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The Midnight Hour, in detail
The Midnight Hour is the second book in Elly Griffiths's Brighton Mystery series, set in 1965. Emma Holmes — a former detective's assistant, now running a private investigation firm with her colleague and friend Sam Collins — is hired to investigate the death of a theatrical agent connected to a fading music-hall star named Bert Billington. Simultaneously, Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens, Emma's former boss and romantic complication, is investigating a murder that may be connected. The two investigations converge in the world of 1960s British entertainment: the old variety circuit dying, pop music arriving, television transforming everything.
This is a procedural in the classic mold — careful, methodical, built around observation and deduction rather than action. Griffiths writes in the tradition of Golden Age detective fiction while being fully aware that she is writing in that tradition, which allows the Brighton series to feel nostalgic without being uncritical. The period detail — the music halls, the boarding houses, the specific class anxieties of entertainment workers in a transitional era — is done with evident enjoyment and real research.
Emma is the novel's best argument for itself. She is smart, self-aware, navigating a professional world that has limited space for her and a romantic situation that is unresolved in the way most adult romantic situations actually are. The relationship between her partnership with Sam and her history with Edgar is drawn with precision. Neither man is cartoonishly good or bad. The moral landscape of the novel is comfortable rather than searching, but it is honest within that comfort.
Griffiths is a reliably skilled genre practitioner. The plotting is clean, the pacing is steady, the period atmosphere is convincing, and the series structure is handled well — this is a second book that rewards having read the first but functions as a standalone. Readers who want formally ambitious crime fiction will look elsewhere. Readers who want a well-crafted, atmospherically rich mystery with a genuinely enjoyable protagonist will be satisfied.
The big ideas
- 1.
The 1965 Brighton setting is precise and evocative — the end of variety entertainment, the beginning of the pop era, the specific geography of English seaside culture.
- 2.
Emma Holmes is a protagonist navigating the narrow professional margins available to women in 1960s Britain, and she does so without anachronistic modern consciousness.
- 3.
The novel is explicitly in dialogue with Golden Age detective fiction — Griffiths knows the tradition she's working in and uses that awareness productively.
