UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Michael Dibdin, The Dying of the Light (1993)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.

Here’s an unusual mystery: Michael Dibdin’s The Dying of the Light , published in 1993 and reissued in paperback in 1995.

            The book opens at tea time, in the lounge of what appears to be an English nursing home, where the old folks’ names sound as if they came out of a Clue game or an Agatha Christie novel: Colonel Weatherby, Lady Belinda Scott, Canon Purvey, and the corned beef millionaire, George Channing, who turns out to be the first victim.

            In this setting, two of the characters, Rosemary and Dorothy, are amusing themselves and trying to keep their minds alive by pretending they are indeed in an Agatha Christie novel: they speculate that the last two deaths in the home were the result of foul play rather than natural causes, and they invent linked romantic pasts for the other guests, providing them each with a motive for doing away with their late companions.  

            Then Dibdin begins to twist the plot.  First a cruel nurse attendant enters, striking one of the guests, snarling, threatening the rest.  “Aha!” we think, “perhaps there is more to Rosemary and Dorothy’s speculation than game playing.”  Then we learn that the clock in the lounge always says ten past four, and we see some of the guests behaving in a very disturbed way.  “Aha!” we think, “Rosemary and Dorothy aren’t just playing mind games; they’re nutty as fruitcakes and so is everyone else; this isn’t an old people’s home but an insane asylum.”

            Then Rosemary finds Dorothy dead, an apparent suicide, and we realize Dibdin has tricked us again: we have to take seriously the murder speculation that Rosemary and her dead friend have been indulging in.  Dibdin plays with the reader in this way throughout: First Rosemary is set up in the tradition of the elderly female amateur—that is, the Miss Marple type—but then she is undercut, then set up again, but we are always reminded that she is also an inventor.

             When a police inspector from the county constabulary enters, we are ready to play Dibdin’s game and to guess whether the constable will look like a bumbling idiot and turn out to be brilliant, or look like a bumbling idiot and turn out to be . . . a bumbling idiot.  The questions remain right up until the end:  will Rosemary be able to convince the inspector that her friend was murdered?  Was Dorothy in fact murdered?  When Rosemary leaves herself off the list of possible suspects, does that mean we should suspect her?  Dibdin keeps shifting the ground under us, and ultimately creates a kind of paradox: a book that is both a good mystery and a good parody of a mystery.  The Dyling of the Light is a dark book, but an entertaining one that will keep you guessing.  I think you’ll like it.