Death in the Dark Paperback – February 26, 2017

Stephan Bayard is another of the many American detectives descended from C. Auguste Dupin and Philo Vance. He is as cold and rational as Dupin and enjoys his esoteric monologues like Vance. Within minutes of learning of the death of Dave Denny, a music concert promoter, Bayard is sure that the man has committed suicide. But a key left in a door when it should be hanging on a hook, one of Denny's diehard habits, will bother the criminologist until the final pages. Bayard much like Vance is also a cultural connoisseur and we get several didactic lectures on art, music, and literature with loads of name dropping of both familiar and obscure painters, sculptors, musicians and writers. Bishop is the S. S. Van Dine stand-in of the book and is both mythical author and narrator when in fact "Stacey Bishop" is the pseudonym of modern musician George Antheil. Dr. Stein, a radical endocrinologist, is one of the many fictional doctors inspired by Louis Berman's work on controlling personality and behavior through use of hormones and surgery of the pituitary and thymus glands. Berman's radical theories and practices which flirt with controversial eugenics theory caught the imagination of many genre fiction writers at the time. Donald Clough Cameron's criminologist, Abelard Voss, for example is another fictional detective who likes to espouse Berman's theories. Antheil takes this specious science to the extremes making Stein something of a mad doctor tinkering with experiments more suited to a science fiction shocker. There is a scene where Bayard and Bishop visit Stein's lab and we see his experiments have led to the development of a bizarre machine that in its description sounds like something out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It seems to involve the extraction of personality via electricity and the wearing of a metal mask. I read these sections several times and still can't make sense of them. The finale of the novel is straight out of a shudder pulp magazine and is completely out of place for a story that was up till then purely cerebral and focussed on logic and ratiocination.Death in the Dark is overloaded with intriguing new ways to tell a detective novel. If they all tend to obfuscate the story that's no real failure. They often made me laugh in astonishment rather than in ridicule. Bayard, our erudite criminologist, draws up numerous fact sheets that serve as tabulation scenes highlighting the oddities that make each crime impossible. He also informs Bishop that Sir Richard Muir, the lawyer involved in the trial of Crippen, liked to compose "poems" during his case summations which he would read to the jury at the close of a trial. Bayard then composes his own series of blank verse tributes to each of the three impossible crimes pointing out each puzzling incident that is nagging his overstimulated brain. In effect we get two separate and protracted tabulation scenes: one in a bulleted list format, the other in a pseudo-poetic format.Over the course of the book the seemingly impossibly executed murders are each dealt with individually with each solution presented as it is discovered rather than revealed in the concluding chapter as with most detective novels. The problem of a key left in the locked door of the Denny apartment is oddly the one problem that is not explained until the novel's end. The jail cell murder -- the most ingenious of the three crimes -- is surprisingly solved almost immediately but having its roots in more pulp fiction gimmickry the bizarre method adds another incongruous element of the absurd to the overarching somber tone.

Very interesting mystery, both because it is challenging to try and figure out the culprit, and because it is an historical genre of mysteries- murder by gunshot in a dark room. I recommend it.

