One Wonderful Night

Louis Tracy compresses his 1912 romance into a single crowded night in New York, where John Delancy Curtis, an American railway engineer just off the Lusitania after ten years in Pekin, walks into a fatal stabbing on West Twenty-seventh Street. In the confusion he takes the dead man’s overcoat by mistake and finds a marriage license inside, issued that day to a Frenchman and to Lady Hermione Grandison, who had arranged the wedding to escape the husband her father picked for her. Curtis brings her the news himself, then offers to stand in as bridegroom. Tracy was a prolific British newspaperman turned novelist, and the commercial instinct shows: the plot runs on coincidence and speed, while the Manhattan of hotels, taxicabs and precinct detectives is drawn with a visitor’s sharp eye. It is pre-war bookstall melodrama, briskly made.