A review of Death in the Dark by Moray Dalton – 230509

Published originally in 1938 and one of the latest batch of Dalton reissues from Dean Street Press, Death in the Dark is as much a thriller as a murder mystery. There are murders, two rather unusual ones, but the culprit is fairly obvious. What gives the plot its tension and excitement is the sense of jeopardy as Dalton’s go-to sleuth, the urbane and empathetic Hugh Collier, whose eighth outing this is, is racing against time to save someone whom he believes to be innocent from the gallows, even though he has been convicted of murder and had his appeal turned down.   

As an author Dalton seems to be attracted to the fringes of society and this story is no exception featuring a troupe of acrobats, a remote gothic house which has a run-down and struggling private zoo in its grounds, a drug-addicted woman, an eccentric who invites performers home for a meal on a Monday night, and a thirteen-year-old would-be detective.

David Merle, one part of the Flying Merles, is invited back to his house by Joshua Fallowes for a meal. Fallowes’ behaviour is odd, remaining muffled throughout the encounter, encouraging David to finger things and before they depart, asks him to help unjam a window in a room upstairs. When David enters the room, the door is locked and he finds a dead body on the bed, treading in blood as he makes his escape using his acrobatic skills through the window. For the police with David’s fingerprints all over the place, blood on his shoes and an unconvincing story, this is an open and shut case and Merle is duly convicted.

His sister, Judy Merle, is convinced of his innocence and is fortunate to find an unlikely and influential ally in Toby, whom we met first met in The Case of the Kneeling Woman, since when Hugh Collier has married his mother, and the boy is now his step-son. It is through Toby’s insistence that Merle has been set up that Collier is persuaded to look into the case. As in the previous encounter, Toby’s mother’s sense of child care is unusual by modern standards. Having previously left the boy alone overnight, prey to a band of international desperadoes, she now seems comfortable to let him meet a stranger alone in the lion house of London Zoo. Children did have more latitude in those days than their mollycoddled modern versions but, while the encounter is necessary for the development of the plot, it does seem odd.

As Curtis Evans points out in his informative introduction, Dalton’s treatment of the kindly and sympathetic Ben Levy, the only Jew in the village, is unusual by for the times when antisemitism, overt or implied, was rife in literature. Levy has a soft spot for Judy, and she is encouraging. However, in what seems to be an oversight in the structuring of the book, Levy disappears halfway through, and Judy gets spliced to someone else at the end without any thought of the man who held a torch for her in her dark days of despair. Odd.

The private menagerie at Sard Manor had already claimed one victim by the time Collier enters the fray, the death of the head keeper, seemingly mauled by a tiger, giving him the entrée into the case. The denouement, tense and thrilling, is somewhat telegraphed by the information that the Chief Constable is a crack shot and that he was a big game hunter, the halls of his house bedecked with the heads of his victims. The occupants of Sard Manor are held hostage by an unusual group of assailants when the animals are let out of their cages and the telephone line cut by the culprit. Will Collier survive to give the evidence to absolve Merle?

There is an air of inevitability about a gung-ho Chief Constable, reliving his days in India, gunning down the tiger. Moray, through Collier, expresses more modern sentiments when lamenting the need to kill such a magnificent creature. Tranquilisers were never an option.

Dalton shows her sense of humour when nicknaming Judy’s aunt, Mrs Sturmer, Auntie Apples, a Sturmer pippin was a popular type of apple at the time. The motivation for the crime seemed to me to be a little far-fetched. Even if the culprit had succeeded, there needed to be at least two other occurrences before they could get their hands on the prize, which, whilst still a large sum at the time, was still only a third of the overall inheritance.

It was an enjoyable story with much to admire, but I did not feel that it was Moray at her very best. Detectives seem to rely on members of their family to be a magnet to attract crime, Agatha Troy and Olive Owen being just two I could mention. In Toby, Hugh Collier might just have found his.