ADAM HOBHOUSE – The Hangover Murders. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1935. Hardcover reprint: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d. Digest-sized paperback reprint: Mercury Mystery #118, 1947. Film: Universal, 1935, as Remember Last Night? (Edward Arnold, Robert Young, Constance Cummings, Sally Eilers; director: James Whale).

   The Hangover Murders, the only novel published by the pseudonymous Adam Hobhouse, and one of only two Borzoi Murder Mystery titles, is known today almost exclusively as the basis for the 1935 screwball comedy mystery film, Remember Last Night?, a pretty good entry in the string of imitations of the William Powell/Myrna LoyThin Man series.

   More’s the pity, because the novel is even more remarkable. Except for the basic premise and a few of the tamer plot elements, it is also wholly different from the screen version.

   Screwball, yes. Comedy, no.

   The basic premise, unlike the rest of the book, is simple: a group of rich, alcoholic Long Islanders wake up from a night’s debauch with monumental hangovers, to discover that their host has been shot to death sometime during the night. One or more of the menage is likely guilty, the problem being that none of them can remember what happened during or after their rowdy binge.

   These are not just weekend or party drunks, you understand; they’re chronic boozers who regularly embark on “nice little busts,” wake up with the screaming horrors, and immediately start all over again.

   Every major character in the novel is a flaming drunk — the unlikable but nonetheless intriguing narrator, Tony Milburn, his wife, Carlotta, and the half dozen friends/suspects. Even the detective called in by Milburn, a New York cop named Danny Harrison, spends almost as much time tippling as he does sleuthing.

   The jacket blurb states in part: “Mr. Hobhouse has written a murder-mystery you will not put down until you’ve read the last page — an invitation to a party! In a stripped metallic style, with the speed of a streamlined train, and in the masculine temper that belongs to today, he has presented the people you read about in the papers — the polo-playing, auto-racing, hard-drinking crowd of fashionable Long Island — hard but charming men, beautiful but brittle women — in an explosive crime story.”

   Jacket blurbs are notoriously inaccurate, but this one is reasonably on the mark — up to a point. The men are hard, all right, though to call any of them charming is a considerable stretch. The women are just as hard, and sometimes just as nasty (one of them casually uses the euphemism “frigging,” probably its first ever appearance in a mystery novel).

   The style is certainly stripped and metallic, the pace frenetic. But it’s what the blurb leaves out that makes this more than just another mystery novel; makes it, in fact, a jaw-dropping tour de force.

   In addition to being as tough and as anything penned by the Black Mask boys in the 30s, with three bloody murders and an equally bloody suicide, it is:

   ? A biting, perhaps intentional satire of the The Thin Man (also published by Knopf the year before), with the lighthearted boozy elements turned upside down.

   ? A fair-play detective story, well clued, with some genuine detection and a surprisingly convoluted plot worthy of Christie (though it would probably have horrified her).

   ? A wild tangle of ingredients including but not limited to: ultra-tough slanguage interspersed with lyrical descriptions of such topics as French antiques and erudite quotes from various literary sources; graphic descriptions of violent acts and autopsy procedures; clever clues such as a note written in Greek that refers to a Christian love-feast and an obscure poem by Lord Byron; a quarter of a million dollars in missing money, one missing chauffeur, one dead chauffeur, a roadside inn run by a gang of drunken Sicilians, a country swimming hole surrounded by muddy footprints, the murder of a psychologist cum hypnotist by a gunman perched in a tree, lessons in ballistics and the making of shellac-and-plaster impressions, a polo match, a booby-trapped polo mallet, and a Revolutionary War cannon.

   There are also two lengthy sequences of staggering (literally) proportions. In one, Milburn chases a suspect into a Manhattan bar, pauses to have a few drinks with the patrons, is slipped a mickey by the bartender, and wakes up hours later in a Brooklyn backwater where he buys a decrepit horse from an Italian vendor, immediately changes the horse’s name from Aida to Rosinante (for no apparent reason), then woozily rides Rosinante bareback among startled crowds in search of a cop, his next drink, and a bucket of beer for the horse.

   In the other, a penultimate “nice little bust,” Milburn and Carlotta consume nearly a dozen different kinds of straight and mixed drinks in NYC restaurants and bars, go for a long joyriding jaunt in the country at 80 miles an hour in Tony’s Bugatti, spend the rest of the night wreaking havoc in a graveyard, and at daybreak breakfast on bottles of brandy and champagne.

   Milburn himself offers the best summation of these extraordinary events. It’s enough, he says at one point near the end, “to put a crimp in your cerebellum.”

   If you can find a copy of The Hangover Murders (it’s extremely scarce and as such, pricey), by all means read it. You may not like it, but I’ll guarantee you won’t soon forget it.