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!

Cue for Murder (1942) by Helen McCloy

If Agatha Christie was the British Queen of Crime, then Helen McCloy was the First Lady of the American detective story. A first-class mystery writer whose cunningly plotted, subtly clued and excellently characterized detective novels can only be compared to the works of Christianna Brand and John Dickson Carr, who all three wrote more than one celebrated locked room mystery, but McCloy differed in two ways from them – an interest in Fruedian psychology and suspense fiction. This lead her to write some unusual detective novels that were a little off the beaten track.

McCloy's Through a Glass, Darkly (1950) is arguably the detective story's most well-known treatment of the doppelgänger phenomena and she decided to develop a taste for the traditional locked room puzzle during a period when the light of the Golden Age had dimmed considerably. Such as blending espionage and suspense with a locked room problem (The Further Side of Fear, 1967) or penning one of the best rooms-that-kill stories (Mr. Splitfoot, 1968), which is as good as anything written by Carr.

So, in comparison, I always assumed Cue for Murder (1942) was one of McCloy's more conventional novels with a theatrical murder committed in full view of the audience, but, now that I've read it, I can only describe it as a demonstration of her abilities as a plotter – devilish complex in its simplicity. McCloy felt confident enough to give her readers the most important clues up front. What a woman!

The prologue states that the Royal Theatre was "solved through the agency of a house fly and a canary." The fly discovered "the chemical evidence that so impressed the jury at the trial," but "the canary provided a psychological clue to the murderer's identity" before "the murder was committed."

Cue for Murder begins with Dr. Basil Willing, medical assistant to the District Attorney, specializing in psychiatry, reading a "pleasantly trivial" newspaper column reporting a puzzling burglary at Marcus Lazarus' knife-grinding shop. The shop is little more than a shack, tucked away in an alley, which contained nothing worth stealing, but the intruder had opened "the cage of Lazarus' pet canary and set the bird free." A petty little problem that teased Dr. Willing's imagination "as prettily as a problem in chess or mathematics," but he would grasp the importance of the freed canary until he attends the opening of a revival play of Victorien Sardou's 1882 Fedora – because the shop in the alley leads to the stage door of the Royalty Theatre. The curtain was raised on murder long before the actors climbed on stage!

During the first act, there are four actors on stage. The leading lady and star of Sam Milhau's theatrical company, Wanda Morley. A young and upcoming actor, Rodney Tait, who's been seen a lot in public with Wanda and an engagement is rumored, but all the time he had been engaged to the costume designer, Pauline. Leonard is the more experienced and talented actor of the group who recently returned to the New York stage after a year's illness. Finally, there's the unknown man who plays the quiet, undemanding role of the mortally wounded Count Vladimir. A character who lies quietly in alcove on stage without uttering a single line, but at the end of the first act, he's discovered with "the grooved handle of a surgical knife" protruding from his chest.

This discovery presents Dr. Willing and Assistant Chief Inspector Foyle with a diabolically planned and executed murder, committed within the forty-eight minutes of the first act, by one of those three actors on stage – all of whom had opportunities and no alibis. Dr. Willing notes that, as a rule, murderers try to disassociate them from the murderer with a false alibi, but this murderer realized there is safety in numbers and "obliterated the alibi of two other people." So the murderer "dissipated suspicion by diffusing it equally among three people."

A situation very reminiscent of Christie's Cards on the Table (1936) in which a man is stabbed while the only four suspects were playing bridge and the deceiving simplicity of the situation is what made it one of Christie's trickiest whodunits. The reason why the clues and psychology of the suspects are so important in Cards on the Table and Cue for Murder. Regrettably, there's a tiny weakness to the clueing and psychology of the suspects that prevented the story from being an undisputed classic.

The clues are mostly excellent. I already mentioned the clue of canary, but there's also the curious behavior of the fly that kept "banking and diving like a miniature plane" around the knife-handle. But never landing on the bloodstained blade. There's manuscript with a seemingly unimportant, but ominous, line underscored and the best clue is perhaps the title of the book. However, the problem is that the clues, physical and psychological, can fit any of the suspects without showing why the two other suspects couldn't have committed the murder – even the titular clue is hardly cast-iron evidence. Because they have no way of telling when exactly the fatal knife blow was delivered. A lawyer would have torn that piece of evidence to shreds in court.

