The catalog record for In the Dead of Night — Story, Setting & Ideas provides practical reading context through 61,979 words, 4 hr 30 min estimated reading time, and 30 detected text sections.
The text analysis averages about 13.9 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.
Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.
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About 275 minutes
Historical Psychological Social Fiction
63,167 recorded words. 5 minutes difference from this book's estimate.
View Gutenberg source #67721About 259 minutes
Historical Psychological Social Fiction
59,417 recorded words. 11 minutes difference from this book's estimate.
View Gutenberg source #67531About 287 minutes
Historical Psychological Social Fiction
65,873 recorded words. 17 minutes difference from this book's estimate.
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Catalog snapshot checked: 2026-09-26. Coverage: 95 public books, 95 available source excerpts.
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Public-domain source text
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From its first paragraph, In the Dead of Night establishes a narrator who watches Broadway with amused detachment: “the same cocksureness, the same air of being the goal of all human effort.” Kenyon, the protagonist, eats a German dinner at the Berlin while an orchestra plays “one of those Indian things, filled with the throb of tom-toms.” The voice is wry, observant, and unhurried—yet the pace tightens as soon as a girl appears on a staircase, whispering his name with “sudden fear.”
McIntyre builds suspense through small, precise details: a hand darting over a shoulder, a tightening at the corners of a smile, a staircase with “many turns” and “many landings.” The language shifts from leisurely description to clipped, urgent sentences as Kenyon moves from dining room to hallway to stairway. This alternation between relaxed observation and quickened action defines the novel’s rhythm.
The narrative voice in In the Dead of Night is consistently amused, even when describing danger. Kenyon’s internal commentary—calling Broadway “flippant and as garish as a vaudeville,” or noting that “social affairs always have an attraction for me”—creates a tone of dry irony. This voice does not simply report events; it judges them, often with a wink. When Kenyon finds himself unexpectedly face-to-face with Anna, he masks his surprise with a polished smile: “Ah, how do you do? I’m charmed, I’m sure.” The dialogue is similarly layered: Anna’s words seem innocent, but Kenyon suspects “a tightening at the corners of her mouth.” The narrator invites the reader to share Kenyon’s skepticism, making every exchange a puzzle.
McIntyre controls pace by alternating static observation with bursts of action. Early scenes linger on sensory details: the “throb of tom-toms,” the “massive balustrades and newel posts,” the “laughing chatter of a great number of women.” Then, without warning, the prose contracts. Kenyon hears “the rustle of silken skirts above him”; he turns “swiftly.” A whisper cuts through the noise. The staircase scene exemplifies this: paragraphs of careful description give way to a single, tense exchange. Later, when Kenyon decides to search the house, the sentences shorten: “He looked out into the hall… in an instant he had gained the stairway.” The effect is cinematic, drawing the reader from calm into alertness.
Three motifs recur in the excerpts: hands, staircases, and fixed gazes. The frontispiece caption reads “A Small White Hand Darted over His Shoulder,” and in the text, Anna lays her hand on Kenyon’s shoulder. Staircases appear repeatedly—the “solid, hard-wood staircase, very wide, with massive balustrades” in Farbush’s house, and the stairs where Anna invites Kenyon to sit “like a schoolgirl.” These spaces become sites of encounter and concealment. Glances are equally telling: Anna’s “gaze was fixed upon the two” in one illustration caption; Kenyon’s “keen eyes” search faces for deception. These small, repeated gestures build a vocabulary of suspicion, suggesting that nothing—not a hand, not a stair, not a look—is innocent.
Readers will find that In the Dead of Night rewards attention to its narrative voice, which oscillates between amused commentary and taut observation. The novel’s structure—a series of nights, each denser with wonder—mirrors Kenyon’s gradual descent into a maze. Pay close attention to what characters do not say, and to the spaces between paragraphs: the pace shifts there, in the silences and sudden movements.
I kept thinking about that November night, how Kenyon drifts through a city that barely looks back. It’s the quiet accumulating dread, not the noise, that stays with you. Reading Against the Tide — Reading Notes felt like sitting with someone who noticed the same kind of shadows, slowly, without ever raising their voice.
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