One Wonderful Night A Romance of New York by Louis TracyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Utter nonsense. Still somewhat entertaining.
To be fair, the plot is probably no more unlikely than a lot of romances being written today - or a lot of rom-com movies. This one was turned into a "photoplay," a silent film made in 1914, now considered lost, and the Project Gutenberg edition features stills from this movie (which show a leading lady significantly less slender than the text describes). It was filmed again in 1922, again without sound, and with a plot which, while simpler and in some points different, bears a closer resemblance to the novel than a lot of film adaptations (if the Wikipedia plot summary is accurate).
Still, the author spends quite a few words carefully hanging lampshades on several of the completely ridiculous and implausible decisions people make in the course of the plot, which also requires some coincidence to make it to the predestined end. One of these decisions results in a Fake Marriage Becomes Real trope, and another is the cause for the Misunderstanding Leading to a Rift Between the Couple.
The couple, of course, are terrific, he a manly man who doesn't hesitate to leap into danger and punch deserving plotters on the nose, she beautiful and wealthy and headstrong in mostly a good way.
The plot, it goeth thusly (as Jill Bearup would say - if you don't know who that is, look her up on YouTube, she's consistently entertaining). The hero, just back from China where he's been doing engineering, lands in New York and almost immediately witnesses a murder outside his hotel. By accident, he ends up with the murdered man's overcoat, having dropped his own to try to intervene and later being handed the wrong one by a bystander. He doesn't notice until he looks in the pocket for something and instead finds a marriage license, made out in a name quite similar to his (Jean de Cortois, while he is John D. Curtis). He leaps to the conclusion that this is the name of the victim, and, rather than go to the police with this vital information, decides to instead go to the address of the woman named on the license and gently break the news to her, since he doesn't trust the police to do so tactfully. Cue first lampshade-hanging.
This woman, Lady Hermione, it turns out, has paid the Frenchman to be her nominal husband to stop her father, an English earl, from forcing her to marry a Hungarian count who she despises, and who only wants her money. The problem still exists, so Curtis offers to step in and be the groom instead. They get married by an elderly clergyman whose eyesight isn't good enough to quite read exactly what's on the license.
Curtis has apparently never twigged that the Frenchman is described as "undersized," and he himself is a fine strapping lad, and so the overcoat should not fit him (this never comes up). But it turns out that the murdered man wasn't the Frenchman at all, but someone who was bringing him a replacement copy of the license after it was somehow lost, and the Frenchman is in fact still alive. Second lampshade hanging then ensues: Curtis doesn't tell Lady Hermione this in case it distresses her, but proceeds with the wedding supper, along with the head of detectives for the City of New York, a friend he'd met on the ocean liner, and his aunt and uncle, who have turned up to see him. The earl and the count, of course, later use this strategic silence of his to drive a wedge between the couple.
Meanwhile, the head of detectives has improbably recruited Curtis and his ocean-liner acquaintance to help in the investigation of the murder, and they have some adventures with various foreign low-lives. The frequent anti-immigrant and anti-foreign bias of the time is fully on display; for example, Curtis, who has lived among the Chinese for some years, absolutely despises them, and so apparently does the author. Along the way, a fortunate coincidence enables them to pursue one of the suspects, who turns the tables on them and then has them turned back on him.
Of course, at the end the murderers are apprehended, the earl and count are foiled, the couple are reconciled and admit they've fallen for each other (after a completely inadequate amount of acquaintance, hence my "thin-romance" tag), and everything works out just fine.
There are worse and sillier romances than this, and it's consistently entertaining in its own manner, but it's not as good as the same author's Cynthia's Chauffeur , in my opinion. That's a romance that develops gradually, for one thing, and while it has its ridiculous elements, none of them are quite so absurd as this one's.
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