Many DVDs have “making of” featurettes or documentaries that describe how the movie was made or provide other insight into the people involved in the production. On more than one occasion, those featurettes have rescued viewers from an otherwise dismal experience watching a mediocre film. I had much the same thought when reading “Death in the Dark,” a very odd 1930 mystery that had acquired somewhat of a cult reputation in the following years. However, I discovered that this reputation was due more to the scarcity of the title than the quality of the authorship. I also learned that the story of the author was far more interesting than the book itself.“Death in the Dark” was the only mystery ever written by George Anthiel, better known as a composer, who used the pen name Stacey Bishop. The book was never released in the U.S. (despite being set in New York) and only received a limited release in England. Over the years, copies of the novel became quite a collector’s item, but it’s now available in new paperback and Kindle editions. Hardcore fans of Golden Age mysteries may rejoice, but being more readily available also means that the book’s numerous flaws are much more noticeable as well.Actually, the mystery in “Death in the Dark” is reasonably entertaining, involving not one but three separate murders that take place under circumstances that would appear to be impossible. The first killing, in particular, is bizarre. Several people are in one room of a spacious apartment late at night when the lights suddenly go out. A few seconds later, a shot rings out, and the victim is found dead with a bullet wound in his forehead, a shot that would be impossible in the dark from the location where the suspects were. The district attorney, who had actually been at a party at the victim’s apartment a few minutes earlier, calls in his friend, criminologist Stephan Bayard, to investigate.Bayard is the sort of wealthy dilettante who frequently inhabited detective fiction of that era. He seems to have little to do other than solve crimes, and, in this capacity, he is accompanied by the narrator, who goes by the name of Stacey Bishop. So, Bayard looks into the case, and he looks into it, and he looks into it some more. That’s right; even though the novel has three separate murders and an attempted murder, most of Bayard’s time is spent engaging in lengthy conversations with Bishop about art, music, the nature of At crime, and society in general. When he actually discusses the case, he goes over the same points in detail over and over. At one place in “Death in the Dark,” Bayard constructs two separate detailed point-by-point possible timelines for the first murder. Later, he writes down a lengthy list of A, B, and C-level clues in order of their reliability, still later, he composes a poem about each killing. Needless to say, this sort of writing becomes tiring very quickly, and what might have been a good 70-page novella becomes a slog of a 200-page novel.Stephan Bayard is closely patterned after Philo Vance, the hero of a series of popular mysteries at the time “Death in the Dark” was written, except that the annoying Vance becomes the even more annoying Bayard here. It’s possible that Anthiel may have intended his book as a satire of the Vance books, but, even if that’s the case, the satire loses its effect when its target is essentially faddish fiction that’s nearly a century old. One plot thread of “Death in the Dark” that sounds like a put-on but which Anthiel took seriously concerns a supporting character, who is a professor of endocrinology. The professor’s theory is that criminal behavior is caused by an imbalance in the various glands that govern human behavior. The killer in the novel is “thymocentric,” or, in other words, has a dominant thymus gland, which caused the criminal behavior, and the professor is trying to “rebalance” the murderer’s glandular levels at the time the killings take place. Silly as this theory sounds, some doctors of that era actually believed in it and treated patients accordingly. More to the point, some mystery writers, including Anthiel, took it seriously as well. Today, it’s hard to read these passages and keep a straight face.As a whodunnit, “Death in the Dark” leaves a lot to be desired. There are not all that many suspects, especially when the body count starts increasing with each murder, and the characters are all cardboard thin, with personalities that are actually driven by what turns out to be their “glandular influences.” The solution to the first crime is rather clever, but the last two are solved very quickly. Further, in at least one of the killings, the killer uses a contraption that seems to work in detective fiction far better than it would in real life. And, on the subject of contraptions, the killer’s entire scheme is ridiculously complicated and requires a whole lot of luck and coincidence to succeed. In other words, it’s the type of plot that exists only in mysteries involving “impossible” crimes.Actually, the best part of “Death in the Dark” wasn’t written by Anthiel but was written about him in an afterword written for the new release by Mauro Piccinini, a music professor who has studied Anthiel extensively. The afterward is a combination mini-biography of Anthiel and description of how the book came to be published. Anthiel was a fascinating man, and this glimpse into his life is a lot more interesting than the mystery he wrote. It made me wish that the book had been 200 pages about Anthiel and 20 about the mystery instead of the other way around.“Death in the Dark” probably won’t appeal to most readers. However, fans of Golden Age mysteries, especially locked room and similar impossible crime mysteries, may find it entertaining despite its flaws. Also, the biographical information about Anthiel will probably interest a lot more readers (for example, during World War II, Anthiel and actress Hedy Lamarr invented a radio torpedo guidance system that formed the basis for today’s Bluetooth technology). That biographical information tipped the scales for me. Therefore, I’m giving this book a very, very, very slight recommendation (I’d rate it 2.5 stars if I could). If you like this type of mystery, you might want to take a shot in the dark on this novel.

Haven't finished it yet - but not very interesting.

A real "locked room" mystery from the Golden Age. You have to concentrate but the exposition is very satisfying.