Wed 30 Jun 2010
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: GUY ENDORE – Detour at Night.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Reviews[7] Comments
William F. Deeck
GUY ENDORE – Detour at Night. Simon & Schuster, US, hardcover, 1959. Paperback reprint: Award, 1965. British edition: Victor Gollancz, UK, 1959, as Detour Through Devon.
A former professor of linguistics and now one of the hopeless and homeless, Frank Willis wants to go nowhere and is in no hurry to get there. Nonetheless, by mistake he ends up in Devon, Indiana, where he had been reared in an orphanage, attended and later taught at the college, married the richest woman in town, and been found not guilty of having murdered one of his students.
On this cold, wet night in Devon, Willis relives some of his experiences and makes the reader aware of his fascination with language, the ways and the whys of speech, a fascination that I would hope any reader would be caught up in.
When Willis is not examining and, indeed, savoring the language, he conveys considerable tension over the crime that he is suspected of having committed, a crime the details of which are not learned until halfway through the book.
Not a great mystery, by any means, in the sense of whodunit. Yet Willis is a gripping character, caught in a web he knows he can’t escape. Despite my being unable to give him much sympathy, as he seems to be looking for, I would deem this novel as most enjoyable.
Criminous Bibliography: [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]
ENDORE, (Samuel) GUY. 1900-1970.
The Man from Limbo (n.) Farrar 1930
The Werewolf of Paris (n.) Farrar 1933 [Paris; 1871]
Methinks the Lady (n.) Duell 1945
Detour at Night (n.) Simon 1959
Editorial Comment: While for most of his career Guy Endore was also a well-known screenwriter, it’s the second of these novels that he’s most famous for. The Werewolf of Paris is without a doubt an absolute classic.
I wish I could thank Bill for his review of this book. It shows a side to Endore as a writer that I knew nothing about before.
June 30th, 2010 at 8:00 pm
Endore’s psychological novels were something new at the time and made a nice little niche for him. METHINKS THE LADY was a good noir film as WHIRLPOOL directed by Otto Preminger, and Hammer did a fairly good job of WEREWOLF with Oliver Reed as CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF though they changed the Dumas like story of a man who might or might not have been a werewolf or a madman into an obvious werewolf.
WEREWOLF is based on a true story, and a bestseller, but as far as I know has only been reprinted once in paperback and used to be fairly hard to find, though having mine I haven’t looked lately.
Though a biography, Endore’s bio of Dumas, KING OF PARIS is written in a novelistic style.
Did anyone ever have a better name for a mystery writer than Guy Endore?
July 1st, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Seems like I reviewed METHINKS THE LADY (aka NIGHTMARE, aka WHIRLPOOL) a while back; wa-a-ay too talky and convoluted for its own good (a problem with WEREWOLF OF PARIS as well) but it offers a catfight of pornographic excess.
July 1st, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Guy Endore. Yes, there’s a certain ring to the author’s name, isn’t there? I think you can feel that he’d be the author of a werewolf novel taking place in 19th century Paris, can’t you?
That’s why I’ve always thought, without reading it, that DETOUR would be a much darker novel than Bill’s review would suggest. And maybe in a certain sense, given the last paragraph of his review, it might still be.
July 1st, 2010 at 9:42 pm
I found DETOUR fairly dark, but also perhaps ‘lighter’ or at least more straightforward than METHINKS.
WEREWOLF is based on an actual individual and incident and not a supernatural novel. How you feel about it may depend on how much you like Dumas novels, particularly the ones based on historical incidents. It is very much a Dumas novel in style and voice.
It’s a very good read and a fascinating story — though far more a historical novel than a horror novel. The Hammer film uses enough of the story that it will be familiar to you, but Endore is far more interested in lycanthropy in the sense of Gilles de Rais or Fritz Hartmann than Lawrence Talbot and Lon Chaney Jr.
WEREWOLF is about an interesting psychological case of a man raised to believe he is a werewolf and how that informs his savage nature and fate. It’s a psychological case study — which puts it in the mainstream of Endore’s works.
July 1st, 2010 at 9:57 pm
David
I keep calling WEREWOLF a “werewolf” novel, and in a sense you’re telling me it’s not — at least in the way that most people will assume that it is. Point well taken!
— Steve
Added later:
Here’s the Wikipedia page on Clinical Lyncanthropy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_lycanthropy
From which I quote:
“Clinical lycanthropy is defined as a rare psychiatric syndrome that involves a delusion that the affected person can or has transformed into an animal or that he or she is an animal. Its name is connected to the mythical condition of lycanthropy, a supernatural affliction in which people are said to physically shapeshift into wolves.”
And from the book itself:
“He panted through his open mouth. And he felt his tongue, the short and bulky tongue of man, begin to flatten and lengthen. ‘God help me!’ he cried. But now the tongue was curling out of his mouth, was hanging over his teeth. Unable to resist any more,he sprang from his bed. He went to a corner of his room, muzzled under a piece of cloth and dragged forth an arm, a human arm. The last of the two arms he had taken from La belle Normade.
“He sank his teeth into it. His eyes glared around suspiciously. Low growls came from his throat. For a while there was silence, then there were more noises, the slap of a hard dead hand as it hit the floor, the crunching a of bone, and occasionally a sharp tick as a ring on one finger struck the wood.”
July 2nd, 2010 at 1:30 am
Clinical lycanthropy was fairly common in the middle ages in certain parts of Europe, seemingly now to have been inspired by the ingestion of ergot — a common grain mold that causes hallucination and death (it’s a medicine today often used for migraine since it cause dilated blood vessels in the skull to expand thus relieving headache).
Among the famous cases were Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc’s second in command, aka Bluebeard, who may have tortured and murdered as many as 500 children — though technically he didn’t suffer from the disease he was often referred to as a wolfman or werewolf having been exceptionally hairy. His motive for the torture murders was that his eventual confession and reform would then prove a greater glory to God — at least according to the transcripts of his trial.
Fritz Harmann or Hartmann was known as the Vampire and or the Wolfman of Dusseldorf, and the model both for the child killer in Fritz Lang’s M and the clinical lycanthrope in Geoffrey Household’s often anthologized novella “Taboo.” Again, he didn’t really suffer clinical lycanthropy.
The character in Endore’s novel was an actual figure in Revolutionary era France who terrorized Paris and committed numerous bloody savage murders. Unlike the other two he seems to be a classical case of clinical lycanthropy in modern times.
Not all clinical lycanthropes are murderers. There have been cases of individuals living in the woods and running at night like animals hunting small game to live. I think there was at least one case of an entire family living that way. In other cases such ‘creatures’ lived on the edges of small villages and ran in the woods either undetected — or tolerated. Endore’s case is a rarity because it happened in relatively modern times in a large urban center — and ironic of course that in a time of such vast public bloodshed anyone noticed an individual monster.
July 4th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
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