Another piece of the puzzle. This was all very much coming together. Except…

“Hey! Why did the Women’s Weekly title Regency Buck as Gay Adventure when they serialized it, when we know that it was Woman’s Journal’s Dorothy Sutherland who changed the title? Why would that have happened? Are they related publications?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Hmm. So… what? Maybe the Women’s Weekly used the same abridged version of the novel that Woman’s Journal did? Maybe they even bought it from them, to save doing it themselves?”

“That’s very possible.”

“And since Dorothy Sutherland apparently liked retitling Heyer’s works, maybe she also retitled They Found Him Dead as On Such a Night, and that is how the Women’s Weekly bought it. But then Sutherland never published it, ostensibly because of the abdication—and perhaps the Women’s Weekly never did either, for the same reason. But, unlike Sutherland, they never revoked their serial rights, because they really valued their relationship with Heyer, and so still paid for them. So when, a couple of years later, they were looking for a story to read aloud during their revamped radio sessions with Dorothea Vautier – and remember, the Heyer serial was the first one they broadcast in that timeslot, before that it was dedicated to sections from the magazine; it also seems to have been a pretty hasty decision on their part, given that they didn’t have time to alert the Wireless Weekly to the change in programming in enough time for them to amend the listings – they dug it up out of their archives.”

Silence.

“That makes sense,” Jen said.

AND with that, I am considering this case closed.

Because the upshot of all of this, after hours upon hours, across months and years, of exhaustive, exhausting research and obsessive cross-correlation, is that I am now one hundred percent convinced that “On Such a Night” never was. Most likely, Georgette (or her assistant, agent, or accountant – that portion of her records is type-written and could have been done by anyone) simply made a mistake when she listed the title under her “Short Story” sales, as she did with Gay Adventure, and neglected to note that it was an alternate title to an existing work. After all, what is more probable – that there is a whole other Georgette Heyer novel-length story out there, that she inexplicably sold only to an Australian magazine, and never had published in book form anywhere, at all; or that mistakes were made and titles were changed and incorrect listings were published and muddled records were kept, and On Such a Night is merely the title of a book we already know and (probably) love?

I vote the latter.

So is “On Such a Night” indeed They Found Him Dead? Or is it Death in the Stocks? Is it The Talisman Ring? Is this reasoning even more faulty, and it is indeed An Infamous Army, or The Unfinished Clue? Does it even matter?

Honestly, not a whit. In the final analysis, all that matters is that “On Such a Night” does not, in fact, exist.