Novelist Paul Graves is a man
literally haunted by his past. The ghosts of one grim and brutal night invade
his thoughts daily, summoned or unbidden, and lend their power to his books.
Raised on a small farm in North Carolina, Graves
was already an imaginative young man who had taken a liking to writing when his
parents were killed in a car accident. Paul was twelve and his sister Gwen was
sixteen. The two continued to live on the farm for about a year until the night
Gwen was tortured and eventually slain by a sadist named Kessler and his
tremulous sidekick Sykes. Forced to witness his sister's agonies, Paul
retreated into a long silence.
In the story's present, a
forty-five-year-old Graves lives a life of self-imposed relative seclusion in New York City. He's the
author of a popular series of novels set in that city at the end of the 19th
Century. They feature a detective named Slovak who, much like Sir Denis Nayland
Smith chasing after Dr. Fu Manchu, pursues the bloodthirsty Kessler and the
slavish Sykes from murder to murder, aging and wearying in the process—much as
his creator has aged and wearied and considered self-extinction.
Graves is invited to
Riverwood, an estate in the Hudson
Valley that remains a
family home and also an artists' colony, by wealthy Allison Davies, who grew up
there and who has never left. She offers him an odd commission: look into the
fifty-year-old murder of her closest friend Faye Harrison, who was killed at
the age of sixteen, and write a story about it that will satisfy Faye's dying
mother about who killed her daughter. The story needn't be true, only
plausible.
Reluctant at first, Graves finally accepts the job and takes up residence at
Riverwood, where he's given access to all of the information about Faye's
death, including the detailed reports by the investigating police detective,
Dennis Portman. He is joined by Eleanor Stern, a playwright, who is quite
possibly more intrigued by the project than Graves
is.
What might seem like a dry
historical probe is rendered dramatic by Graves's
vivid imagination. He visualizes the players and the scenes they enact so as to
carry the reader into the moments Portman's summaries only sketch. His
investigations lead to revelations about Riverwood and its denizens in that
long-ago time, and about Graves's own past.
I should add, for Golden Age
fans, that although Instruments of Night is very much a psychological
thriller, it's also a fairly-clued mystery. The key clue is extremely subtle
and easily overlooked.
I discovered Edgar Allan Poe
in early adolescence, William Faulkner in my late teens. What struck me about
both of their prose styles was the quality of envelopment: you might be sitting
in a riotous, crowded stadium during the Super Bowl or the World Series, but if
you were reading one of their stories, you'd feel as though you were alone in
inky blackness, aswirl in the story's events. Thomas H. Cook—at least in this
novel, the first of his I've read—conveys that same envelopment.
So why am I torn about this
book?
It's very well-written,
Cook's prose often lyrical. The characters are properly fleshed-out, the pacing
spot-on, and the suspense carefully built and sustained.
But its tone is unremittingly
dark. In short stories like Poe's, where uniformity of tone was a goal, that
quality is tolerable. Many of Faulkner's darker novels were occasionally
relieved by moments of levity. Not so Instruments of Night. Cook
sometimes overdoes Graves's recollections of
his own horrors. Thus, compelling as the storyline is, I found it hard to
sustain long periods of reading. I can't recall ever having read anything
darker: not Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, or Light in August.
Nor Bernard Malamud's The Fixer. Not even Elie Wiesel's Night.
With that caveat in
place, I can recommend Instruments of Night as worth your time.
For more on the Golden Age
follow the link http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/
Barry Ergang © 2007, 2012
Formerly the Managing Editor
of Futures
Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E,
winner of the Short
Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007Derringer Award in the Flash
Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous
publications, print and electronic. For links to material available online, see
Barry’s webpages
Barry's mystery spoof groaner, "The Loom of Doom Galls Mainly in the Tomb,"
which Tony Burton originally published in "Crime and Suspense" has been
reprinted in the just-released UNCLE JOHN'S BATHROOM READER PRESENTS FLUSH FICTION--see http://bathroomreader.com/2012/04/new-release-flush-fiction/ It's available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble but, alas, not yet in Kindle and Nook formats. Barry will be picking one lucky winner from those who enter by midnight Eastern Daylight Time Friday night as noted elsewhere on the blog.
Other links of Barry's that are worthy of note......
Other links of Barry's that are worthy of note......
http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/ <--a few new mystery titles recently added
http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005GXMF86 <--for Kindle users
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/cassidy20
1 comment:
THere's noir, there's dark cirem fiction, and then there's INSTRUMENTS OF NIGHT. Can we invent a new subgenre called *ebony* crime fiction? That's how dark this book is. I liked what Cook was doing here until the over-the-top ending that belonged in a splatter/slasher movie as directed by Quentin Tarentino. Ruined everything that preceded it. It's hard for me to believe that the man who wrote such a compelling and often poingnant award winner like THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR wrote this book. Was he going through a really bad time in his personal life when he wrote INSTRUMENTS OF NIGHT? I wonder.
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