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     The compelling title of Night Must Fall sounds like a literary quotation, but it is actually the result of a painstaking search by actor-playwright Emlyn Williams for the simplest way of expressing the idea that had inspired the play: "the sinister behind the ordinary." Although all the characters in Night Must Fall talk about murder, it is to the introspective Olivia Grayne that Williams assigns some of his own characteristic comments on the manner in which murder is perceived by the "ordinary" person. When Olivia learns that a murder has been committed in the neighborhood, she finds it hard to grasp the idea that "there's a man walking about somewhere, and talking, like us; and he woke up this morning, and looked at the weather." In her mind a comfortable workaday belief that murder is unreal alternates with a darker knowledge that it coexists intimately with her and threatens the disruption of her living pattern: "No, murder's a thing we read about in the papers; it isn't real life; it can't touch us . . . but it can. And it's here. All round us. In the forest . . . in this house. We're . . . living with it." And yet when murder ultimately intrudes into her life, Olivia's emotion is less that of horror than of surprise at its banality. "And that's murder," she says. "But it's so ordinary. . . ."
     Emlyn Williams's ability to present both the terrifying and the depressing aspects of murder was formed by a close study of criminal cases and the masterworks of English crime writing. He had once thought of dramatizing the crimes described by Thomas De Quincey in his classic essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. However, as an aspiring young actor, Williams had a good reason for putting the De Quincey project aside: he wanted to write a play of his very own, starring his "very own self." For the facial picture of his murderer he did not have to look far. He tells us: "I put the fag-end between my lips and looked in the mirror." The mirror did not lie to him, for Williams played the role of the murderer with great distinction in the original London production, which opened at the Duchess Theatre on May 31, 1935 with Dame May Whitty as Mrs. Bramson and Angela Baddeley as Olivia Grayne. These players also appeared in the New York run at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, which began in October 1936.
     Night Must Fall builds suspensefully to the murder of an elderly hypochondriac, Mrs. Bramson, by Dan, a hotel page boy whom she has taken into her isolated Essex bungalow as an attendant and flatterer. In order to provide a realistic quality to his drama, Williams drew on his memories of many English murder cases of the preceding fifteen years.

     Because of his immersion in crime history, we can believe what the play tells us about the murders it depicts; the actuality that was furnished by his sources was far worse. For details about the disposal of a corpse, Williams had cast his mind back to Patrick Mahon's murder of his mistress Emily Kaye in a Sussex bungalow (1924) and to Toni Mancini's clumsy concealment of the body of Violette Kaye (alias Joan Watson) in his Brighton lodging (1934). In fact, it was Patrick Mahon's crime that gave Williams the idea for what was to become one of the most celebrated (and certainly one of the most horrific) props in modern stage history -- the hat box in which a previous victim's head is hidden.
     In the personality and motivation of Williams's murderer we can see reflections of at least three cases in which a young man killed an elderly woman for gain. The earliest of the cases was that of Henry Jacoby, an eighteen-year-old pantry boy in a London hotel, who was executed in 1922 for battering to death a hotel guest, Lady Alice White, as she lay in her bed. The prosecution argued that Jacoby had gone to Lady White's room to steal but murdered her when she awakened. Jacoby excited considerable public sympathy because of his youth and possible insanity. He claimed that he had heard "whisperings" in the hotel basement earlier in the night, and that he entered Lady White's room because of murmurs he thought indicated the presence of "some other person who had no right to be there."
     Certainly no sympathy need be wasted on John Donald Merrett, another of the models for Williams's murderer. Tried in Edinburgh in 1927 for the shooting of his mother, whose bank accounts he had been draining away by clever forgeries, the nineteen-year-old Merrett was freed by the ambiguous verdict permitted under Scottish law, "not proven." (This grudging verdict has been waggishly translated as "not guilty, but don't do it again.") Merrett's criminal career, like the play it inspired, was remarkable for its revivals. In February 1954, almost three decades after his first escape from the law, the middle-aged Merrett (now known as Ronald Chesney) was found, shot dead, in a wood near Cologne, Germany, after a police hunt occasioned by his murder of his wife and mother-in-law two weeks before.
     Amid the numerous murderers Williams identifies as the originals of the villain of Night Must Fall he has generally given first place to Sidney Harry Fox, the Margate murderer. Williams had some indirect personal knowledge of Fox. A middle-aged acquaintance of the playwright had picked Fox up at a London bar in 1929 and about a year later had the unpleasant experience of opening his morning paper to find that Fox stood charged with having murdered his mother by setting fire to her hotel room. An accomplished forger, confidence man, and thief who liked to pose as a member of high society, Fox had served a number of 

