Dance of Death (1938) by Helen McCloy

I previously reviewed Tage la Cour festive short story, "The Murder of Santa Claus" (1952), before that Benjamin Stevenson's Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (2024), but also wanted take a look this year at a couple snowy, wintertime mysteries – considered giving John Dickson Carr's Poison in Jest (1932) a second look. When going through the options, I spotted a title that had completely slipped my mind over the years.

Helen McCloy's Dance of Death (1938), alternatively published as Design for Dying, is the first book in the Dr. Basil Willing series that has been hailed as one of the better, stronger debuts from the American Golden Age. More recent reviews praised McCloy's debut for remaining remarkably topical during the more than eighty years following its first publication. So let's find out if this is indeed one of the best debut of a 1930s detective novelist and series character.

Dance of Death takes place in New York City during a cold, snowy day in early December and begins when two men on snow removal duty find "a stiff in the snow" on 78th Street, but not an ordinary stiff. The body belongs to a young, unidentified and cheaply dressed woman, who had been buried beneath a snowdrift for hours, but the body was neither cold nor frozen – inexplicably hot to the touch ("...hot as a fever patient"). Even stranger, the medical examiner found a vivid, canary yellow stain underneath her make-up and concludes she had died of heat stroke on a winter night! So the curious little case, dubbed by the press the "Red Hot Momma Case," comes to the attention of General Archer, the Police Commissioner, and Dr. Basil Willing.

Dr. Willing, psychiatrist attached to the district attorney's office, discovers the victim could possibly by a young debutante, Miss Katherine "Kitty" Jocelyn, who had her "coming out" party on the night of her murder. That's where the case begins to twist and turn, because she appears to be still alive. She was in fact seen dancing when she already supposed to be dead under a heap of snow. Only for her poor cousin, Ann Jocelyn Claude, to turn up claiming she took Kitty's place at the coming out party at the behest of her cousin's stepmother, Rhoda Jocelyn. Dr. Willing can't detect any lies in her stories nor any mental aberrations or being unbalanced ("she's as sane as you or I"). So what really happened to Kitty during her party and how, exactly, was she murdered and ended up on a New York sidewalk under a pack of snow? These are only the first of many, many puzzling questions arising from the discovery of Kitty's body, the events that took place during the party and the people who were present.

When it comes to the plot, McCloy creates a pleasingly intricate, uncluttered patterns with every answer revealing a new mystery, or puzzling aspect, that needs to be explained – like a Russian nestling doll. Particularly the better part of the first-half dealing with the body's discovery and the problems the police faced with identifying the body, but the entire story is, plot-wise, grand from start to finish. I'll get to the solution in a moment. What also deserves to be mentioned is how well the story, as a whole, has aged and agree with many of reviewers from the past two decades who called Dance to Death remarkably modern. Similar to Christianna Brand's Death in High Heels (1941), McCloy's Dance to Death reads like it was published only thirty, forty years ago. Not only because Dr. Willing brings a psychological facet to the investigation. That has been done before McCloy and her psychiatrist detective arrived on the scene. The modern feeling has more to do with the background of the central characters.

Kitty is not the rich heiress her stepmother has everyone believe and, "famous for her svelte and willowy figure," she has to earn money on the side with endorsements for cosmetic products or patent medicines. You can call Kitty a 1930s analog of social media influencer. Note that the story mentions that the guest list is made up of other debutantes and bachelors who know Kitty only from published photographs and gossip columns. Dr. Willing actually linked the body in the snow to Kitty when remembering spotting her face in a magazine ad for a so-called reducing medicine, named Sveltis, advertised as a miracle cure requiring no diet or exercise ("...I can eat all the chocolates and marshmallows I like without counting calories"). Don't forget, this story takes place during a period when stuff like heroin was an over-the-counter drug. That all helps build Dance of Death up to a detective novel that feels distinctly different and even unique from its contemporaries. The solution continued that pattern revealing an interesting choice of murderer with a suitable unusual motive and a new method for murder. A method that nearly produced a genuinely perfect murder had it not been for that Merrivalean cussedness of all things general.

By the way, Dance of Death is generally considered to be an impossible crime novel and Robert Adey even listed the book in Locked Room Murders (1991), but, in my often ignored and discarded opinions, it would be more accurate to describe it as a howdunit – a borderline impossibility at a stretch. Dance of Death presents a poisonous puzzle that can stand comparison with the best from Agatha Christie. That's what you should expect. Not an impossible crime a la carr, but what a howdunit!

So what more can I say? It's writers like McCloy and novels such as Dance of Death that put the gold in the Golden Age detective story. Simply great stuff that somehow still comes across like a fresh treatment of the conventional whodunit today. Highly recommended!