"The Night of January 16th" is the murder-mystery, in which the author has relieved himself of the painful necessity of arriving at a conclusion. With an impartiality which would do credit to a magistrate Ayn Rand has written his play in the form of a court trial and arranged things so that the verdict is given by a jury selected from the audience. Thus, as the author tells us, it is really the audience who is on trial. This may or may not be drama, but it certainly makes for a pleasant theatrical picnic.

On Saturday night the good men and true included such worthies as former Mayor John Fitzgerald, Charles Innes, Eliot Wadsworth, and other luminaries in the Hub firmament. They decided that Karen Andre was not guilty of the murder of her lover, Bjorne Faulkner, the notorious Swedish tycoon; which is just about the way things seemed to this unjudicial corner.

The testimony presented during the two days appears to boil down to the following essentials: on the night of January 16th Bjorne Faulkner disappeared. The private detective hired by Mrs. Faulkner to check up on the nocturnal activities of her spouse claims to have seen Faulkner shot by his former secretary and mistress, Karen Andre, but he can't be sure that the corpse was Faulkner because Miss Andre proceeded to push it off her penthouse roof and it got rather spread out on the pavement many stories below.

Miss Andre claims that it wasn't Faulkner whom she thrust from the roof but the already dead body of a gangster. She says that Faulkner and she were planning to start life anew in South America and, in order to start from scratch, Faulkner had decided to make the public believe that he had committed suicide; thus the byplay with the gangster's body. The state charges that it was Faulkner's body; Miss Andre holds to her version, and the jury decides.

It has always been the naive conviction of this reviewer that nobody could be convicted of murder unless the body had been definitely identified or could be produced. Inasmuch as the state is unable to prove that the corpse was Faulkner's we don't exactly see how the jury could convict Miss Andre. At any rate the dialogue is well written and the play is constructed with a reasonably sure touch. The humor is of the predictable type and not particularly annoying.