prison terms. In March 1929 upon his release from prison he took his mother Rosaline on a curious odyssey from hotel to hotel, always moving without paying their bill. Finally, Fox had just about run out of potential victims except his mother. On October 21, he left his mother ensconced at the Metropole Hotel in Margate and went to London to arrange for the extensions of two insurance policies on her life for a suspiciously short period -- until midnight of Wednesday, October 23. He then returned to Margate, where he accomplished the murder of his mother with precise timing worthy of a veteran quarterback working the two-minute drill. At 11:40 P.M. on Wednesday, twenty minutes before the insurance expired, Fox rushed downstairs into the lobby to report a fire in his mother's room. Her body was quickly brought out into the hallway but she could not be revived. At first Fox won sympathy as a grief-stricken son, but the tide soon turned against him. While the doctor was examining his mother's body, the hotel manager's wife consoled Fox by stroking his hair. When she prepared for bed that night, she was surprised to find that her hand smelled strongly of smoke and the next morning she reported her suspicions to the police. A close inspection of Mrs. Fox's room indicated that the fire had been started intentionally and her body was ordered exhumed. Famed forensic scientist Sir Bernard Spilsbury found evidence that Mrs. Fox had been strangled and the fire had been set to create an appearance of accident. Though other doctors contested Spilsbury's conclusions, Fox was convicted and hanged. The outcome had undoubtedly been influenced by Fox's emotionless demeanor in the witness box, and by his incredible statement that on discovering the fire, he closed the outer door of his mother's room so that "the smoke should not spread into the hotel." Fox's callous courtroom behavior is probably reflected in the Lord Chief Justice's speech, which serves as a brief prologue to Night Must Fall.
     Williams obviously delighted in accumulating true-crime footnotes for his play. In his article for the October 1936 issue of the American theatre magazine Stage, written prior to the opening of Night Must Fall in New York, he claimed to have found inspiration for the play in a hearing of a murderer's appeal he had attended with the distinguished crime writer F. Tennyson Jesse. Sidney Fox did not appeal, and the hearing described by Williams in Stage bears some resemblance to the appeal in the Rattenbury-Stoner case which was heard in London in June 1935 after Night Must Fall had already opened there. For the Paris version of the play, Williams hit on the idea of changing the murderer into an ice-cream vendor, as was the case in the Le Touquet forest murder. (I regret that he missed the opportunity of choosing for the title of the adaptation The Bad Humor Man.)

