Come, Thick Night is a non-series title by the Australian crime writing sister duo Margot Goyder and Anne Neville Goyder Joske, who wrote under the penname of Margot Neville. They wrote 21 mystery novels between 1943 and 1966. Most of their books were for a series featuring Inspector Grogan and Detective Sergeant Manning. To date I have read 4 others by them: Murder in Rockwater (1943) Murder and Poor Jenny (1954), Murder of Olympia (1956) and The Hateful Voyage (1956). Regarding Murder of Olympia, The Australian Weekly ran a competition in tandem with its serialisation, as part of the runup to the 1956 Melbourne Olympic games. On 27th June 1956 readers were given the first instalment of Neville’s new story. They received the second instalment of the story on the 4th July. All contestants had to do was read these first two instalments and then in 400 words or less write in how they would finish it; in particular identifying which character would be the killer and explain how they did the crime and why. I wrote more fully about this competition and the winners’ entries in a post in 2019. You can read it here.
Today’s read derives its title from a passage in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which is quoted at the beginning of the novel: ‘… Come, thick night,… That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark.’ Quite a few of the critical scenes occur in darkness, which restricts how easily the heroine can figure out what is going on and it is this limitation which fuels a lot of her anxiety and vacillating spirit in the story. When the mystery was published in America a year later in 1952, it was retitled Divining Rod for Murder.
Synopsis
‘Australian lady tutor takes job in spotty household; wealthy spinster vanishes, supposedly on trip, but teacher has doubts.’
This summary comes from the Criminal Record in The Saturday Review of Literature, which reviewed this title. It is rather pithy but having now read the book, it does actually pretty much sum up the gist of the story. I just had to remind myself that ‘spotty’ probably meant suspicious rather than being a reference to a house full of people with acne.
Overall Thoughts
The novel begins with Lacey Oliver travelling across Marriot’s Bay via a ferry. She notices the non-professional friendliness between Dr Miller and his nurse Peggy Wellings, yet even from these first few pages, I was intrigued by the self-loathing Lacey directs at her own inquisitiveness:
‘Lacey pulled up short, feeling suddenly disgusted by the burning-glass quality of her own stare. She wished she didn’t always have to probe around people and things, try to see more than their outward appearance. When you did that you so rarely saw anything that was nice to look at.’
This is a consistent feature throughout the story and whilst it is interesting, I think it does hamper the plot as it unfolds. But perhaps my previous reading sets me up to expect, and want, a budding Miss Marple type, who has no such qualms about gazing at the dark and messy side of human nature.
The authors swiftly establish the situation Lacey is working in. She is at university and over her summer vacation she is tutoring Dr Miller’s son, Christopher (another university student) in English Literature. He flunked his first-year exams, and his aunt Miss Miller has hired Lacey to help him improve. Although this is rather a lost cause, as he is spoilt and indolent. Dr Miller (who left his son in Miss Miller’s care for years, when he decided to take a job in America after the death of his wife) is fed up and decides he will not fund anymore university education and that he will get him a job on a sheep ranch instead. This causes much tension within the Miller household, as Christopher wants an easy life and Miss Miller is blind to his faults. She says she will pay for his education, but by the next day when Lacey goes there to tutor, Miss Miller has uncharacteristically gone on a long trip to visit a sick friend.
But why is Lacey so fussed by this? That’s because she went back to the Miller household the previous night to collect a book she had left. But when she arrives, no one is there and eerie goings on make her wonder the next morning if the crumpled garment on the couch she saw, was in fact a body. Yes, I know, if she had just investigated the couch on her evening visit, she could have saved herself a lot of bother. But hey it was eerie and scary; you can’t possibly do anything sensible when things are eerie and scary…
This type of setup, with a heroine on their own in the dark and the reader waiting to see what peril is about to be unfurled, put me in mind of Mabel Seeley’s work. Although I think Seeley did it better, particularly when it comes to building a mystery with greater structural integrity. Nevertheless, like Seeley, the Neville sisters clearly signal a sense of foreboding for the reader through foreshadowing:
‘Music came out in a stream. What was he playing? What was it? She stood and listened until it came to an end. Though it didn’t really seem to come to an end but rather to go on echoing its own question … on and on, weaving a mesh of painful doubt. Lacey’s next few days woven in sound.’
