Brean, Herbert - The Darker the Night

Here we have the follow - up to the excellent Wilders Walk Away, author Herbert Brean`s wonderful nod to John Dickson Carr and a (IMO) GAD classic. In this book, published in 1949, Brean adopts a more noir - like approach to the adventures of Reynold Frame, photojournalist/amateur investigator. This takes place weeks after the Wilder story, and shortly before his marriage to Connie Wilder, which resulted from their romance in the first book. Frame reads in a newspaper about the death of a man who fell from the 26th floor of the Barchester Hotel. Mentioned in the story is the man`s niece, Lee Ballantyne, whom Frame used to date in college. He goes to see her to offer his condolences and offer any help. Turns out maybe he was pushed, and maybe the lady who fell from another hotel a couple days later was pushed too. They were all involved in the same circle of friends, and as it turns out, Frame's old flame, Lee Ballantyne, was asleep in the hotel room of the woman who fell at the time of her fall.

You have here the same rich character developement and excellent storytelling that was in the first book. A tight plot with no dull spots. You also get the great footnotes that Brean uses to explain minor and major points that come up in the story. In this one we learn about, (1) a short little back history of defenestration (murder by hurling someone out of a window), (2) a little bit about the work done by Dr. J.B.Rhine at Duke University on the subjects of ESP, telepathy and clairvoyance., (3) the story of the split personality case of “Miss Beauchamp” and how it turned out., (4) the recipe for spiedino romano., (5) a discussion on 3 of New Yorks most famous old unsolved murders, and a couple more. These footnotes add to the already interesting story. Hypnosis is involved in this book, but it is not treated in the cheesy or gimmicky way it was treated in a lot of the books in the 30`s and 40`s. So this is one you should try and find if you can. I give it 4 and a half stars out of five. Doesn`t quite reach the heights that Wilders Walk Away did, and the murderer isn`t real hard to figure if you do that sort of thing. It`s just a good sit back and read and enjoy the great storytelling kind of book.

MikeB

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       The only disappointing aspect of The Darker the Night is the lack of an impossible crime. Otherwise it's a hard-to-put-down, fast-paced whodunit with more physical action and hardboiled attitude than one is accustomed to seeing in Brean's work, as Reynold Frame mingles with café society types, tangles with a Capone-era hitman, and is wanted by suspicious police and an assistant D.A. because of his involvement in the events surrounding two murders and an attempted third one.

        But Frame is also very much a thinking reader's detective who uses his ratiocinative powers every bit as well as more famous fictional sleuths. As MikeB points out, the solution isn't all that difficult to arrive at if you pay reasonable attention. But whether you do or don't, the journey is as much fun as the destination.

—Barry Ergang, September 7, 2007