Review of Deadly at Midnight, by Johnny Lane

Can you figure it out?

As he often does

Terry Freedman

has provided us with something of a puzzle in today’ short piece. I think I may well have figured it out but honestly I’m not 100% sure. Maybe you will fare better. So give this short article a read and let us know in the comments what you think is going on.

The prize is simply the knowledge that you are clever than most other people and in the age of the internet such incontrovertible proof has to count for something, right?

Enjoy.

~TJB

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Mr Lane is a well-established figure on the fringes of the detective novel. Not quite at bestseller status, he nevertheless commands respect from a relatively small but growing group of fans who will, of course, be the first in the line to buy this, his latest offering.

The hero of his pieces is one Jason Fox, moulded in the style of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Fox is a hard-drinking, hard-smoking and, above all, hard-talking no-holds-barred larger-than-life don’t-mess-with-me professional with a giant chip on his shoulder and who doesn’t care who knows it. He grits, grunts and grates his way into every conversation until he gets to the truth.

The question, though, is this: has Lane out-Foxed himself in this, the 118^th in the series. In an interview last year Lane admitted that “I churn out a novel a week, whether I’ve thought of a plot or not.” In answer to the question “Are you losing the plot, then, Mr Lane?” he responded “What plot? I never had a plot in the first place. Plots are vastly overrated. What the modern reader is looking for is action.”

Had Lane suggested that his main concern is with character, one might argue (though perhaps not entirely convincingly) that the Fox series were in the Chekhovian mould. However, the Fox mantra may be summarised as “action at any cost”, or “action is all”. Whether the action makes sense, or is even required, would appear to be irrelevant.

Deadly At Midnight follows the same format as the previous stories. It begins as Fox is about to light some incense in order to improve his mood. However, he hears “on the wire” that a vigilante is getting rid of the gangsters in town by a previously unknown method. It involves poisoning, but to say any more at this point would be to enter the realm of plot-spoiling. Suffice it to say that he repairs to the speakeasy across the street from his office. There he meets a beautiful woman. He doesn’t know who she is, but she appears to know him.

Structurally, the novel is sound, although perhaps uninspired. Despite its meagre length (just 43 pages) it packs in a lot of twists, turns, and crimson-coloured fish. The final revelation is startling in its simplicity yet devasting in its complexity.

Looking beyond the words themselves, Deadly At Midnight is subtly based on a rhomboidal structure of intersecting narratives and plot developments. One or two scholars have even suggested that, taken together, the Fox novels form a literary pyramid with interlocking “bricks”. In other words, the developments in, say, the third book are mirrored in, for example, the sixteenth book.

Whether such verbal acrobatics is enough to convince the wider public of the merits of this book or the series as a whole remains to be seen.

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There is something special about this book review. What do you think it is? Please say in the comments.

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