Mr Posterity, do you want to know what the twentieth century was really like? Leave Booth Tarkington on the shelf and watch King Kong. Start a fire with Edna Ferber and read Red Harvest. Prop up that wonky table leg with John Galsworthy and riffle through the horror magazines where the truth is really told.
Something More Than Night is a 2021 Fantastic Noir novel by Kim Newman.
The world contains more dark, strange things than most people care to imagine. Hollywood in the 1930s has more than its share. The bright lights and glitzy facades hide many secrets that oil barons and movie moguls will pay well to keep secret. Eccentric geniuses lurk and monsters roam, behind as well as in front of the cameras.
Private investigator Joh Devlin's day began with a man on fire on the doorstep of one of Hollywood's most exclusive estates, and after that it got weird. Now, money has talked, and all his leads have dried up. Determined to find the truth, he needs a man with a face that can open doors, and he needs a man who understands how mysteries work. Fortunately, he knows just the men.
William Henry Pratt, the actor known to his legions of fans as horror star Boris Karloff, is a man who knows darkness only too well; he's seen horrors to match anything in any of his films. Mystery author Raymond Chandler is another. The two men share a secret, the memory of a terrible event of which they were the only two surviving witnesses — at least, the only two surviving human witnesses...
Something More Than Night contains examples of:
- Biography à Clef: Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff investigate a mystery and encounter supernatural goings-on, including a private eye who's said to be Chandler's model for Philip Marlowe, a sequence of events that's implied to be the inspiration for a chapter in Farewell, My Lovely, and another sequence of events that's explicitly said to be the inspiration for Karloff's horror film The Man They Could Not Hang. There is an afterword in which the author points out the very few details that are real, and reminds the reader that most of it is made up.
- Bookcase Passage: While exploring Home House, Devlin recalls seeing one of Ward Home Junior's horror movies where the villain had a secret passage was opened by pulling out a book on a bookcase. The entrances to the secret passages in Home House, it turns out, are associated with peephole portraits, and opened by pressing a poorly-disguised switch on the portrait. (None of the rooms Devlin visits in Home House have any bookcases, incidentally, and it's possible Junior doesn't own any; he's not the reading type.)
- Character Overlap:
- Ariadne first appeared in Bad Dreams, which involves supernatural shenanigans in 1950s Hollywood.
- Stephen Swift first appeared in The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School.
- Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Discussed. The villain talks about marketing the technology his pet Mad Scientists have produced, but Billy Pratt, a keen judge of character, predicts that it will never actually happen. Before he was enhanced by mad science, the villain had a complex about being dismissed and belittled by his parents and his peers — who are exactly the kind of rich, selfish people who would constitute the market for the technology. If they get the benefit of the technology he'll be back as the little fish; only by keeping it for himself can he continue to be special.
- Exposition of Immortality:
- Doctor Voodoo's file on Herbert Holloway starts mundane with the details of his film career in the 1920s and 1930s, then lays out evidence of earlier careers as an evangelist in the 1880s, a naval officer in the 1810s, and so on back to the 1600s.
- Devlin's exploration of Home House, a sequence full of played-with horror tropes, culminates in the discovery of a portrait, painted over a century ago on another continent, showing Ariadne looking the same age as she does in the present. It would be a dramatic revelation, except that the heroes already know about Ariadne.
- Framing Device: The novel begins (apart from the prologue) with Ray and Billy receving news in 1939 of the death of their friend Joh Devlin under mysterious circumstances connected with the Home House Case. Most of the novel is taken up with a flashback recounting the events of the Home House Case, before returning to 1939 to tie up the loose ends.
- Gender-Blender Name: Stephen Swift is a woman. She explains that her family were very traditional, and had always named the firstborn of each generation "Stephen", and didn't see any reason to change just because this one was a girl.
- Historical Domain Character: Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff. Other famous Hollywood figures are mentioned, but most of the other people they interact with on the page are entirely fictional.
- Horrible Hollywood: The novel's focus is on the seedy side of Hollywood; the stars are mostly vapid or selfish, the cops are all on the take, and the studios spend as much time hushing up the misdeeds of their employees as they do actually making movies.
- Inhuman Eye Concealers: Stephen Swift has her hair styled to cover her right eye. The practical purpose is to hide the eye, which is her Mark of the Supernatural, from view. Symbolically, it represents her having secrets to hide, and goes with her being the Femme Fatale of the story (or what would be the femme fatale if the story didn't also include Ariadne).
- Liquid Assets: Part of the plot involves a Mad Scientist who has devised a way to transfer insubstantial attributes, like a psychic ability or a contortionist's flexibility, from one person to another in a process analogous to blood transfusion but involving a lot more sinister electrical devices.
