FORGOTTEN BOOK: KILLER BY NIGHT

 Killer by Night by "Paul Valdez"  (Alan Yates) (published as an Australian paperback by Transport Publishing Company as part of their "Scientific Thriller" line, 1951)

A frightened woman wakes in her room in the morning, with many balmnk spots in her memory.  Her last coherent thought was at about 10 p.m. the night before; she vaguely rememberes the clock showing 3:00 when she heard a fearful howling from outside...or was it from her own throat?  "There was a killer at large -- a killer who killed like a mad dog.  You couldn't blame the police for searching for a dog -- a dog with the cunning of a mad nan -- or woman!!  But was there such an animal..."

Mike Allison is a feature article writer for the Amercian magazine Dynamite, so named because it was not afraid to blow up everything -- its combination of hard-hitting investigative journalism and sensationalism has made it a world-wide success story.  Mike's last feature was an acclaimed article on the Chicago Ice Pick Murders, a story that ruffled the feathers of many mob bosses, leading his editor to send Mike out of the country util things cooled down.  Mike finds himself in England, looking for material for the final article tp fill his yearly quota.  He's looking for a sensational story that has been hidden from the mainstream press.  He thinks he may have found it in the pages of a small weekly Yorkshire paper:  "LOSS OF SHEEP CONTINUES.  VALUABLE FLOCKS BEING DEPLETED BY SAVAGE DOG."  According to the story, this was the fourth such attack on sheep in recent days; no trace of the killer dog has been seen.

Mike makes arrangements to go to Yorkshire.  the night before he leaves, he runs into a journalist friend, Pete Logan, of the Record.  Logan mentions that he, too, was off to Yorkshire in a few days.  Mike hopes that he is not following the same story.

While driving through the outskirts of town, he comes across a girl, June Staynger, whose car has broken down.  He offers to give her a ride to a garage, but she instead asks him to drive her home, some four miles distant.  June lives at "The Grange," a 300-year-old mansion.  She invites Mike to stay for dinner, where he meets her brother Clive and Major Danning, a family friend.  As Mike leaves, he notices a light in a window on the top floor.  She could see a woman moving around.  Stnge, because neither June nor Clive mentioned that anyone else was in the house.  Driving home, he stops by the road to admire the night.  The peaceful silence is broken by an ubngodly howling in the distance.  Shakened by the strangeness of the noise, Mike drive back to his lodgings.

The next day, the village is abuzz about the death of Tom Bligh, a local dog breeded, whose mutilated corpse was found on the moor.  Judging from the time given and the location of the body, that miust have been the source of the weird howling Mike had heard.  The body was found a few miles from the Staynger estate.  Mike runs into Pete Logan again, who admits that he is there to investigate the sheeps killings -- and ow the killing of Tom Bligh.  It turns out that Logan was originally from the area and had been a good friend of Bligh.  Logan asks Mike to back off from the story.

That evening, Mike goes on a date with June, ending with a romantic (and probably passionate; but Mike is a gentleman, so details are missing from his first-person narrative) walk.  Returning to his lodgings, he meets Doctor Vaseikov, a world-reknown psychiatrist, sent by the head of Dynamite's London office to give some assistance to Mike on the story.  Vaseikov's take is that a lycnthrope was responsible for the slaughters -- noty the werewolf of movies, but a person who is convinced that he is a wolf and acts accordingly.  Mike pooh-poohs the idea of a werewolf, whether human or supernatural.

Searching for clues, Mike goes to Bligh's now-abandoned farm.  He breaks in and discovers and account book with one page torn out.  In the kennels, he discovers Pete Logan's body, with his throat torn out.  Later that night, Mike goes to The Grange.  All is dark on the first floor, but there is alight from the same upper window as before.  Mike climbs up some vines to investigate and sees a woman in her 50s getting upset, throwing a book and at mirror, and howling in the same uncanny way that he had heard before.  The woman is June and Clive's mother, supposedly an invalid and confined to her room.

Mike travels to his London office to get some infomration on Paul Logn.  He discovers that Logan is June's cousin, as well as the details of an odd will involving the family.  Fearting something will happens, he takes a compoany car, driven by an ex-soldier, to rush back to The Grange.  There's a terrible snow storm, visibility is almost non-existent, and it takes them four hours to drive the forty miles.  When he gets there, it's too late -- he finds June's mother over the fresh, blood-stained corpse of Dr. Vaseikov...

There's more, of course, along with a bloodier finale.

Pure pulp.  Pure Austraian pulp, and a fast, interesting read.

"Paul Valdez" was Alan G. Yates, perhaps much better-known as the best-selling author of the Carter Brown mysteries. which flooded the American, English, and Australian markets back in the 60s and 70s.  As "Valdez," Yates wrote fifteen novels for Transport's Scientific Thriller line and six stories for the Australian magazine Thrills, Incorporated.   None of these should be read for their non-existent subtlety and nuance, but for entertainment alone.

Killer by Night, with a nifty cover of a wold lurking outside a window, is available online at Luminist Archives.