In his specially written introduction, crime novelist Martin Edwards, President of the DetectionClub and author of the multi-award winning 'The Golden Age of Murder' writes "The reappearance of 'Death in the Dark, ' truly a one-of-a-kind detective novel is long overdue and will be widely welcomed."'Death in the Dark' by George Antheil was until now the rarest novel in detective fiction and one of the most complex, with its three impossible crimes committed in one apartment under cover of darkness, but how and why it came into being is even stranger, as described in the extensive Afterword.Antheil, an expatriate avant-garde composer whose works were performed throughout Europe in the 1920s had a disastrous Carnegie Hall concert in 1927 and wrote 'Death in the Dark' out of revenge in 1929. In it he murdered all the people he held responsible. He was helped by Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats and T.S.Eliot himself wrote "This is a very good detective story."Locked Room International discovers and publishes impossible crime mysteries from all over the world. For more information please contact pugmire1@yahoo.com or go to www.mylri.com.
About the Author: George Antheil (1900-1959) was an American composer-born in Trenton, New Jersey-who began his professional career in Europe, where he was friends with, among many others, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, Eric Satie, and Igor Stravinsky. In the early '20s, he lived at the literal center of English-language culture in Europe: above Sylvia Beach's legendary Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on the Rue de l'Odéon, in Paris's Latin Quarter. (Beach was the original publisher of Joyce's controversial and groundbreaking Ulysses.) Antheil wrote over 300 musical works in all major genres, including symphonies, chamber works, film music, and operas. He was extremely outspoken and articulate, and wrote numerous articles, as well as an autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, which is still in print. As a young composer, he considered himself to be quite the revolutionary, and his music, especially in his early career, employed many unusual sound sources and combinations of instruments. In many ways, both musical and technical, he was far ahead of his time. His concerts routinely caused riots all over Europe, which at the time was considered a sign of genius. Besides composing, Antheil was an excellent writer, an inventor, and a student of many disciplines, including endocrinology, criminal justice, and military history. He was co-holder of a remarkable patent (with actress Hedy Lamarr) for a "secret communications system" which is today in wide use and known as "spread-spectrum technology" - although neither he nor Lamarr ever received a dime for it. Antheil left Paris in the late '20s and went to Berlin, and then as German society began to fall under the influence of the Nazis, returned permanently to America. He settled in Hollywood, where he enjoyed a reasonably successful career as a composer for film and television. He died in 1959. He wrote 'Death in the Dark' in 1929 while the guest of Ezra Pound in Rapallo, Italy. W.B.Yeats helped with the writing and T.S.Eliot arranged for its publication by Faber and Faber in London in 1930