     All this raw material obviously required considerable reworking for the stage. Williams had started off with the murderer and his second victim as son and mother but rejected the plan on the ground that "absolute truth in the theatre can be too shocking." But as he worked at his final design of the relationship, he did not stray too far from his original intent, for the murderer cynically but effectively casts himself into an imitation of a filial role. Moreover, his victim's niece, Olivia Grayne, and her other visitors and attendants express feelings of extreme hostility towards her. "She'll be found murdered one of these days," Olivia's phlegmatic suitor Hubert Laurie correctly predicts, and Olivia cannot restrain herself from saying to Dan, "I could kill her." These angry words recreate much of the atmosphere of pervasive hatreds that is the hallmark of family murder cases. The hostility of the onlookers to the murder victims is made palatable in Night Must Fall by Williams's application of a theory held by many crime writers -- that many victims have personal characteristics that attract murderers. Williams's friend F. Tennyson Jesse coined the term "murderee" to describe such victims and wrote that for every trunk murderer there is a victim who is "trunkable," a person who may be nice but is probably "rather foolish and wanton" as well. Of the victims in Night Must Fall, one suffers from twin manias (dipso and nympho), and the other is in such an advanced stage of bullying hypochondria that, as Dan observes, the only remedies left are artificial respiration and chocolates. Actually, the theory that victims attract murderers through the failings of their own personality is a consoling one since most of us consider ourselves free of defects, but, as the twentieth century has progressed, we have learned that victims, whether of individual or mass murder, can be distressingly random.
     I think that we will remember Williams's murderer longer than his victims. The author's directions note that his personality varies considerably as the play proceeds. The first impression he makes is of totally disarming good humor and childlike unselfconsciousness, but, Williams warns us, "it would need a very close observer to suspect that there is something wrong somewhere -- that this personality is completely assumed." The mystery about the murderer's name and origins, and his addiction to playacting, underscore the fact that he has a weak sense of his identity and lives largely in a world of his imagination. He is extravagantly vain and completely preoccupied with the impression he is making on others, to the point that he foregoes a chance of escape so that he can indulge in a tirade of self-praise for his murderous accomplishments. Yet he is capable of exerting a strong personal appeal, not only by his good looks and charm, but also through quick insight into the vulnerabilities of others. For a demanding and gullible old woman he can posture as a "son" and a flatterer. His relationship with Olivia is 

much more complex; though superficially he acts the role of a lady's man pursuing a woman of repressed passion, he also shows uncanny insight into the affinities between their personalities. Olivia and he are both lonely, rebellious, resentful of their subordinate stations, and deeply insecure. To her secret penchant for poetry he offers his flair for "speechifying" and he can even match his insomnia and nightmares with hers. The final irony of their interplay is that, though Olivia is afraid of violence, the murderer is even more intensely afraid of the hundreds of people watching behind each tree, the thousands of eyes, the "whole damn world" on his track.
     The first evening notice of Night Must Fall in Edinburgh, where the play previewed before its London opening, appeared under the headline "Can a Woman Love a Murderer, Problem of New Play"; the reviewer reported that when the murderer kissed the heroine without being repulsed, some women in the audience said, "Absurd." Those women must never have read of the love letters commonly received by real-life mass murderers, and surely cannot have seen Richard III.

     Studies of the murder cases on which Emlyn Williams drew in Night Must Fall may be found in the following sources: The Trial of Patrick Mahon (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1928)(Edgar Wallace introd.) (Famous Trials Series); H. Montgomery Hyde, Lord Justice: The Life and Times of Lord Birkett of Ulverston 394-418 (New York: Random House, 1965); Trevor Allen, "The Lady White Murder," in Famous Crimes of Recent Times 52-67 (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1928); William Roughead (ed.), Trial of John Donald Merrett (Edinburgh: W. Hodge, 1929)(Notable British Trials); F. Tennyson Jesse (ed.), Trial of Sidney Harry Fox (Edinburgh: W. Hodge, 1934)(Notable British Trials); G.B. Stern, "The Le Touquet Mystery," in Great Unsolved Crimes 197-204 (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1935).
     For F. Tennyson Jesse's concept of the "murderee," see her Murder and Its Motives 60-62 (London: G.G. Harrap, New ed., 1952).
     Biographical information regarding Williams is drawn from Emlyn Williams, Emlyn: An Early Autobiography 1927-1935 (London: Bodley Head, 1973) and from his "Introduction" to Emlyn Williams, Collected Plays xv-xix (London: Heinemann, 1961)(vol.1).
     Emlyn Williams later in his career produced other works based on actual crimes. See e.g., his play Someone Waiting: A Play in Three Acts (London: W. Heinemann, 1954) inspired by the trial of Brian Donald Hume and Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and Its Detection (London: H. Hamilton, 1967), an idiosyncratic but often moving account of the Moors Murder Case.
     This essay first appeared in somewhat different form as a program note for the Cleveland Play House's production of Night Must Fall, starring Margaret Hamilton (October 13-November 18, 1978).

* This article was previously published in 14 (3) Armchair Detective 284-286 (1981) and in A Gallery of Sinister Perspectives pp. 45-50.