Having finally achieved all he has so long dreamed of, Larry Rock has just one lingering problem: one of the women from his chequered past must die in order to not stand in the way of his continued success. Realising that the balcony of his swank new apartment represents the perfect opportunity to kill someone and make it look like an accident, Larry throws a dinner party and invites his ex-wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife, his mistress, and his fiancée…and the whole city sits back and waits for the fur to fly while we, the reader, wait to find out whose body it was that dropped out of the sky in the prologue. As set-ups go, Follow As the Night (1950) by Pat McGerr takes some beating.

Unfortunately, that setup is about as interesting as the book gets, since the overwhelming majority of its duration is spent in flashbacks which show us how Larry came to meet, woo, and spurn these women against the background of his own astronomical rise to success as a newspaper columnist and author. And since who he wishes to kill, and whose body that is that hits the pavement in the opening, is blatantly obvious from about a quarter of the way through, all you’re left with is an extended character examination of Larry Rock which makes it clear he’s driven, hollow, and only interested in moving forward…not really enough to support a 60,000 word novel.

Little human moments shine through, like Larry having to admit awkwardly to this first wife Shannon that he was initially only interested in her because of what he mistakenly perceived to be her family connections, and McGerr has a good way of capturing the sort of uncertain self-disgust in which Larry gets increasingly mired as his success grows and leaves him with the knotty tangle of a past with which he wants to make a clean break:

He’d made the offer and he’d go through with it, but the first elation at his generosity had passed, leaving him flat and empty, almost as if he had increased his guilt by trying to buy release from it.

But, honestly, this is hardly gripping stuff, with even the ‘now’ chapters detailing the party failing to produce anything close to the spark at that whole city is apparently eagerly craning forward to witness. Mostly it’s his one-time amour Maggie simply throwing out sub-Dorothy Parker put-downs with an energy that is clearly trying to make up for their feebleness…

“Don’t strain yourself,” Larry advised curtly. “You’ve been at it for two hours and you haven’t produced a good laugh line yet. Maybe you should take an intermission.”

Every so often one of these women, having previously lost patience with Larry and his heartless ways, tries to demand something of him and then reacts with amazement at his heartless response, and every so often we get a glimpse of the more loving, more caring, more human man he could have been were he not so obsessed with image and climbing the social ladder…but this is far more a character study than it is a novel of crime. To fit in its intended genre there needs to be some unexpected development, some clever idea, some new take on accepted events — and instead we just grind on, always knowing where we’re ending up, and then getting there after solidly 40 pages too many.

This is only my third novel by McGerr, but I’m beginning to wonder if I lucked out by reading Death in a Million Living Rooms (1951) first. These novels where she is apparently keeping back the devastating reveal until the final pages have a lot of Anthony Berkeley-esque promise about them, but McGerr doesn’t seem to have the streak of nastiness needed to make them work. She cares too much about justice in the grander sense, in a single good action making up for a multitude of selfish ones, and seems much more interested in people than the machinations you can put them through as a novelist. Which, fine, makes this a very realistic and acute character study, but leaves me somewhat cold when it comes to my reading entertainment.