Books 1941: DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler

Brightened in Dungeons

DARKNESS AT NOON—Arthur Koestler—Macmillan ($2.50).

Of Author Arthur Koestler little is definitely known. But he has written the most exciting novel of the season. The book begins with the clang of a cell door closing in a GPU prison. It ends with a shot in the back of the head in a murky passageway of the prison cellar. It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet. More plausibly than any other book yet written, fiction or nonfiction, it gives the answer to one of history’s great riddles: Why do Russians confess?