We also have the suspicious romantic interest Evan Hartley, who begins their interaction by just randomly kissing her, before spending the next few days giving her the cold shoulder. We are told that:
‘Lacey had never been so surprised in her life as she let herself caught in this embrace. Her eyes looking back into his had the startled look of a swimmer taken by a sudden swamping wave. This hammering of her heart, was it pleasure? […] Or was it alarm, some warning being beaten out to her not to stay here in this dim place with this – until now, almost unthought of – almost stranger, her work-a-day mood swept away like familiar landmarks by a bushfire?’
I think this means she’s not sure about him… Passages like this add a strong note of melodrama to the piece, although as I discuss later, I am not convinced this is always such a good thing.
Miss Miller was called away to visit her friend (who lives 700 miles away in Brisbane) via telegram and us readers are always suspicious about telegrams. So is Lacey. She is also alarmed when she notices that Miss Miller has left her insulin behind and then of course there is the fresh soil on a spade outside in the garden. Yet what does Lacey do? Tells no one.
Lacking a posse of friends Lacey doesn’t have any obvious allies to call upon. But interestingly she sees her sleuthing instinct as a social disadvantage and as the reason she is socially isolated:
‘I haven’t got any friends, she told herself, with an all too ready self-pity. And why should I have? I haven’t any warmth in my nature to draw friends to me. Only a sharp watchfulness about people’s rather more unpleasant actions and motives. They sense this way I’ve got of considering all sorts of other aspects of what they’re saying while they’re talking to me, and of course they sheer off me like the plague, and I feel cut to the quick because they don’t come gambolling towards me all delight at seeing me. God knows, I’m not beautiful, I ought to do more to try and hide my wretched temperament.’
I would not fully agree with this. Miss Marple, after all, was not a social pariah due to her sleuthing skills. Moreover, when it comes to Lacey, there are people who want to socially interact with her, such as the medical student at her digs. Yet he doesn’t get a look in, as she is forever rejecting his invitations to do things. Furthermore, her actions do not support her belief that she coldly analyses other people, as when it comes to the crunch, she acts a hysterical nitwit, and I wonder if people probably find her highly strung or skittish instead.
Her isolation is picked up on by others, such as Dr Miller who remarks on the anonymity and loneliness of student boarding houses, where you can disappear for quite a while before anyone notices. Nothing worrying about that then… The sinister goings on start small. There is a sense of a danger not yet unleashed, like a spring which has not been released. Lacey agonises over what might have happened to Miss Miller:
‘If you were ill, or were afraid you were, you could go to a doctor, he was there to cure you or reassure you if your illness was imaginary… Or to a lawyer if someone threatened your money affairs. But in this case there was no one… no one.’
I am hoping I am not the only one who is shouting: “How about the police?” at this point.
Lacey acts like a pendulum (adding to the skittish vibe to her), with each new incident either convincing her Miss Miller is perfectly fine or that something horrible has happened to her. There is no overt sleuthing on Lacey’s part, aside from the odd question and snooping. There is melodrama every time she does anything like a detective. For example, she considers sneaking into a suspect’s home to look at their footwear, which of course triggers off an explosion of self-recrimination, followed by a rebuttal:
‘What was it that was driving her on in this sickening way? Oh, what was it? Beyond all discretion, all common sense! To be prying like a policeman into what didn’t concern her! Could a compulsion that kept her so determined to see more spring from curiosity only? Or was she in some way a sort of blind tool of a fate stronger than herself. Didn’t murder – if it was murder – concern everyone? Go on, she urged her wavering will: go on, you can’t stop now.’
The fact her sleuthing anxieties divert to self-loathing very fast, limits how effective she is as a sleuth.
