Cohen, Octavus Roy - Six Seconds of Darkness

Cohen's Six Seconds of Darkness was, according to the reference books, published in 1921, but my 1930 reprint library copy is plainly marked copyright 1918. Perhaps this date refers to a magazine serialization. I get the impression that I am about the first person anywhere to read this book in around 75 years. It is a gem. It is a real detective story, very different from the Rogue like tales of Jim Hanvey that have been reprinted. Cohen's The Crimson Alibi (1918-1919) was adapted by him into a play, and Darkness also has features that suggest it is stage related - either originally a play, or written with theatrical adaptation in mind. It is very near in time to Rinehart and Hopwood's mystery play, The Bat (1920), and is recognizably in the same world. There are some similarities in characters, including the young lovers who interfere with justice, woman servants who get involved with melodrama, and the tough detectives. And there are also some similarly melodramatic events, and even plot twists that have some family resemblance.

One thing that is very different about Cohen's work from Rinehart's is that it is purely a formal detective story. The murder is discovered in the first few pages, and the detectives spend the rest of the book trying to reconstruct the crime. What did happen during those 6 seconds of darkness, when shots rang out and a millionaire was killed? The detailed investigation of the crime and its attendant events takes up the entire rest of the book. It anticipates such writers as Ellery Queen, who also investigated crime scenes in depth. However Cohen's work differs from Christie, Queen, and Carr and other Golden Age writers with not being fully "fair play". While the solution is logical, the story does not provide all the clues that would allow the reader to deduce the solution in advance. One has to simply watch the detectives work it all out, as they gradually acquire evidence. The detectives do largely share their knowledge and theories with the reader as they go, which helps make this a satisfying reading experience.

The victim headed up a civic reform party, and the book plays out against a background of civic corruption. This was very common in American detective stories of the period - see Rinehart's The Window at the White Cat (1909), or Richard Harding Davis' "The Frame Up" (1915). There is considerable realism in all these tales. Yet the atmosphere of the Cohen book is still quite removed from Hammett and the Black Mask school. The milieu of the book is the squad room, the precinct house, and the police raid, not the private detective agency, and even the book's private eye lead character David Carroll works closely with the police throughout the tale. There is more emphasis on machine politics in these writers, and less on purely underworld characters or "open cities" like Red Harvest's Poisonville. One can argue that Rinehart and Cohen are more realistic than Hammett in their depiction of civic corruption, although this idea will seem anathema to critics who regard Hammett as the ne plus ultra of realism.

Cohen's book reads like the wind. I downed it all in 3 1/2 hours, while lingering over a Chinese buffet lunch. (I stopped eating after the first hour!) It is full of twists, and vivid detail. There are passages that comment reflexively on detectives, and detective storytelling traditions.

Mike Grost