Another problem is that everyone appeared to have an association, or fondness, for canaries, which showed the influence of Freudian psycho-analyses had on McCloy ("no human being can ever perform any act without a motive"), but it severely weakened that clue. And it hampered the fair play aspect of the story. A story that would have otherwise been as close to perfection as you could wish a detective story to be.

Regardless of my technical nitpicking, you should not feel discouraged and drop the book to the bottom of your to-be-read pile. Cue for Murder is not one of McCloy's greatest triumphs, but it's unquestionably one of the better and most original theatrical mystery novels from the genre's Golden Age. McCloy brilliantly used the psychology of actors and the closed environment of the stage, "the frontier between reality and illusion," to create a truly baffling murder mystery. Only thing it lacked was a process of elimination clearly demonstrating why the other suspects couldn't have committed the murder, which would have strengthened instead of weakened those crafty clues. But, in the end, Cue for Murder is a near-classic that can still be admired and enjoyed for the all things it did right rather than leaving the reader annoyed at its few mistakes. I definitely enjoyed it. Recommended, with reservations.

A note for the curious: the prologue mentioned how the chemical evidence impressed the jury at the trial, but the murderer took the easy way out in the last chapter. So there was no trial! McCloy was a little sloppy here when it came to the finer details of her storytelling and plotting.

The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003) by Helen McCloy

Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003) is a collection of short stories, originally assembled by Crippen & Landru, reprinted in 2013 as an ebook by The Murder Room and gathered all ten short stories about McCloy's series-detective, Dr. Basil Willing – a psychiatric consultant of the district attorney's office. This volume has all ten short stories, including eight previously uncollected stories, that were written about Dr. Basil Willing. A splendid collections demonstrating McCloy's versatility as both a writer and plotter.

There are stories littered with the conventions of the traditional detective, such as locked room puzzles, impossible crimes and unbreakable alibis, but the post-1940s stories show a willingness to adept to a new world. Resulting in some unusual plots or subject matters. Well, unusual when it comes from a writer so closely associated with the genre's Golden Age.

Most notably, there are not one, but two, stories in this collection dealing with a crime rarely touched upon by classic mystery writers: mass murder. Fascinatingly, there's an extraterrestrial element in both stories and they were penned exactly thirty years apart. So it was interesting to see McCloy revisit these ideas so late in her career and wrote a completely different story around them, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's take down these stories from the top.

"Through a Glass, Darkly" is the opener of this collection, originally published in the September, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM), but this novella has already been discussed in my 2011 review of All But Impossible! An Anthology of Locked Room and Impossible Crime Stories by Members of the Mystery Writers of America (1981). So moving on!

The second novella of the collection, "The Singing Diamonds," was first printed in the October, 1949, issue of EQMM and is a quasi-impossible crime story plotted around the UFO phenomena. There are entire shelves of detective stories with supposedly malevolent ghosts, family curses and rooms that kill, but not that many have handled the topic of alien visitations. McCloy here mixed a flurry of UFO sightings with mass murder, possible espionage and government conspiracies.

Mathilde Verworn was one of the eyewitnesses who saw the flat, elongated squares, "like the pips on a nine of diamonds," flying in V-formation at a great height, emanating "a strange resonance" like the humming or singing of "a high-tension wire in the wind," but in the last fortnight three witnesses have unexpected died – which is why she decided to consult a specialist, Dr. Basil Willing. The plot he exposes is a clever, well executed interpretation of a trick as classic as it's pure evil. But the story as a whole was marvelous. From the premise of the flying diamonds and dying witnesses to Dr. Willing getting "a lesson in the manufacture of public opinion" as a high-placed Naval Intelligence officer shows him how they manipulated and distorted the press reports on the flying diamonds. Easily one of the better and more memorable stories in this collection.

"The Case of the Duplicate Door" is a completely overlooked locked room mystery with an unusual publishing history, which when it was released, in 1949, as a separately printed story in the Mystery of the Month series of jigsaw puzzles. You had to put together a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle and the completed picture was a clue to the solution. This is probably why even Robert Adey missed it when he was compiling Locked Room Murders (1991). However, the story was reprinted in the February, 1965, issue of EQMM under alternative title, "Into Thin Air," with an added paragraph to replace the jigsaw clue.

