The Man in the Dark

[from back of Dean Street Press 2022 trade paperback edition]

"Yes, and then I'll go over Miss Kay's rooms with either you or the housekeeper." "There is no housekeeper, Miss." From his voice it sounded as if the housekeeper had been strangled and her body put in the cellar; it nearly made Marda giggle.

James Longford, a wealthy former racing car driver with vision loss from an accident several years before, hires 26-year-old Marda Mayne as companion to his newly-orphaned 17-year-old American ward Shirley. His main concern is to avoid being troubled so he can continue to live in self-imposed isolation, but as plucky, practical Marda and flirtatious, kind-hearted Shirley take his intimidating household staff in hand (and find an unexpected ally in that surly butler), they also begin to revive James' interest in life. The trio will have to brace themselves, however, when his self-absorbed, manipulative sister Vera -- who sees his fortune as practically already hers -- announces a visit.

First, a few quibbles with the description. James did, indeed, do some racing, but the implication from the text is that this was more in the way of a hobby and that his profession was being a wealthy heir. Also, his ward was not American: she was the daughter of his best friend at Oxford and was just returning from having been educated the past two years in America.

The Man in the Dark is a gentle, easy-to-digest book. It reads, with its straightforward focus on the central romance, more genre than, say, a D. E. Stevenson or a Molly Clavering might.

The book opens with Marda, the female mc, waking up on her 26th birthday and reflecting that it's a milestone because "Twenty-five is still a girl, twenty-six is a woman." (A few chapters later, her father, reflecting on her angsty mood, looks at her "with loving amusement" and says "I expect your trouble is that you're growing up. It always hurts." (63)) This surprised me, in a good way, coming from a genre where you're conditioned to expect 26-and-still-living-at-home to be written as spinster territory -- but maybe that's more a 50s-60s thing? Marda, trained as a "dispenser", has been working for her gp dad, but his practice is in a poor area, and is short the number of wealthy clients ("jam" the family calls them, since they provide the "extras" in their budget) needed to pay Marda's younger siblings' tuition. Hence the companion job and the falling in love with her reclusive employer. Marda is a very likable protagonist and the ward is kind of a hoot, mainly for Scarlett's view of the "Americanisms" she's picked up across the pond -- like carrying a flask of brandy, and taking a whiskey and soda instead of tea (mind you, she's 17) -- we Yanks were, in 1940, apparently, a cosmopolitan lot.

The warmth of Marda's family relationships is also nice -- I wish there'd been a prequel about her parents' love story, actually! The romance was ok: you don't get to know Jim very well -- which leaves him largely defined by his reaction to his disability (retreat from the world) and her efforts to coax him out of it. And Scarlett's no The Rosary in handling those tropes.

As a modern reader, you do get a sense of how much adaptive technologies have increased accessibility over the past century. And repeated references to "St. Dunstan's men" led me to the really interesting history of that organization (now Blind Veterans UK). It's painful to read Jim constantly referring to himself as "a crock" and Marda's mother hope that her daughter won't "tie" herself "to a blind man" -- we have a long way to go when it comes to inclusion, but the vintage stuff brings home just how far back we were.

Flags: Disability stuff previously mentioned, and some outdated language and understandings re. race (part and parcel of the ward's "American" exposure).