As I was reading the narrative, it felt like there was something lacking in the story because Lacey doesn’t voice her concerns or discuss them with anyone for ages. Dialogue is a key aspect of the sleuthing process, and it is not one I have thought much about, until this book where it is noticeably absent. When Lacey does finally share her worries with another person, all they try to do is dampen her suspicions down. This is a frustrating conversation, not least when they try to brush aside Lacey’s concerns about the overlooked insulin, by spouting this utter nonsense:
“[…] it’s a funny thing about diabetes. They say it’s one of the diseases that’s largely influenced by the mind. I knew a chap who had it. He had a job he didn’t like and a wife he liked less. Well, when he got rid of the job and the wife, he got rid of the diabetes too!”
I wonder where the Neville sisters got this idea from.
The final third of the novel is the most annoying. Firstly, because when she thinks she has discovered the culprit, she disintegrates into a melodramatic and soppy heap:
‘Now truly she was faced with two courses of action equally intolerable: to go to the police and lead them here, clanging shut the prison gates for life on someone. Someone she’d for ever after be able to picture in that never-ending imprisonment through her doing. Everything in her recoiled from it, rejected it frantically, pushed it away from her. No, no, no I can’t do that! Instead – To live for the rest of her life, like a prisoner herself, shut up with a nightmare secret which she’d never be able to escape from. No matter where she went, what she did, if she married, was happy, had children, she’d always have to be thinking how she knew – only she and one other […]’
The reader is warned: Such scenes may increase homicidal urges towards fictional characters.
This vacillating nature of hers becomes even more infuriating in the final showdown, as it makes what should be a tense cat and mouse scene, an utterly annoying farce. Ethel Lina White’s Some Must Watch (1933) does a much better job of crafting a mystery with confined peril. This scene is too long, and it makes you want to throw the book at a wall. Lacey perpetually jumps at shadows and is alone in the dark but cannot get out of the loop of dithering over whether she should leave the isolated place or not. Every little action has to be questioned. Should I move? Should I use the telephone? It’s a wonder she doesn’t have a meeting with herself every time she needs to take a breath.
The dust jacket to the original hardback edition has this comment from the publisher:
‘This is an unusual book in two ways: first of all, it is a Mystery Novel without a detective, and perhaps one may add et mieux comme ça! Secondly, unlike many modern mystery novels, in which a murder is merely the prelude to a light-hearted romp in search of clues (as though it were a sort of Crossword Puzzle), this story is persuaded by an atmosphere of terror and suspense, not unlike those great mystery novels of Gaboriau […]’
By no detective I think it means no police detective. I would say Lacey is probably an accidental sleuth at a push, with a last-minute amateur sleuth putting it all together at the end. It is all rather vague though and to be honest I do not think this book is all the better for lacking a detective. The second assertion the publisher makes is an odd one, as the type of mystery they are describing (the ones like crossword puzzles), were common in the 1920s, not the 1950s where they were hardly a dominant strain. Consequently, the comment sounds anachronistic or out of date. I think The Saturday Review of Literature has better insight into the story, mentioning that the ‘plotting [is] ingenious, but suspense sequences grow top-heavy as heroine insists on playing lone hand.’
The second part of their comment is evident to see in the points I have raised in my review already, but what about the ingenious plotting? Reflecting on the novel, in light of the solution, there is some clever misdirection, particularly regarding one well-used trope of the genre. However, this book’s biggest weakness is that all its potential is lost in Lacey’s terrors, real and imagined. The solution has some really good bits to it, worthy of Agatha Christie, but it’s all for nought, because firstly the best bits come out of nowhere and have no proper cluing. Secondly, the ending is a brief chapter in which another character tells Lacey and us the solution. Their explanation comes in a written format, rather than a conversation, so it is dry and bland, and it is so annoying that a third party has to finish the job. Before they begin, they write: ‘Since hearing your distracted story last night I’ve managed to put all the facts together, talked to everyone and filled in the gaps by guesswork.’ So basically, they have done the job Lacey should have been doing. There is no dialogue in this chapter which means it is lacking in character vibrancy and excitement and there are no reactions from the surviving characters.
The Neville sisters do not receive much discussion online, nor have they gained interest from any publishers with a view to reprinting them. If this was the only book I had read by them, then I could see why, but fortunately, my other reads by this pair have been much stronger, so I would recommend readers giving them a go. Just not this one!
Rating: 3.25/5