Abbot, Anthony - About the Murder of the Night Club Lady (1931)

This book has an original impossible crime. This impossibility is the best part of this work. The impossible crime has aspects of the "howdunit": it asks the detective and reader to figure out a method by which a seemingly impossible murder occurred. Such howdunits were also a staple in Van Dine and Stuart Palmer. The howdunit crime is another example of "killing someone at a distance, without leaving any traces": an Abbot tradition. This is also found in About the Murder of the Circus Queen and The Shudders, two Abbot novels that share much imagery with Night Club Lady, and which are often close to it in approach.

The impossible crime is framed within a situation derived from Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905) - a ploy that has been much used in films and comics ever since Wallace invented it. Abbot's explanation of the impossible crime is different from Wallace's, however. There is also little in Abbot of anything political, while Wallace's book is soaked in social commentary. Abbot's howdunit solution brings the novel into the realm of the Scientific detective story. So do some other aspects of police lab work. Several of Abbot's tales involve such scientific and technological details - it is a running strand throughout his fiction, as was most prominent in his first novel, About the Murder of Geraldine Foster.

Impossible crime aside, the novel shows less colorful storytelling, and less imagination its plotting, characters and setting, than the best of Abbot's writing. It's night-club opening scene, and the Night Club Lady's penthouse apartment where most of the action occurs, while well described, are hardly novel settings for crime fiction. Both seem like female settings, elaborate ornate boxes that contain entire lives of the heroine and her female relatives and friends. These womb symbols are constantly contrasted with the male police officers and their masculine and phallic symbols, with Thatcher Colt in top hat and tails, uniformed officers on motorcycles, a policeman undercover in doorman's uniform, etc. The women are in white, with occasional flashes of red, while the men are in dark colors such as Colt's black tail coat or blue police uniforms. White tie and tails are a tradition in Abbot books. The glittering night-club is full of mirrors, crystals and jewels, and is underground; the penthouse is high in the sky: two extremes that will re-appear in About the Murder of the Circus Queen. The penthouse has a high window playing a role in the plot, not unlike other Abbot books, such as About the Murder of the Circus Queen and The Shudders.

The two young women in the story have plot-lines that move in parallel: they are perhaps examples of the doubling characters that will appear more systematically in About the Murder of the Circus Queen. Abbot once more features life histories of the characters, that play a role in the solution. While other Abbot books such as About the Murder of the Circus Queen and The Shudders, open on Friday the Thirteenth in a rain storm, this one is set on New Year's Eve in a snow storm. The male characters are once again in deep trouble, as in those other books. While those books refer to the chemical industry, and have ties to Germany, this one is set against the medical supply business, and refers to the characters' past lives in France. The final quarter of the book, after the explanation of the howdunit three quarters way through (Chapter 13), is also anticlimactic, and not as successful as the previous three quarters of the novel. Its plot elements are less interesting than those that went before.

Mike Grost