I'm continuing with my reread of Stories to be Read with Lights On today. As I said in the previous post, I don't think I'm going to be doing a story-a-day reread, but just story-by-story as and when I can. I did have a bit of a wobble when I read the first story and didn't remember anything about it, in case it turned out my fondness for this book was based on a false memory of reading the book as a teenager. Fortunately, that feeling was dispelled with the second story!
I had a massive wave of nostalgia reading 'Witness in the Dark'. I could even picture where I was the first time I read it (particularly the 'all cats be grey' lines), so that was a bit more reassuring.
'Witness in the Dark' is much more of a crime story than a horror story ('Death Out of Season' probably leans slightly the other way). So I think it's worth remembering that Stories to be Read with the Lights On isn't actually meant to be a horror collection. The introduction (supposedly by Hitchcock himself, but I doubt he personally wrote it) says the selected stories are 'startling, horrifying perhaps', but the overarching genre is 'suspense'. Suspense is defined here (as per the dictionary) as 'uncertainty accompanied by apprehension'. But I think for publishing purposes, it's very much being used as the 'Alfred Hitchcock Brand'. That kinda makes sense as a genre to me. According to the acknowledgements, quite a few of the stories in this collection were previously published in either Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which very much fits with this idea of an 'Alfred Hitchcock Brand' story.
Brown's story is about a murder committed in the bedroom of a man who has temporarily lost his sight (he is the 'witness in the dark'), and it's got a nice layer of uncertainty and apprehension to that set-up. I think what I liked about it when I was a teen (being a fan of classic detective fiction) is that, for all its atmosphere of suspense, there's still a mystery here and there are clues along the way to allow the reader to (potentially) solve it. Does it hold up now? Yes - I think so. It's a bit dated in terms of its style and aesthetic, but given it was first published in the 50s, it would've seemed retro when the collection came out in the 70s too.
I'm just glad I remembered this one, to be honest!
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