- Mad Scientist:
- Dr Vaudois, called "Doctor Voodoo" by his detractors, runs a private medical clinic for rich customers and does unethical experiments in search of a cure for death itself.
- Norman Francis Quin is a mad engineer who started out designing Mad Scientist Laboratory equipment for movies like Frankenstein (1931) and branched out into designing equipment that does real mad science.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: Invoked. Doctor Voodoo's secret basement laboratory looks the part, due to being bankrolled by a movie mogul with an overdeveloped sense of drama. It's full of sinister gadgets and specimens, most of which are irrelevant set dressing, and has stone walls that subsequently turn out to be textured plasterboard.
- Mark of the Supernatural: Stephen Swift's right eye is dramatically bloodshot, a consequence of a past incident when she overused her telekinesis. She usually hides it behind bangs. When Ward Home Junior acquires her telekinesis, he immediately gets the bloodshot eye as well.
- Monster Clown: The Sparx Brothers, a trio of unfunny clowns who make knock-off comedy films for Monolith Pictures, are revealed to double as sadistic enforcers and hitmen for the studio boss.
- Mythology Gag:
- After learning Miss Swift's real name, Chandler jokingly invents a proverb saying that you should never trust women named after birds. Riffing on it, he suggests some other names — Lark, Swan, Dove — all of which are the surnames of female characters in other Kim Newman stories who should not be treated lightly.
- Chandler's dream sequence in chapter 30 is directly modelled on, to the point of frequently directly quoting from, the dreamlike interlude that makes up chapter 30 of Chandler's The Little Sister.
- Naturalized Name:
- Private eye Joh Devlin was born "Johan Dieffenbach".
- The Home family, owners of the sinister Home House, are descended from a German immigrant who changed his name from "Heim".
- Noodle Incident: Joh Devlin became a private eye after being fired from the DA's office for caring more about justice than about the tender feelings of the rich and influential. The incident that got him fired is described in detail, and he also gives a description of an earlier incident he describes as his "second strike" with the DA — which implies the existence of a "first strike", about which the reader learns nothing at all.
- Old, Dark House: Invoked. Home House is a sinister mansion on a hill, riddled with secret passages and portrait peepholes and the like — but the house is only a few years old, and belongs to a movie mogul with an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic.
- Portrait Painting Peephole: Invoked. Home House contains several paintings with peepholes in the eyes and Secret Rooms hidden behind them, as part of the owner's commitment to horror movie decor.
- Punk in the Trunk: When Ray and Billy finally get to meet Stephen Swift, she's locked in the trunk of Joh Devlin's Studebaker.
- Red Shirt: Stewart the butler, who gets killed by a Death Trap while Joh Devlin and some other characters with stronger Plot Armor survive. Somewhat deconstructed later in the book; Devlin notes that Stewart was a person with a family, and that he feels guilty about the fact that Stewart would probably still be alive if Devlin hadn't insisted on being shown around.
- Running Gag: Every time Chandler meets someone who's read The Big Sleep, they ask him who killed the chauffeur.note He gives a straight answer once, and to the other queries gives more metaphorical responses, such as claiming that it's a reminder that life doesn't always contain neat answers or asserting that ultimately it was Raymond Chandler who killed the chauffeur regardless of which fictional character did the deed.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: The Home family get away with a lot because Ward Home Senior is a wealthy oil baron who can pay to make any problems go away, one way or another.
- Secret Underground Passage: Invoked. When some of the protagonists are trapped in a room in Home House, they deduce the existence of a secret passage by noting that when a drama-addicted movie mogul builds at significant expense a sinister mansion on a hill with a secret basement laboratory, death traps, portrait peepholes, and other such Gothic trappings, he's not going to pass up the chance to include a few secret passages.
- Spoiled Brat: Ward Home Junior has spent his entire life coasting on the vast amount of money allowed him by his oil baron father. He thinks of himself as a bigshot movie mogul, but his studio is an ego project that makes many terrible movies and no profits; it's really just a big playset for a kid who never grew up, with real human action figures.
- Wanted a Son Instead: Stephen Swift says that her parents were expecting a son as their firstborn, and made do by giving her the name they'd planned to give their son. Then her younger brother was born; he was christened John Stephen Swift, but everyone in the family called him Stephen, while she went from being "Stephen" to "The Girl".
- Weirdness Censor: Chandler notes that most people, when confronted with the impossible, find ways to rationalize it or remember it as something more mundane. This is then demonstrated as a group of policemen at a crime scene come up with an explanation they can live with for a woman emerging alive from a situation no ordinary human could have survived.
