Crime-Book Society paperback edition No. 85 - 1940
John Chancellor, the pen name of Ernest Charles de Balzac Rideau (1900-1971) was the author of a series of crime and adventure novels popular in the 1920s and 1930s. He lived in Paris for a while and published an alternative guide to that city entitled How to be Happy in Paris without being Ruined! (1926) He also spent enough time in Berlin to produce a sequel, How to be Happy in Berlin (1929). The Dark God was published by Hutchinson in 1927 and by The Century Cp., New York in 1928, as sensational detective fiction with rationalised supernaturalism featuring Clawson of the Yard. It was also published in the Pulp Magazine, Detective Weekly, in several parts in 1927.
Jane Dace and her American boyfriend Dick Parmandy are walking through a dark Hyde Park, after the annual Armistice Night Ball at the Albert Hall. They are amongst returning revellers (many dressed in garish costumes) who were ghosts amongst the tall trees . Their footsteps on the damp grass were soft whispers. Little moons of powdered faces flashed by in the gloom. A crowd of people pressed past Jane. Somebody breathed in her ear: "Done!" A nervous, highly sensitive girl, orphaned at fifteen, she had become a live-in companion to her Aunt Miriam. Easily frightened, she experienced a moment of cold superstitious horror. Who had said it. A real being or a ghost? Parmandy leaves her at the block of flats in Marylebone Road, where Mrs. Miriam Dace had a five-room apartment on the first floor.
The 63-year-old aunt - a small, thin, virile woman, with fine white hair, blue wasted hands, sharp features, with an acid tongue - quizzes her niece the following morning as to whether she will marry Parmandy. All boyfriends she treated with suspicion - they only wanted the wealth she was to leave to Jane. The latter goes off to the bank where a second shock awaits: a Mr. William Jones has paid £1,000 into her account. The rest of the day passes normally, but the next morning she reads in her aunt's copy of The Times, in the Agony Column, an announcement with a black border around it: "To J.D. - Thou fool! This night thy soul shall be required of thee." The fear she felt was a fear more dreadful that that of a known death. It was the fear of the Unknown.
So off she goes to see her best friend, May Smith, who, although she poo poos thoughts of the supernatural, does accompany Jane to the bank. They find the depositor of the £1,000 had left a fictitious address. May agrees to spend the night at Aunt Miriam's due to Jane's increasing fears. That night Jane wakes up to see what she believes is Dick standing in the darkened bedroom. Whoever it was disappears; but, horror, Aunt Miriam has been murdered, with a knife firmly embedded in her chest. It's time for Scotland Yard's C.I.D. to appear - in the person of Superintendent Clawson, a calm, precise, thoughtful man. He was forty-two years old...his eyes were warm and dreamy - the eyes of a poet or a philosopher rather than a detective. Worse news is given to Jane - the knife is an American Army clasp knife and it has Richard Parmandy's initials engraved on it. Whilst there, Clawson is summoned by a scream to Jane's bedroom - she is standing by the bed looking at a pillow: a red fluid had been worked over it, forming the word "Dead!" Supernatural or not?
Clawson goes to work. Although convinced that Parmandy is not the murderer, he fails to stop his arrest and incarceration. He attends Aunt Miriam's funeral and the reading of her Will. Also present are Jane, May Smith, Mrs Toyne (Mrs Dace's burly Irish helper), Pickerman (Mrs Dace's and Jane's solicitor) and an executor of the Will, Colonel Twiney. The latter was a living caricature of senility, a horrible, smirking picture of age that has outlived the decencies of humanity and become nothing but a gibbering husk. His face was grey and shrunken; the eyes were black, shining pin-points hidden in boney cavities. Wisps of white moustache, so fine that the grey flesh could be seen through them, quivered on his upper lip, which was continually twisted into an obscene grin above his toothless, champing gums. Nice. Jane has been left nearly half a million and Pickerman also says he will immediately move £63,408 into her account from a deposit in her aunt's bank. Mmm.
The rest of the story is how Clawson slowly unpicks various clues; visits the very strange and eerie home of Colonel Twiney in Dorking; finds himself falling for the sprightly, if much younger, May Smith (luckily, it proves to be mutual); and pins down the actual murderer and his accomplices. It is, needless to say, not Parmandy. The highly unlikely ending rather spoilt things for me. Good defeated evil but in a rather fantastic way. I guessed the culprit[s] fairly early on, but that didn't preclude my enjoyment of the book.
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