The Twilight Hour [Paperback]

Elizabeth Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2007

“This is an atmospheric book in which foggy, half-ruined London is as much a character as the artists and good-time girls who wander through its pages.”—Time Out

Elizabeth Wilson’s elegant noir vividly evokes the fashions and politics of a bohemian community flourishing in postwar London. The Twilight Hour is a riveting thriller with a corkscrew twist.

Visiting professor at the London College of Fashion, Elizabeth Wilson is a well-known UK writer on feminism and popular culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British commentator Wilson (The Lost Time Café), whose nonfiction focus is feminism and popular culture, does little with her intriguing choice of period in this unremarkable historical whodunit. 1947 London is beset both by a record-breaking freeze and by the country's bumpy return to normalcy after the traumas of WWII. Against this background, Wilson has placed a young and callow heroine, Dinah Wentworth, a newly-married socialite whose naïveté (and penchant for exclamation points) will grate on some readers. Wentworth's dull existence is brightened when her filmmaker husband, Alan, falls in with a mysterious Romanian film director, Radu Enescu, and his leading lady, Gwendolen Grey, who want to use him to write the screenplay for a romantic feature film. After Dinah stumbles across a corpse, she panics and doesn't notify the authorities, leading to predictable complications. An unsurprising solution to the murder and unconvincing period detail leaves readers as cold as the London winter.
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Review

"'Her intellectual enthusiasm, ironic humour and delight in bohemian absurdity make this a fascinating book to read' Financial Times (on Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts) 'Her book is the best I have read on the subject, bar none' Angela Carter, London Review of Books (on Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity) 'A novel filled with pleasures of an unexpected kind' New Statesman (on Prisons of Glass)"

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (May 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 185242477X
• ISBN-13: 978-1852424770
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,906,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars The amateur sleuth tale is well written, but takes a back seat to the period piece, October 24, 2007

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Twilight Hour (Paperback)

1947, in a freezing still bombed out London, Dinah Wentworth finds the corpse of surrealist painter Titus Mavor. Not wanting to reveal any reasons for being at the Mayor's apartment and heeding advice, she fails to inform the cops.

Not long afterward, the police arrest family friend and film-making business partner Colin Harris, who had a vitriolic public shouting match with the deceased over the immediate future of England. Dinah knows Colin is innocent, a victim of circumstantial evidence compounded by his being a Communist as the Cold War begins to heat up. Over the objection of her husband Alan, who tells her the film partnership was over before Harris' arrest so they owe him nothing; Dinah needs to prove the innocence of Colin as she believes someone is filling in the blanks to finish framing him for the murder.

The amateur sleuth tale is well written, but takes a back seat to the period piece as London, still recovering from the bombings, suffers through a freezing winter as the Cold War begins. Dinah is a fascinating character as she wants the freedom men has, but besides her spouse and the males who dominate the fledgling English film industry keeping her down, her own limitations also holds her back as she accepts as gospel those limitations because she is a female. We've come a long way. Fans of historical tales with a mystery subplot will appreciate THE TWILIGHT HOUR more so than pure whodunit buffs as the incredibly vivid look at the era (readers will shiver with the cold) supersedes the solid investigative subplot.

Harriet Klausner

3.0 out of 5 stars Strong Atmosphere / Less Strong Plot & Characters, April 23, 2007

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Twilight Hour (Paperback)

This third crime novel by feminist fashion expert Wilson is ultimately more interesting for its setting than its plot, which hinges on a pretty lame gimmick. The protagonist is naive twenty-year-old Dinah Wentworth, newly married to her older screenwriter husband and trying to find her own identity amidst the arty Fitzrovia scene of her husband and his friends. These include her husband's old filmmaking pals Hugh (relatively nondescript), Colin (intensely communist), Romanian film director Radu, willowy film star Gwen, property developer and potential film financier Stanley, has-been surrealist painter Titus Mavor, good-time girl Fiona, and assorted other journalists, artists, and gallery owners. Before long, one of the above is dead, and Dinah's deeply involved. In that oldest of plot devices, Dinah comes across the corpse and doesn't report it to the police right away. Anyone who's encountered this before in fiction (and really, who hasn't?) will recognize that her inaction will lead to all kinds of trouble for her as the plot progresses.

Soon, another of the above characters is charged with the murder on the flimsiest of pretexts. Things all get awfully complicated from here, as he has an alibi, but can't use it as it would expose him as a homosexual. Which also ties into dark events that took place during the war. Maybe. Or maybe it ties into some valuable Dali paintings the murder victim had. Or was said to have. Or maybe not. Or maybe the murder related to a love triangle. Or maybe not. It's a very murky plot just barely held together by Dinah and her husband's attempts to exonerate their imprisoned friend, with the help of a Jewish lawyer. Dinah does some haphazard amateur sleuthing, but the story is very herky jerky, and when all is revealed at the end, it's a major disappointment.

Fortunately, the book is greatly redeemed by its evocative portrayal of 1947 London, especially the semi-bohemian demimonde. Britain may have won WWII, but you sure wouldn't know it from this portrait of London (with a minor diversion to Brighton). The wartime unity of the nation is rapidly eroding in the face of an economy in tatters, food rationing, and the uncertain specter of the Cold War. And the bitter Winter isn't helping matters in a city still scarred by widespread bomb damage. Wilson does a nice job of weaving all this content into the story, along with a sense of social change, as Dinah notices a new freedom in fashion, makeup, and social mores. In terms of atmosphere and tone, it shares a great deal with classic noir novels such as Gerald Kersh's "Night and the City", Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock", Arthur La Bern's "It Always Rains on Sunday" (all made into excellent, if somewhat forgotten films) -- which is not to suggest that it's of that rank.

The plotting is a little too haphazard, the characterization a little too uneven, and the ending too gimmicky to make it wholly recommendable, but it's worth checking out by those with an interest immediate postwar London. The author is apparently working on a sequel.