The Midnight Visitor by Robert Arthur
Quick answer: The Midnight Visitor by Robert Arthur, Class 10 Footprints Without Feet: summary with the ending, Ausable, Fowler and Max, the invented balcony, and exam answers.
A fat, sloppy secret agent climbs to his hotel room with a disappointed young writer in tow, opens the door, and finds a man with a pistol waiting for the report due at midnight. Robert Arthur's The Midnight Visitor is third in Class 10 Footprints Without Feet.
The story in brief
Fowler, a writer expecting glamour in Paris, is let down by Ausable: heavy, breathless on the stairs, living in a gloomy sixth-floor room. Inside stands Max, slim, with a pistol, come for a report on new missiles due that night. Ausable sits and complains, not about the gun but about the balcony beneath his window, through which a man once broke in. The balcony is now established.
A knock. Ausable calmly says it will be the police he asked to check on him. Max decides to wait on the balcony until they leave, swings over the sill, drops, and screams as he falls; there is no balcony. The door opens on Henry the waiter with the drinks Ausable ordered on the way up. Fowler asks about the police, and Ausable says there were none. He asks about the man on the balcony, and Ausable says there is no balcony.
The characters
Themes and meaning
Exams want appearance against reality, presence of mind, and intelligence over the gun. The sharper observation is that Ausable's lie works because it is boring. He makes the balcony a grievance about management rather than a fact about escape, and Max accepts it because it sounds like a complaint nobody would invent. The dull detail is the believable one.
The craft
The turn is the knock. Everything before it is set-up, the balcony described and the drinks ordered; everything after is payoff. Arthur plants the drinks on the stairs so casually that readers forget them until the door opens, and the ending is two negatives. A story that plants like this scores well on Storytelling and Structure in Writory's five-part rubric, where judges look for endings prepared in plain sight.
For the exam
Summary in 100 words: Fowler, a young writer, is disappointed that the secret agent Ausable is fat and unglamorous. In Ausable's sixth-floor Paris hotel room they find Max, a rival agent, holding a pistol and waiting to seize a report on missiles due at midnight. Ausable calmly complains about a balcony below his window through which someone once entered. When a knock sounds, Ausable says it is the police he had arranged. Max, alarmed, climbs out onto the balcony to hide, and falls screaming, because no balcony exists. The knock was Henry the waiter bringing drinks. Ausable's quick lie has saved him.
What writers can take from this
- Give the setting exactly: a sixth-floor room in a Paris hotel, midnight, the missile report.
- Explain that the balcony lie is convincing because it is delivered as a complaint.
- Remember Henry and the drinks; the knock question is the most common one.
- Writers: plant your payoff, the ordered drinks, so early that the reader forgets it.
- Make the crucial lie dull, and give the reader two negatives to end on.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character escapes a threat by describing, in a bored and complaining voice, a feature of the room that does not exist, and let a completely innocent interruption trigger the payoff.
Questions
How did Ausable trick Max in The Midnight Visitor?
He casually complained about a balcony under his window, making Max believe it existed. When a knock came, he claimed it was the police, and Max climbed out to hide on the balcony, falling to his death.
Who was actually knocking at the door?
Henry, the hotel waiter, bringing the bottle and glasses Ausable had ordered on the way up. Ausable had used the expected knock as the signal to spring his trap.
What is the theme of The Midnight Visitor?
Appearances deceive and intelligence defeats force. The unimpressive Ausable outwits an armed enemy with quick thinking and a well-told lie.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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