Duncan, David - The Shade of Time (1945)

Detective novel w/ sci-fi elements and a quasi-locked room murder

Heavily talky and didactic detective novel written by a writer better known for science fiction. Much of the dialogue is arch and pseudo-sophisticated.  He shuns the use of contractions for some reason and this makes everyday speech come out stilted or as if everyone is a foreigner.  First 90 or so pages nothing but exposition with much repetition and rehash in order to enlighten the reader about everyone's relationships and a murder that took place ten years in the past.  The scenes between men and women are dreary and eyeball-rollingly unreal.  They come off sounding like awful soap opera lover's spats from bad 1940s melodramas.  The detective story plot is an interesting one – wrongfully accused man is released from prison and he and his ex-girlfriend concoct a plan in which all the people present at the time of the ten year old murder are once again under the same roof for an impromptu house party.  Then they will re-enact the crime and try to reveal the real murderer.  Of course, the plan backfires and another person ends up dead.  But the problem with the book is that it is almost 100% dialogue and all of that dialogue is done in long mini-lectures on basic physics and particle physics, hypnotism, auto-suggestion, Freudian psychology, dream interpretation as well as protracted discussions about a crime that occurred in the past.  Much of the plot is devoted to the first murder victim's theory of "displacement of atoms" and his experiments with motion in trying to prove that theory.  The experiment involved photographing the flight of an arrow.  In order to do this he created a device that eventually became the weapon of his murder.  Just for the hell of it the author throws in a bizarre "homosexual" character (actually only a man who likes to dress as a woman) and there is a section in which the coroner talks about "a man not being a man" and the perversions of homosexuals.  It is once again a case of an ignorant (or prejudiced) writer who confuses a man who is a transvestite with a man who engages in gay male sex.  Horrid but typical for the period.  Listed on several "Best Locked Room Mystery" lists but it isn't really a locked room plot at all.  The impossibility is quickly shown to be faked.  And the first murder turns out to have been a case of someone locking the room after the crime was committed.  Adey gives it high praise.  I thought it pretty dull and the phony gay stuff really bothered me. (Oct. 2010)

J.F. Norris