This was a fun enough little book, albeit a bit silly and not all that believable. On the other hand, I can see that Hollywood could have had a wonderful time dramatizing the book, what with car chases and people climbing around inside chimney flues and also having fights inside the flues and on the roofs and so forth. But, as nearly as I can tell, no movie has ever been made.

The book begins in Cambridge where one of the dons appears to have been murdered along with an undergraduate who has no known connection to the don. Inspector Buller tries to ferret out the scoundrel, and thinks he knows "who dunnit", but can't prove it. He talks to the murderer, who has since also murdered one of the college porters (door keeper to us Yanks). The murderer confesses, but since there is zero tangible evidence against the murderer, he can't be arrested and tried. Buller is despondent and quits the police force.

A few months later, Buller visits his friend Charles Darcy at Pemberly. Darcy lives there with his sister Elizabeth. Yes, they are of the lineage of the original Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet from Jane Austen, and it's allegedly the same Pemberly. That's about all the Jane Austenism one gets, however. Just the use of some names to provide some flack to intrigue the reading masses and con then into buying this unremarkable book.

Anyway, Buller tells his tale to Charles and Elizabeth (btw, he's madly in love with Elizabeth, but since he's a lowly policeman and she's a baronet's daughter, he figures there's no hope and mostly pines away in vain). Charles is incensed for some reason and goes to Cambridge to tell the murderer that he, Charles, is going to get the guy. So, the guy laughs at Charles and tells him to watch his own back. Then for much of the rest of the book, the murderer haunts Pemberly by living inside the chimney-flue system and sneaking into people's rooms at night, leaving frivolous, but tangible evidence of his sneaking, so as to scare them, and have a bit of fun for himself. He's got a huge ego, which is partly justified because he is actually rather brilliant. No surprise about the brilliance, of course: he is a chemist, after all.

Anyway we have lots of adventures and eventually come to a conclusion. T.H. White is a rather famous author, but certainly not for this book.
( )

This is by the author of The Sword in the Stone etc. It is a straight forward mystery of its period, beginning in a university setting an moving to the estate of Pemberley, formerly owned by Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, though from my faint recollection of this story, there is little connection to the earlier novel. My vague recollection, again, is that I liked this less than most of White's books I have read. ( )

Substance: The mystery and suspense are handled well, although the villains activities are rather outre, and the plot hinges on out-dated legal and police methods. However, the people were interesting and the excitement entertaining. Quite fun, on the whole.
Style: White is reasonably straight-forward. Some of the fun comes from attempting to decipher now-obsolete slang and even respectable words no longer in vogue.
Quibble (spoiler alert): The hapless student could have seen the villain in the victims flat, but not the actual event.

"sported door" - apparently having an outer door fitted over the interior, original door of an apartment, with a lock but no handle on the outside
"bant" - get context ( )

This is really two stories in one. The first part is an intellectual murder mystery set at a university very like Cambridge (White's own school) - an example of that school of English who-done-its whose solution depends on timelines and knowing where the furniture is placed about the room. (Dorothy Sayers would wholly approve.) The detective, Buller, is refreshingly clever: he figures out in 100pgs what would take most fictional detectives the whole novel to puzzle out, but the real fun of the first part of the novel is T.H. White's wonderfully dry wit. His send-up of college professors and Scotland Yard mini-celebrities made me laugh aloud more than once.

Then the story takes an abrupt turn, becoming a sort of cat-and-mouse adventure thriller in which Buller and the other members of the Pemberley estate are stalked by a mad murderer. Confess I didn't find this part nearly as entertaining, though think the fault has to do with time and changing tastes rather than any deficiency on the part of the writer. These days television and movies have accustomed us to spectacular chase scenes; in contrast, White's version - probably considered riveting and dramatic in its day - seems a little plodding and improbable. However, White's lovely prose and wit were enough to sustain me through the less-than-riveting bits, and the ending, when it comes, is satisfying.

I understand this is one of White's earlier works and I think it shows. There are elements of imagination here, but feel like the author let himself be constrained by the genre in which he was writing. Had he undertaken this later in his career, believe White probably could/woulc have shaped this material into something more unique, more cohesive, and more enduring. The fact remains, however, that even a relatively bad book by White outshines the best efforts of hundreds of other who-done-it authors who have come since! ( )

**Slight spoilers ahead**

Remarkable in many ways. I’ve always liked slasher movies, where a homicidal maniac stalks a loosely articulated group of people in a remote setting. The premise of Darkness is that a homicidal maniac stalks a group of friends in a remote English country manor. It’s something like a slasher movie in book form*, and the 1927 play The Cat and the Canary is brought to mind, but Darkness differs from both in that we know who the murderer is and, through a series of expositions by the madman, we get to know all the crawly things he’s done and is planning to do.

White was about 26 when he wrote the book and it has the action and confident, unadorned tone that would later make The Once and Future King so famous. It also treats violent crime as a type of madness, and criminals as evil and not simply misunderstood or underutilized citizens. Several mystery books from the 30s portray the murderers as mad and evil, not just manipulative, and this gives a lot of the crime novels I’ve read from the era a real sense of menace, even horror. For Christie, Marsh and Carr, what goes bump in the night may have been the cat, or it may have been a lunatic creeping across the floor just beyond the moonlight shadows.

*For a book that reads exactly like a classic 80s slasher, try The Twelve Deaths of Christmas by Marion Babson.