Review: In The Night: A Detective Novel

In The Night: A Detective Novel by Ronald Gorell Barnes
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Dorothy L. Sayers apparently said, quite accurately, “Lord Gorell has a nice ear for dialogue, and a light and pleasant touch with description.” Considering he was a poet, his prose is solid, workmanlike and never attempts to be lyrical or fanciful, though personally I would relocate a few of his commas. I wonder if Sayers drew inspiration from the general tone of this book for her Lord Peter Wimsey books? They do have some resemblances, not least that the amateur detective discovers that "to investigate was interesting, to discover horrible," which is a neat summing up of how Wimsey feels about the consequences of his detecting hobby for the criminals he detects.

This is a textbook example of an early-20th-century mystery novel: country house, unpopular rich man dead in the night, everyone a suspect, apparent locked-room (or rather locked-house) aspect, inspector who has tenacity but lacks brilliance, amateur detective who is better at detecting than the professional. Interestingly, the amateur detective here is a young woman, the close friend of the daughter of the victim, and she shows considerable intelligence and ability while not being some kind of prodigy. She also has a more developed personality - as do all the characters - than I'm used to encountering in these early-20th-century mysteries. They're not just archetype plus plot role, but have believable motivations and emotions and, in general, an interior life. A lot of early detective novels, particularly those by men, had lifeless characters who were only ever seen from the outside, and went through a kind of puppet-play acting out the author's plot. This is not one of those.

(view spoiler)[I said above that everyone is a suspect. That's not completely true, but almost. The amateur detective herself is never a suspect, for the reader because we're in her head and know she wasn't involved in the crime, and for the policeman because... contrary to his declared practice, he just doesn't think she's the type and rules her out immediately, thus avoiding some complications that would otherwise have ensured. This is pretty much the only forced part of the plot, though.

The other way in which it's not true to say that everyone is a suspect is that neither detective - amateur or professional - ever suspects the actual killer, which is largely why I suspected that person intensely. Their exclusion from the list of suspects was itself suspicious, though fully understandable in the context of the story.

There's a one-sided attraction, rather than a romance - the dead man's secretary for the young woman who functions as amateur detective - but it's briefly covered near the beginning and never develops into anything; the secretary himself hardly appears after it's clear he's not the murderer. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, it's a good piece of work, better than a lot of superficially similar books from the time, and I'll be looking out for other books by the same author in the hope that they are just as good. Unfortunately, this is the only one so far on Project Gutenberg,

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