This is the EQMM version of the story with its original title restored and a reduced, black-and-white reproduction of the assembled jigsaw puzzle. Purely as a locked room story, this is a curiosity that put a false solution to good use.

Matthew Rex, President of the Conservative Trust, has absconded with $80,000 in cash and $300,000 in bearer bonds, but he sends a panicky radio gram from Bermuda that he can "explain everything" and that he'll return the following day by private-plane – police is waiting for him when he lands. But when they storm the plane, they only find a fedora, a pair of gloves and a shot glass half filled with brandy. Nobody had left the plane after it landed and the pilot swears his boss had been aboard, but Matthew Rex had inexplicably disappeared along with a briefcase that had been chained to his wrist. This is the point where the story does something that's as clever as it's frustrating.

A perfectly logical, but incorrect, solution is proposed that turned the inexplicable disappearance into an unfortunate accident. An accident is not the most desirable explanation to a seemingly impossible situation, no matter how bizarre the circumstances, but this was a genuinely good, reasonable and acceptable answer – directly linked to the actual solution. A weak, uninspired solution that looked much better than it was, because it was backed up by the false solution. Dr. Willing figured out the trick when he spotted the flaw in this perfectly acceptable explanation.

So this is an uneven, but interesting, curiosity and the only reason why it never made any of the locked room anthologies is its obscurity. Hey, it would be an excuse to put McCloy's name on the cover and you can't keep reprinting "Through a Glass, Darkly."

The next story, "Thy Brother Death," was culled from a 1955 issue of This Week and begins when Dr. Willing is consulted by an acquaintance. Dick Blount found an anonymous letter, addressed to his wife, in the morning mail with ominous-sounding lines of poetry from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Suspicion has fallen on a village girl, who had worked for them as a maid, but was dismissed after a diamond brooch went missing. Dr. Willing wants a sample of her handwriting and accompanies Blount to his private office to get some canceled checks she had endorsed, but, when they arrive, the telephone is ringing. The caller was his desperate wife, Clara, who called to say "someone was prowling outside the house" followed by scream and a gunshot. And then silence.

A good, old-fashioned detective story with more emphasis on the how, rather than the who, which hinged on a clever, but ultimately simple, alibi-trick reminiscent of Christopher Bush. A note of warning: the solution is harder to anticipate for readers today, because the hinge of the alibi-trick is specific to that period in time.

"Murder Stops the Music" was first published in This Week in 1957 and Dr. Willing is tasked with solving the murder of a famous concert pianist, Gertrude Ehrenthal, who was stabbed to death during a village square dance for local charity when the place was suddenly plunged in darkness. I think murderer moved around a little too easily in a pitch-black room with people standing around, but the double-clue of the ill-mannered dog was smartly handled. A good, but minor, story.

"The Pleasant Assassin" was originally published in the December, 1970, issue of EQMM and Dr. Willing is consulted by Captain Aloysius Grogan, of the Boston Police Department, who needs his help with ensnaring a respected academic, Professor Jeremiah Pitcairn. Apparently, the professor is deeply involved in the drug trade and capturing involves a quasi-locked room problem of a warning message being transmitted from a closely observed space (c.f. Edmund Crispin's "A Country to Sell," 1955). However, the plot is paper-thin to the point that it barely exists, but stands out for its open, liberally-minded opinion on marijuana and Captain Grogan even endorsed its legalization ("as long as marijuana is illegal it brings young people it brings young people into contact with the criminal world"). Not what you would expect from a Golden Age mystery writer, but good to see McCloy tried to keep up with the times.

"Murder Ad Lib" was originally published in the November, 1964, issue of EQMM and is an unusual poorly plotted detective story. Dr. Willing is only present as a sharp-eyed, quick-witted spectator. Lt. Carson Dawes, of the Los Angeles Police, knows the murderer's identity and that his alibi has crumbled to pieces, but the murderer is blissfully unaware of these development. So all the police lieutenant has to do is sit back and "let him talk himself into the gas chamber," but he allowed a close friend of the suspect to be present and this person managed to give him a warning message. Dawes is the only one who misses the moment when this happened. The reader can only spot this painfully obvious moment, but decoding the message is impossible. So this is the practically inescapable dud you come across in nearly every short story collection.

"A Case of Innocent Eavesdropping" was originally published in the March, 1978, issue of EQMM and is more of a domestic crime than a puzzle detective story.

Mrs. Jessie Markel is an elderly lady who moves in with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson, but her daughter-in-law, Maggie, exploits her from all sides. Maggie has taken full control of her income and has her "scrubbing all the pots and pans that can't go into the dishwasher," running the vacuum cleaner, polishing the silver and babysitting her grandson – which gives her little time or energy for anything else. Maggie tells her friends Mrs. Markel needs this work "to recover her identity." There is, however, something sinister going on the Markel household and Mrs. Markel learns a terrifying secret that ends in murder.

However, the only thing Dr. Willing has to do here is exonerate an innocent man by destroying a lie from a cantankerous, dishonest eyewitness. I didn't dislike this story, but hardly one of McCloy's best works.

"Murphy's Law" is another minor, but enjoyable, story originally published in the May, 1979, issue of EQMM and the structure of the plot recalls Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his thief-for-hire, Nick Velvet. The story begins with Gerald Murphy and Professor Allerton plotting to steal "a small album" of ten ancient Greek coins from a notorious collector, Sammy Bork, which have an estimated value of half a million dollars. Naturally, everything goes wrong and Dr. Willing has to exonerate one of them from a potential murder charge. A good short story with multiple, intertwined plot-threads.

This collection ends strongly with the unnerving "The Bug That's Going Around," originally printed in the August, 1979, issue of EQMM and opens with a covert challenge to the reader. In most of Dr. Willing's murder cases, "the essential clue has been some scrap of rare information," but this time, he solved it with common "scraps of knowledge" accessible "to everybody who bothered to read newspapers." The extraordinary problem here is another quasi-impossible puzzle of a scientific nature and the story is in more than way related to "The Singing Diamonds."

The backdrop of the story is a convention of microbiologists at the Forum Hotel, but an inexplicable epidemic has left five people dead and even Dr. Willing's five-year-old grandson has fallen ill. A bizarre micro-organism has been found in the bodies of everyone who died or fell ill at the hotel, but the problem is that the micro-organism appears to be "a new species," violating all "the laws of evolution by appearing too suddenly," which makes the thing a monster – something literally out of this world! So are these micro-organisms "silent, invisible micro-astronauts," who don't need spaceships, because they can survive "all extremes of heat, cold and distance." An alien killer! And if this is the case, how did they get in the air-conditioning system of a Boston hotel?

Dr. Willing finds a logical and rational explanation for "an impossible micro-organism," which he deduced from a doodle on a telephone pad found at the scene of a murder. A genuinely good, slightly unnerving story of mass murder and a potential extraterrestrial threat. A great closer to a great collection!

So, on a whole, The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing is an outstanding collection of McCloy's short fiction that opened strongly with an all-time classic, a highly original novella, a virtually unknown locked room mystery and good alibi story. After these four excellent stories, the quality tapered off a little bit and had one dud, but McCloy returned to form in the last two stories. Highly recommended!

The Further Side of Fear (1967) by Helen McCloy

Early last year, I dispensed with the oh-so clever, but confusing, blog-post titles and faintly related opening quotes, which I shamelessly copies from Ho-Ling Wong – whose blog was a model for my own back in 2011. Hey, you know the old classroom rule: if you're going to copy your homework, copy it off an Asian.

So my first, normal-looking review was Helen McCloy's The Man in the Moonlight (1940) and ended with the promise to look at her other work in 2018. As to be expected, this didn't pan out as planned. Nonetheless, there was one particular title that had been on my mind the entire year and have referred to this book in a number of reviews (e.g. Donald E. Westlake's Murder Among Children, 1967).

The Further Side of Fear (1967) is one of McCloy's lesser-known detective novels and the only person who appears to have discussed it is Mike Grost, of A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection, who described it as a combination of suspense, mystery and espionage with an impossible crime plot – noting that the late sixties was "an atypical era in mystery history" for a writer "to develop an interest in locked room puzzles." Surprisingly, The Further Side of Fear was McCloy's first formal, traditionally-styled locked room mystery novel.

The impossibility from her earlier and much lauded mystery novel, Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), concerned the inexplicable appearances of a döppelganger. The Further Side of Fear offers an authentic locked room conundrum in the spirit of MacKinlay Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" (collected in It's About Crime, 1960), but with a better explanation for the impossible problem.

Lydia Grey is an American who has come to London to write a series of magazine articles on British furniture and has taken a small flat in Belfast Square.

Lydia is a very light sleeper and the story begins when she's awakened in the middle of the night by footsteps, muffled by the carpet, around the corner of the L-shape room of the flat. She pretends to be asleep, while intruder silently moves around the dark flat like "a stealthy animal," but catches a glimpse of this person as the silhouette drew a curtain to look out on "the lamplit London square" – which is an odd thing to do for an intruder. However, this presence vanishes as mysteriously from the pitch-black apartment as it has appeared and this is where the impossibility comes into play.

There's only one door, locked and bolted from the inside, "the windows were eight floors above the ground," sliding panels of glass, which were tightly locked against "the winter night." So how did the uninvited, night-time visitor enter and leave the dark flat? The second chapter is a treat for the overly enthusiastic locked room reader.

Lydia immediately called the police and the responding officers eliminate every possible point of entry and exit. The intruder could have wormed a forearm through the letter slot in the door and turned "the knob that releases the snap lock," but the bolt was "too far from the slot." And the door with its lock is a modern one, which makes it impossible to use one of those old-fashioned thread-and wire tricks that manipulate the keys and bolts from the outside. Lastly, there's a rubbish hatch with a powerful compressed air spring designed to hold it tightly shut once it's closed. A brief experiment shows the flat could not have been entered through the rubbish hatch.

So they establish it's "physically impossible" for anyone to get in, or out, of the flat when the hall door was locked and bolted from the inside! Nevertheless, you don't have to be Dr. Gideon Fell or Jonathan Creek to figure out how the trick was worked. The trick is a relatively simple one, but notable because it's set in a modern, post-WWII building with doors, locks and bolt that appeared to preclude any of the old, time-worn tricks or gadgets. And this gave it a glimmer or originality.

Although some would probably argue McCloy reversed a time-honored principle of locked room trickery and applied it to a modern setting, but that would be taking a sledgehammer to a butterfly. It's a good, acceptable, if simple, locked room-trick.

The seemingly impossible entering of a tightly locked and secured flat is only one facet of the plot and the book, as mentioned previously, is primarily a novel of suspense with a dash of espionage, which McCloy neatly linked to the locked room problem – not forgetting to plant a clue or two in the narrative. I also liked how the setting was used. A lion's share of The Further Side of Fear takes place in the flat and not only gives you the idea that you're reading a novelization of a stage-play, but it drives home the fact Lydia is a very isolated woman. A woman far away from home with really nobody around her who she can trust.

There's the house steward, John Erskine, who had been making his nightly round of the premise at the time the intruder was in Lydia's flat. She had a shipboard acquaintance, Gerald Denbigh, over as a guest that evening and her only friend in England is Alan MacAlan of the Foreign Office. The only ones she can trust are her two teenage daughters, but they dragged along two young boys, Jimmy Gregg and Tony Ffolliott, who have a talent for getting into trouble.

Needless to say, there are a number of complications in the case, such as an unexpected murder, anonymous telephone calls and a kidnapping, which finds its climax on the European continent – bringing Lydia to France and Italy.

On a whole, The Further Side of Fear is a fairly minor and short novel, but the plot pleasantly blends dark, nightmarish suspense with espionage and framed it as a locked room story with an unusual impossibility. And deserves much more attention than it has gotten until now. Especially from us locked room readers.

The Man in the Moonlight (1940) by Helen McCloy

Helen Clarkson was the birth name of "Helen McCloy," an American mystery writer, who served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and they awarded her with an Edgar statuette, in 1953, for her literary criticism, but, more importantly, McCloy is remembered for her body of work – consisting of roughly thirty novels and a dusting of short stories. McCloy distinguished herself as a mystery novelist by incorporating elements of morbid psychology and (domestic) suspense into her otherwise traditional detective plots. And the result is usually outstanding!

I've only read a handful of her detective novels, but all but one were good to excellent reads with the late-period Mr. Splitfoot (1968) being the standout title of the lot. Regardless of McCloy's successful track record, I read her only very sporadically (only two since the inception of this blog) and decided to finally pick up her much lauded Dr. Basil Willing series again this year. My perusing eye fell upon one of her earlier titles, which is a period in her career that I have criminally overlooked.

The Man in the Moonlight (1940) is not a typical American college mystery, like Clifford Orr's The Dartmouth Murders (1929), Timothy Fuller's Harvard Has a Homicide (1936) and Patrick Quentin's Death and the Maiden (1939), because the plot is driven by the war that was brewing on the European continent at the time – which I say on the assumption that the book was written during the last days of peace. However, the book already deals with refugees from Austria and Germany who fled when the Nazis took over. And one of these refugees brought a deadly problem to a small, unassuming American college.

Assistant Chief Inspector Patrick Foyle is sitting in a park outside Yorkville University, where he plans to send his own boy to, pouring over college bulletins when he notices a piece of paper. A stray bit of paper that looked out of place in the clean, tidy park.

Out of curiosity, Foyle picks up the piece of paper and astonishing reads the following, "I take pleasure in informing you that you have been chosen as murderer for Group No. 1" and to "please follow these instructions with as great exactness as possible." An astonishing note for a policeman to find, but the surprises don't end there as he's addressed by Professor Franz Konradi, a research bio-chemist, who escaped from Austria. Konradi happened to be missing paperwork and assumed Foyle had found one sheet of it.

They discuss the murderous message of the note, but their conversation ends with Konradi telling Foyle that "no matter what happens" he shall "not commit suicide." An unsettling end of a conversation. Particularly, when "the academic peace was shattered by a pistol shot" emanating from Southerland Hall.

Raymond Prickett, Professor of Experimental Psychology, was conducting an experiment by firing blank pistol shots above his infant son and meticulously writing down the reactions – not believing in the "vulgar superstition" of the Freudian mythology that his experiments will saddle his son with complexes when he gets older. So not exactly father of the year material, but the stage was now properly set and Professor Konradi dies that same evening inside his laboratory at Southerland Hall. Apparently, he actually did take his own life. Or so the evidence suggests.

According to the evidence, Konradi placed the muzzle of a revolver between his teeth, in contact with the roof of his mouth, and simply pulled the trigger and blew out the top of his head.

There were no marks of violence on the body. The lips and teeth were uninjured, which is considered clear proof of suicide, because a murderer could not make such a clean shot with an unwilling victim. An assumption strengthened by the fact that there was no smell of chloroform or tell-tale symptoms of a narcotic drug, but Foyle had not forgotten about Konradi's assurance that would never commit suicide and decided to call in the help of an old friend, Dr. Basil Willing. A psychologist who acts as a medical assistant to the District Attorney and is often consulted whenever a case needed a psychologist. However, a seemingly perfect murder is not the only problem the detective-psychologist has to contend with.

At the time of the murder, Southerland Hall was used by Prickett to stage "a shame crime" as part of psychological test and he wanted to put everyone involved (willing or unwilling) through a lie-detector test, but now that Konradi has died nobody who was present wanted to be subjected to a lie-detector test – including Prickett! But that's not the only problem muddying the waters.

There's the titular man in the moonlight who was seen that night and three different witnesses gave three different descriptions of this elusive person. A policeman who was task with guarding the crime-scene swore he heard a typing machine rattling inside the empty building that was followed by an inhuman scream, which "sounded like a lost soul cursing' the devil" and "callin' on God to let him out of hell." There are two additional murders and (of course) the potential presence of Nazi spies. Even the identity of Konradi is put into question, because he only used his elaborate equipment for simple, routine experiments.

Plot-wise, I think the best part of The Man in the Moonlight is Willing separating the red herrings from the clues as he tries to figure out what happened that night and why everyone refused the lie-detector test. This part of the plot is also peppered with the kind of arcane medical, psychological and historical facts that John Norris touched upon in his review of the book, which make for interesting reading if you love these obscure tidbits of history. I never knew the preferred method of suicide for Austrians, at the time, was a bullet through the roof of the mouth or how a certain medical condition can influence the results of a word-association test.

Only downside is that, by the end of this, there's one (somewhat obvious) suspect left standing and this person is brought to heel by a psychological analyses of the various lies this person told throughout the story. I think Willing's analyses could have used a physical clue, or two, to backup his psychological analyses, but, on a whole, the plot fitted nicely together and the motive for these murders was an original one – which affected the decisions of several characters. So, when you take a step back to look at the overall story, you can see how this book could very well have been titled A Web of Lies and Willing cutting through those lies is the real attraction of The Man in the Moonlight. It's a clever, well-written detective novel with a pleasantly entangled plot.

All in all, I really enjoyed my time with The Man in the Moonlight, even if my reading of the book was plagued by interruptions, but it convinced me to return to McCloy's work more often. She genuinely was an American Crime Queen! I have already set my sights on such titles as Dance of Death (1938), Cue for Murder (1942) and The Further Side of Fear (1967), but I'll get to at least one or two of them later this year.

So... that brings this review to an end. The first blog-post since my inaugural review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946), back in 2011, which does not use one of those confusing post-titles and vaguely related opening quotes. Admittedly, I cranked out this review a lot quicker now those first hurdles of finding a quote and coming up with a post-title have been removed!

Out of Character

"Do you know my friend that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desire and aptitude?"

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Thirteen at Dinner, 1933)

While I have only read a handful of Helen McCloy's novels and short stories, I regard her as one of the uncrowned Queens of Crime, along with Christianna Brand and Gladys Mitchell, but I guess we can place the blame of this oversight solidly on the shoulders of General Washington's triumphant rebellion against the British.

The Goblin Market (1943), Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), Two-Thirds of a Ghost (1956) and Mr. Splitfoot (1968) were good-to-excellent detective stories, which were either laced with suspense, furnished with thriller-and spy material or covered with suggestive touches of the supernatural – and always outfitted with solid plots. However, it's been a while since I picked up one of McCloy's mysteries and some rummaging unearthed a copy of Alias Basil Willing (1951), which became irresistible after reading the dedication: "To Clarise and John Dickson Carr, with affection." 

Unfortunately, Alias Basil Willing bears very little resemblance to either the mystery or the adventurous thriller novels by Carr. The only, slight exception was the set-up of the plot, which was very reminiscent of the type of Carrian stories that plunges the hero in a series of ever-increasing bizarre events after a strange encounter in the opening chapter (e.g. The Unicorn Murders (1934) and The Arabian Nights Murder, 1936).

Dr. Basil Willing is McCloy's psychiatrist-detective and usually cases are brought to his attention by the District Attorney's office, but here it's a visit to a Manhattan tobacco shop. A ruffled little man, who bought the same cigarettes as the doctor, is overheard introducing himself to a cabdriver with a very familiar sounding name, "I am Dr. Basil Willing," and that's all the encouragement Willing needed to hop in the next cab in pursuit. What he finds is a strange dinner party thrown by an eminent German-born psychiatrist, Max Zimmer, for his patients and two Basil Willing's gives the party a thirteenth guest – which is considered a bad omen even by the rational host.

Willing manages to pry his imposter loose from the party, but soon comes to the discovery that he's dragging along a delirious and dying man, whose last words were the cryptic mutterings, "and – no – bird – sang..." The fake Basil Willing had died of codeine poisoning and the only place it could've been administrated was during the dinner party. A second death of a guest is discovered the following morning, also from codeine poisoning, but the plot and story-telling weren't able to deliver on its premise – as good as the attempt may’ve been. Yes, that's why I began with the praise.

The problem is that not much of sustainable interest happens between opening and closing chapters. There are some interviews, character-sketches and some nicely written observation about the times, but McCloy left two interesting points in the story underdeveloped. I thought there was something clever about the method for the poisonings, which makes the book a borderline impossible crime story, but more could've been done with it. And, secondly, if more attention (i.e. clueing) was paid to the place where birds don't sing, we could've had a classic of the "Dying Message" on our hands. The motive was good though, but the murderer belonged to a different type of crime story.

So, while Alias Basil Willing has its moments and interesting in showing how the genre had began to transition from plot-oriented mysteries to character-driven crime-and thriller novels, but as part of a series it will always be overshadowed by the previously mentioned titles. I'm glad, judging by the later books, McCloy abandoned this approach.

Sorry for this bad review and poorly written review. I was very distracted and multitasking isn't one of my strong suits.