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Two O'Clock Courage
Trade Paperback. This 1934 thriller is the third book under Richard A. Lupoff's Surinam Turtle imprint. A man wakes up in a park and can't remember who he is. But thanks to the help of a couple of intriguing women, he manages to remain free from arrest for a murder he MAY have committed. But he simply must figure out his identity before the cops -- or the murderer -- catch up with him. The story was made into a film called TWO IN THE DARK and the plot has been used in later films and books (notably Evan Hunter's BUDDWING and a British film called HYSTERIA) but no one has done it with the skill and style of Gelett Burgess.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1934
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About the author
Gelett Burgess
276 books15 followersFrank Gelett Burgess was an artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. An important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, The Lark, he is best known as a writer of nonsense verse, such as "The Purple Cow", and for introducing French modern art to the United States in an essay titled "The Wild Men of Paris." He was the author of the popular Goops books, and he coined the term "blurb."
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March 15, 2015
Burgess wrote humor, children’s books, whimsical satire, and fantasy; he wrote “The Purple Cow” and coined the term “blurb.” In satire, he cares less about exposing the follies of the world than about declaring an immunity from them. He is dogmatically facetious. TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE, published in a year of breadlines, puts this attitude in a peculiar light.
The story begins as a nameless narrator finds himself inexplicably walking the night streets of a prosperous neighborhood in what turns out to be Brookline, Massachusetts. He has a head wound, blood on his brown suit, and a gun in his pocket. He doesn’t remember his name.
The reader will not be surprised to learn there was a murder in Brookline that night. Nor that the police are looking for a man in a brown suit.
Of course he must evade the police and solve the murder. For David Goodis or Cornell Woolrich, this situation would lead to depictions of fear, despair, and guilt. Burgess mentions such things repeatedly but won’t make them palpable. He seems to expect a gentlemanly response from the reader: when a narrator says he’s scared, one accepts his word.
The novel works well enough as a fair play mystery, though like many of them it makes no human sense. The solution is one of those traffic jams that writers of the John Dickson Carr school postulate in order to account for the clues they’ve scattered—every one of the victim’s enemies had a separate errand to the crime scene on the same night. I believe it was absent-mindedness that led two of the suspects to neglect killing someone.
The intricate backstory and a sidelong point of view do create many incidents for Burgess to relate. The narrator recounts his plodding, hour by hour for several days, through narrow escapes and along false trails. The story is less preposterous when told so meticulously, but the method dilutes any curiosity readers might develop because the character’s choices have no effect—the man doesn’t know anything, he isn’t getting anywhere, and he might as well be doing something else. Also, Burgess tends to dilate scenes if he can find their humor. The momentary amusements delay the progress of the story.
You could read a good deal of the book without realizing the Depression had come. Yet the amnesiac fugitive has a problem that must have been bitterly, blackly humorous in 1934. He can’t flee town. He is barely able to eat and will soon be homeless. Yet he has five one hundred dollar bills in his pocket. He can’t spend the money because the serial numbers connect him with the murder.
Possibly the entire book was a wry meditation on the folly of a way of life where survival depends on something as arbitrary as currency. Burgess may have put his original readers at exactly the right distance from his material to contemplate this absurdity. If so, the book fails now because it’s a clockworks disconnected from its original purpose
The story begins as a nameless narrator finds himself inexplicably walking the night streets of a prosperous neighborhood in what turns out to be Brookline, Massachusetts. He has a head wound, blood on his brown suit, and a gun in his pocket. He doesn’t remember his name.
The reader will not be surprised to learn there was a murder in Brookline that night. Nor that the police are looking for a man in a brown suit.
Of course he must evade the police and solve the murder. For David Goodis or Cornell Woolrich, this situation would lead to depictions of fear, despair, and guilt. Burgess mentions such things repeatedly but won’t make them palpable. He seems to expect a gentlemanly response from the reader: when a narrator says he’s scared, one accepts his word.
The novel works well enough as a fair play mystery, though like many of them it makes no human sense. The solution is one of those traffic jams that writers of the John Dickson Carr school postulate in order to account for the clues they’ve scattered—every one of the victim’s enemies had a separate errand to the crime scene on the same night. I believe it was absent-mindedness that led two of the suspects to neglect killing someone.
The intricate backstory and a sidelong point of view do create many incidents for Burgess to relate. The narrator recounts his plodding, hour by hour for several days, through narrow escapes and along false trails. The story is less preposterous when told so meticulously, but the method dilutes any curiosity readers might develop because the character’s choices have no effect—the man doesn’t know anything, he isn’t getting anywhere, and he might as well be doing something else. Also, Burgess tends to dilate scenes if he can find their humor. The momentary amusements delay the progress of the story.
You could read a good deal of the book without realizing the Depression had come. Yet the amnesiac fugitive has a problem that must have been bitterly, blackly humorous in 1934. He can’t flee town. He is barely able to eat and will soon be homeless. Yet he has five one hundred dollar bills in his pocket. He can’t spend the money because the serial numbers connect him with the murder.
Possibly the entire book was a wry meditation on the folly of a way of life where survival depends on something as arbitrary as currency. Burgess may have put his original readers at exactly the right distance from his material to contemplate this absurdity. If so, the book fails now because it’s a clockworks disconnected from its original purpose
Displaying 1 of 1 review