Death in the Dark

the long version

In his specially written introduction, crime novelist Martin Edwards, President of the Detection Club and author of the multi-award winner *The Golden Age of Murder*, writes, "The reappearance of *Death in the Dark*, truly a one-of-a-kind detective novel, is long overdue and will be widely welcomed." Until now, the novel by "Stacey Bishop" (George Antheil) was one of the rarest novels in detective fiction and, with three impossible crimes committed under cover of darkness, one of the most complex. But how and why it came into being is even more bizarre as described in the extensive Afterword. Antheil, an expatriate avant-garde composer whose work were performed throughout Europe in the 1920s, had a disastrous Carnegie Hall concert in 1927 and wrote *Death in the Dark* out of revenge in 1929. In it he murdered all the people he held responsible. He was helped by no less than three Nobel Prize Winners in Literature, one of whom, T.S.Eliot, wrote to Ezra Pound: "This is a very good detective story."