Tue 18 Mar 2025
A 1001 Midnights Review: CELIA FREMLIN – The Hours Before Dawn.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[3] Comments
by Marcia Muller
CELIA FREMLIN – The Hours Before Dawn. Lippincott, hardcover, 1958. Dell D-422, paperback, 1966. Academy Chicago Publishers, softcover, 2005. Dover Publications, paperback, 2017.
Celia Fremlin has the unusual ability to take a perfectly normal, if not mundane, situation and create an atmosphere of sheer terror. The Hours Before Dawn, which won an Edgar for Best Novel of its year, introduces us to Louise Henderson, a sleep-starved young housewife with a fretful new infant that is causing complaints from both her family and neighbors.
The only person who doesn’t complain is Miss Vera Brandon, the boarder the Hendersons have recently taken in. In fact, Miss Brandon is so self-effacing and quiet that at times the Hendersons don’t even know she is in the house.
Soon the boarder’s actions begin to arouse Louise’s suspicions, and she finds herself doing all sorts of things she has never done before — attempting to search the woman’s room, contacting total strangers for information about her, and finally taking the baby for a nocturnal stroll in his pram, only to fall asleep and lose him in a park.
The author skillfully weaves truly frightening events into Louise’s daily routine of meals, housecleaning, and childcare, and her superb characterization has the reader thoroughly on Louise’s side — and just as terrified as she is — by the time the story reaches its surprising conclusion.
Other Fremlin titles of note: Uncle Paul (1960), Prisoner’s Base (1967), The Spider-Orchid (1978), With No Crying (1981).
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
March 18th, 2025 at 7:18 pm
I read it in the Dell paperback in 1966 based on a strong review from Anthony Boucher, and it knocked my socks. I re-read it about a decade ago, and the effect was much less so. I believe I have become jaded in my dotage.
March 18th, 2025 at 7:29 pm
Having always been a fan of detective work in the mysteries I read, I’ve managed somehow to have never read anything Celia Fremlin has written. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always associated her work with “thriller” fiction, or psychological suspense, and passed on by. I may have been wrong about that, but it’s probably too late to do a lot about it.
March 23rd, 2025 at 2:06 am
Fremlin recalls Elizabeth Saxnay Holding and Charlotte Armstrong for me, her books often semi cozy set-ups turned nightmares of suspense and the threat of violence. Most of her books would have made interesting film noir entries.