Look, I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, and maybe even less by its title, but
when you see a book titled It Walks By Night and it has an obelisk on the cover, then
given my range of interests, it seems like a book that should be read. So I read it. It's by
John Dickson Carr.
Spoiler alert: the plot is so preposterous, involving a ‘locked room,’ plastic surgery, decapitation, opium, and one of the characters attempting to live out the plot of Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ that I pretty much gave up trying to understand it. Suffice to say there is no obelisk in the book, and precious few mentions of walking, unless you include passages like this one, describing Inspector Bencolin, the hot shot Parisian detective:
‘In his hands a thousand facets came glittering out of the revolving jewel of Paris – lights and shadows, perfume and danger – the salon, the greenroom, the pits – abbey, brothel, and guillotine, a Babylonian carnival through which he walked in the name of the prefecture.’
No one ever accused this book of being underwritten.
And here on the last page is the heroine/murderess’s final utterance in the book: note, she has been indulging in marijuana cigarettes.
‘When I smoke one of those – I don’t know why – I am capable of anything. I took a taxi. I came up to the villa by the back gate, and when I came in by the back gate, he was standing there … I struck him. I hacked him – I was bathed in his blood. I liked that!’
Pity she didn’t just go for a walk, with friends, and a map:
