FFB: Alias Basil Willing - Helen McCloy

THE STORY: Dr. Basil Willing encounters a man claiming to be him when he stops in a local cigar shop for some cigarettes. Intrigued he follows the impostor in a taxi. He ends up at a dinner party of the prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Zimmer. At the party Basil learns that one of the guests, Katharine Shaw, knows him and has hired him to do something for her -- or rather she has hired the man pretending to be Dr. Basil Willing. Confusion follows when the fake Basil shows up and both eventually leave the party headed for a restaurant where Basil intends to uncover why the man is pretending to be him. But the impostor suddenly dies, apparently poisoned by codeine, yet not before uttering a cryptic phrase; "And no--bird--sang..." Basil needs to solve several mysteries, including two murders, and find out if he was in fact the intended target of a killer.

THE CHARACTERS: The party guests make up the majority of the cast and of course provide us with a large pool of murder suspects. Basil must help the police interrogate all of the party goers a as well as the host Dr. Zimmer and his sister Greta Mann who lives with him. Over time Willing discovers that most of the guests are also Zimmer's patients and that the dinner parties are held regularly as part of Zimmer's unconventional treatment plan. Zimmer disapproves of typical Freudian psychoanalysis which he says relies on "the passive dream-side of the mind." By observing his patients in a social setting he can study the patient "in his most completely active, conscious state--when he is reacting to the people in his life." But Basil begins to see a strange pattern in the behavior of the guest/patients and is troubled by this odd style of psychiatric treatment.

Typically for McCloy most of the characters come from Manhattan's elite society and the stand-outs in the cast include the amoral Rosamunde Yorke, who was acquainted with Basil prior to his marriage to Gisela; Stephen Lawrence, an aged and ailing poet and his neurotic daughter Perdita; and the warring married couple Hubert and Isolda Canning. The Cannings allow McCloy a chance to skewer post-WW2 American life in this couple grown tired of each other and living in a sterile "modern" apartment done up in the latest trends of personality-less interior decoration while drowning their sorrows and anger in numerous bottles of booze and cocktail glasses. They are a sad couple and the portrait McCloy paints is as ugly a commentary the highbrow high life as you will find in her books.

INNOVATIONS: Perhaps the only reason one should red this book is the motive for the crimes. I was reminded of a forgotten novel by Guy Boothby called The Woman of Death and an equally forgotten short novel by Robert Louis Stevenson as it became clear to me what was going on at Zimmer's home. It's a terrifying notion.

The detection in the novel, however, is also a highlight and recalls some of McCloy's finest work in her early career. Alias Basil Willing (1951) comes almost exactly in her mid-career and is one of her last genuine detective novels before she turned to suspense and psychological thrillers in the 1960s. The clueing is fair play with teasing classic gimmicks like ambiguous initials in a cryptic diary entry, a dying message, and a devilish murder method. This time, however, the clues consist largely of intellectual and literary references that may have some readers crying "Foul!" If you're a fan of Innes, Crispin and other literary-minded detective novelists, then you may enjoy Alias Basil Willing all the more. There are ample references to romantic poetry including Keat's Gothic masterpiece "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and a very obscure Victorian short story collection called Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy (more on that in the "Things I Learned" section below). Kipling and Coleridge are also quoted at length, but it is Keats and a writer named Charles Allston Collins whose work provide the biggest clues to the solution. Students of British literature will truly have a field day with this particular murder mystery of Helen McCloy.

QUOTES: Here are two examples of McCloy's prose. Both are fine examples of character descriptions. The first ends with an unusual metaphor I envy. The second is absurdly arch yet perfectly suited for the pseudo-sophisticate McCloy is describing.

Basil had spent too much time in hospitals not to see at a glance that Stephen Lawrence was a man chronically ill. [...] It wasn't altogether a matter of frial body, sunken cheeks, thinning hair and faded blue eyes. It wasn't even the lightness of this breathing, the slowness of his motions and the gentleness of his manner. It was rather his singularly sweet-tempered smile and his look of detached serenity. He was like paper which has burned away so slowly that the dead ash retains the shape of solidity yet actually is so fragile that it will crumble to dust at the firs touch.

Charlotte fumbled at her jabot and detached a long, slim, Italian lorgnette, silver worked in a repoussée design. Daintily she peered though the lenses at the grubby scrap of paper.

THINGS I LEARNED: Bizarre vocabulary word of this book: fissiparous. The sentence was of no help to me: "When the fissiparous process was completed Basil found himself beside Yorke." The definition is "inclined to cause or undergo division into separate parts or groups." Its root is the noun fission. I would have chosen a simpler synonym or just use "break-up" and forget about the adjective. McCloy does like to show off her erudition quite often.

Basil recalls a book called Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy which he claims is the work of Charles Dickens. This is only partly true, as the book is a collection of short stories by a variety of writers. The story he is talking about is really by Charles Allston Collins, a painter and writer, who coincidentally married Dicken's daughter. Originally written as Christmas stories in the magazine All the Year Round during the mid 1860s each tale is related by one of the lodgers in a boarding house run by Mrs. Lirriper, sort of a Canterbury Tales of the Victorian era. The second story in the collection, "A Past Lodger Relates A Wild Story of a Doctor," is the one Basil recalls. The main character and what he does is a direct echo of the action in Alias Basil Willing and leads the psychologist sleuth to the solution of the crimes.

EASY TO FIND? My ritual search of used bookselling sites turned up quite a few copies of this book in a variety of editions. Published both in the UK and US, Alias Basil Willing was reprinted in paperback only in the UK for some reason. But of the about fifteen or so copies I uncovered nearly all of them are priced affordably. For those who like digital books Orion has reissued many of McCloy's mystery novels as eBooks as part of "The Murder Room." Alias Basil Willing is one of those reissued digital books. At one time they offered Alias Basil Willing in a paperback edition, but this imprint stopped printing all paperback editions a few years ago. I found one Murder Room paperback edition being sold online, but no others. Good luck in your search!

Able and Willing - Raven's Head Press News

Raven's Head Press has some wonderful news for vintage detective fiction fans. Take a look at the email I received yesterday afternoon.

This is a huge coup for our little operation. We plan to reprint Dance of Death, The Man in the Moonlight and The Deadly Truth all of which I have reviewed here at Pretty Sinister Books.

If the legal issues and money for rights are within our means we may continue with the other books I reviewed on this blog: Do Not Disturb and Mr. Splitfoot. Ideally, I would like to get all of the Basil Willing books back in print and that would entail asking for the rights for another seven books.

I'm especially excited since Helen McCloy's books have languished in the realm of Out-of-Printdom since the 1970s. Currently the only title available in a new paperback edition is Through a Glass, Darkly and that comes from an independent press (also a print on demand outfit like us) who markets only to the UK.

Dance of Death is first on our list. It's the very first Dr. Basil Willing detective novel and I think it was a pioneering book in the genre. Below are the links to Helen McCloy's books reviewed on this blog.

I am one of her greatest fans. And now mystery readers all over will be able to afford new editions of her books without having to scour the planet for a used copy of her early, very hard to find, and often absurdly priced books.

Helen McCloy Books Previously Reviewed
Dance of Death (1938)
The Man in the Moonlight (1940)
The Deadly Truth (1941)
Do Not Disturb (1943)
Mr. Splitfoot (1968)

FFB: The Man in the Moonlight - Helen McCloy

Helen McCloy would have made a great writer of TV crime show scripts these days. While reading The Man in the Moonlight (1940), her sophomore detective novel featuring Dr. Basil Willing, I was struck by the abundance of arcane bits of scientific knowledge that made up the clues and evidence in her usual fascinating plot. She introduces biochemistry, anatomy, abnormal psychology, symbology, and even the construction of heating and air conditioning units in to her multi-layered plot. The story of the murder at Yorkville University could easily have been an episode on House or Elementary or any of the dozen of shows in which the plot hinges on little known medical, psychological and historical facts.

Want a sampling? Let's go!

1. Suicide by a gun in the mouth is the most common method of self-destruction among German and Austrian soldiers.

2. There is an abnormal condition of the thymus gland that can result in giving people a youthful appearance not consistent with chronological age.

3. A certain type of lesion in the septum is indicative of chromic acid poisoning.

4. There is a discussion of HVAC construction and its flaws and how it relates to acoustical anomalies that allow the murderer to eavesdrop on private conversations in one room while being hidden in an adjacent room below.

That just scratches the surface. My notes include three other points which unfortunately would reveal a few well deserved surprises. As I've said before McCloy was way ahead of the rest of her mystery writing colleagues in tackling what are now almost routine in plot devices. She was, in my opinion, the first of the truly modern detective novel writers.

Inspector Foyle is visiting Yorkville University and loses his way en route to a meeting with the dean. He runs into Professor Franz Konradi, a research biochemist, who interrupts Foyle as he is looking over a piece of paper. The paper begins with the jarring sentence "I take pleasure in informing you that you have been chosen as murderer for Group No. 1." and continues with detailed instructions on how to play the role of the murderer. Prof. Konradi thinks Foyle has found a missing paper in written in his native German, but is as equally puzzled by the instructions when Foyle shows him the paper. Prof. Konradi must hurry back to his lab and leaves Foyle with the cryptic comment that if anything unusual should happen that night Foyle should know that Konradi would never commit suicide. Something indeed does happen that night. Konradi in found in his locked laboratory dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Foyle enlists the aid of Basil Willing, consultant in psychology to the New York District Attorney's office, to help make sense of a murder disguised a suicide. In the process of the investigation Foyle and Willing must uncover the bizarre psychology and behavioral experiments of Raymond Pickett who confesses to using his own children in behavioral pre-trials. His experiment with a "sham murder" was modeled on a mouse in a maze. He tells the police that he turned Southerland Hall (where Konradi is found dead) into "a gigantic maze similar to those we use in animal experiments with only one exit which the animal is compelled to discover under the urge of fear, hunger or sex." It doesn't help matters much when the gun used to kill Konradi turns out to be Prickett's and was intended for use in his sham murder experiment.

As is usual in the early Basil Willing detective novels the field of psychology and its practices are intrinsic to the plot. There is one sequence involving association tests (a much overused device by less informed mystery writers going back to the early 20th century) that for once is actually interesting to read about. McCloy also incorporates a discussion of lie detectors, how they work and their unreliability in police investigations. The use of a lie detector test is part of Pickett's experiment. But perhaps the most interesting point related to psychology is Willing's theory that there is truth in a lie, that creative lying reveals the devious mind of the murderer.

Another highlight that makes this a stand out in mystery novels of the period is the role of German and Austrian refugees fleeing Europe for America and other parts of the world. Basil will meet Gisela von Hohenems for the first time in this book as secretary to Prof. Konradi. Though the police try to make a strong case against her in the course of the investigation readers knowledgeable about the later books in the series will know that she will be in the clear. Gisela, you see, turns out to be Mrs. Willing by the fourth book. But among all these compelling features the most important is the role of capitalism in wartime. The motive for the murder will be tied to the discovery of a synthetic metal and its effects on global economy. As ever McCloy devises an intelligent mystery with a thoroughly original and captivating plot.

FFB: The Deadly Truth - Helen McCloy

The ultra urbane New Yorkers of Helen McCloy's detective novels are beginning to remind me of  similar sophisticated Manhattanites of the 1920s in the S.S. Van Dine series about Philo Vance. But whereas Vance is the only one who seems to be extremely well read and eager to make literary allusions as often as the wind changes direction in McCloy's world everyone acts like Vance. Was there ever really a New York like the one we find in The Deadly Truth (1941)? Did people really spice up their language with frequent quotes from historical figures and obscure authors? Did mini lectures about chemistry and literature and the science of audiology take the place of regular conversation? I doubt it. Unlike Willard Huntington Wright who to me always seemed to be showing off in the guise of Philo Vance, Helen McCloy makes her erudite characters fit naturally into her mysteries. Her lectures are intrinsic not intrusive to the story.

Claudia Bethune, with her multiple marriages and multiple wardrobe changes, tart tongue and wicked ways, is very much like a 1940s version of Alexis Carrington. Life has become a great amusement to her and people are her toys. She is planning a cocktail party to which she has invited several friends and business acquaintances and sent individual invitations stating that each person should try to come as "you are the only one I really want to see." Little do they know that these cocktails will be laced with a new drug she stole from her biochemist pal Dr. Roger Slater. The drug is a derivative of scopolamine with "truth serum" properties enhanced and its dangerous side effects removed. Claudia is eager to find out all the secrets her friends have been keeping from her.

The cocktail party is a highlight of the book and gives McCloy a chance to show off her talent for wicked dialogue. The entire sequence might have been lifted from an episode of that hyper-melodramatic nighttime soap Revenge. During the party Claudia manages to goad her guests into revealing a myriad of deep dark secrets. Chief among those secrets are her husband's long time adulterous affair with Phyllis (who also happens to be his first wife) and the plummeting price of the stock in a clothing mill Claudia inherited from her father that has virtually left her penniless. There are other secrets, too, but McCloy cuts the scene short choosing instead to reveal those in the surprise-filled denouement.

The theme of truth and lies runs throughout the novel with the characters indulging in McCloy's love of allusion. Prior to their ever being aware of the truth drug they will ingest at the party we get quips and quotes like these:

Truth is always unpleasant and usually intolerable.

If I may be permitted to paraphrase Aaron Burr: Truth is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

Yet even the speakers of those quotes are vulnerable to the effects of the super dose of the drug Claudia tosses into the bottle of vermouth used to make the night's martinis. She, of course, does not partake of the drinks nor does Roger who spotted a missing tube of the test drug only minutes after Claudia left his lab. He warns everyone to stop drinking while everyone else warns Claudia that she'll pay for her cruel game. But by then it's too late. And it's too late for Claudia as well. Later that night she is found brutally strangled with her prized emerald and platinum necklace.

Dr. Basil Willing, psychologist and consultant to the NYPD, is on hand and in fact discovers Claudia in her death throes, nearly catching the murderer in the act of strangling. Claudia is still alive when he breaks into the dining room, but the intricately designed catch on her necklace leaves Basil helpless to free her from the jeweled death trap. Basil is also an "ear-witness" of sorts to the crime. He will remember that prior to the discovery of Claudia he had heard an unusual sound of footsteps and does his best to apply his listening skills throughout the book to match that aural memory to the gait and footsteps of the suspects. Sound and the absence of sound feature prominently in the book as major clues even to the inclusion of a deaf character.

The Deadly Truth is not only a high spirited melodrama of modern mind game playing it is one of the best examples of a fair play detective novel I've ever read. The clues are right there in front of you. Many of them stood out to me flagrantly and yet I was unable to put the pieces together. Why? Because McCloy has ingeniously led the reader down the garden path with a plethora of red herrings that seem to lead to one person when in fact all the flagrant clues most assuredly point to another. It was one of those rare instances of an ending that left me gasping and saying, "That's why that happened!" I'd love to point out some specific examples but that would ruin the enjoyment of joining me as yet another reader fooled by a master deceiver.  With each new book I read by Helen McCloy I discover that she is indeed an artist of the detective novel.

FFB: Do Not Disturb - Helen McCloy

Edith Talbot has fled Paris and her ex-husband to return to New York for a well deserved break. She takes up residence in the Hotel Majestic where she begrudgingly is given the only room available. It turns out to be next door to Room 1404 from which horrible crying can be heard – the crying and sobbing of what she believes to be an adult male. She is tempted to knock on the door but notices the "Do Not Disturb" sign on door and decides to honor the request.

The next day she mentions the incident to the desk clerk who reveals that the room she is staying in was reserved by the man in Room 1404. He is Dr. Melchior, a psychiatrist, traveling with his son who is suffering from a painful ailment. Melchior wanted to reserve the room adjacent (where Edith is staying) but not use it so that no one would be bothered by his son's frequent crying and moaning. The desk clerk reluctantly gave the room to Edith because she was insistent on staying in the hotel. Edith thinks the doctor's reasoning is odd but returns to her room.

The second night she hears a piercing scream and rushes to the room next door to find out exactly what is going on. This time she ignores the "Do Not Disturb" sign and knocks until she gets an answer. The man who opens the door identifies himself as Captain Gorgas of the New York Police. After Edith's persistent questioning he tells her they are interrogating a suspect in a crime and she should return to her room and forget anything she may have heard. It's none of her business. He closes the door in her face leaving her puzzled as to where Dr. Melchior and his son might be since they are the ones who should be in the room.

Edith leaves to visit a friend the next day and when she returns that night she discovers a dead body in her room. The man resembles one of the men she had seen when Gorgas opened the door to Room 1404. And she does what any character in a suspense novel would do – she flees the hotel in search of help.

But by doing so she inadvertently sets herself up as the accused. Soon her photograph is in all the newspapers as a woman wanted for questioning in the man's murder. Everywhere she turns she thinks someone is part of a plot to capture her and turn her into the police. She spends the entire book trying to find somewhere that is safe, someone who she can trust, who will believe her story and help her find who really killed the man in her hotel room.

This is not a detective novel, though there are elements of crime solving. Dr. Basil Willing, McCloy's usual series detective, is nowhere in sight. This is a pure cat-and-mouse pursuit thriller. But Do Not Disturb (1943) is not as fast paced as it could be due to McCloy's usual fondness for didactic passages in both the dialog and the prose. While there tends to be far too much intellectualizing on Edith's part, and lots of talk about the psychology of criminal behavior, there is also some fascinating background on life in WW2 era America – both urban and rural viewpoints. Gas rationing and its impact on traffic, air raid patrols, blackouts in buildings of fifteen stories or taller all play an important part in the story as Edith flees the city, with the police hot on her heels, to head for Pennsylvania to seek refuge with her former high school friend.

There is a very odd scene where she is helped by an overly friendly couple in the Pennsylvania hills. After escaping from a bus full of inquisitive passengers one of whom recognizes her from her infamous newspaper photo and sends out the alarm she trudges through the woods, comes across a house. Comforted by a German Shepherd and a black cat that greet her and practically invite her inside she enters the unlocked home just like Goldilocks in need of food and shelter. Inside, the unnamed man and woman treat her like their own child, feed her, chit chat with her about their life, then leave her to watch over the house while they head out for a church function. Edith is rightly suspicious of their behavior but after more rationalizing and intellectualizing decides they mean well. As it turns out she is not as safe as she thought when they leave the house. It is one of many scenes that McCloy creates to lull the reader into a false sense of Edith's safety only to let loose with a barrage of unexpected violence.

I was reminded of so many Hitchcock films like The Wrong Man, and especially The 39 Steps, while reading McCloy's book. It is relentless in its themes of pursuit and the wrongly accused. It even employs Hitchcock's favorite plot gimmick of "find the MacGuffin" as so many of the villains believe that Edith is in possession of that "something special" yet she hasn't a clue what it is.

The book shifts into a quasi-spy thriller when Edith is abducted (for the third time!) and returned to New York where she encounters more suspicious police and a lawyer named Charles Henderson who is adamant that Edith has that "something special" in her possession and demands its return. Strangely, her ex-husband Lucien will turn up in the course of the twisty plot and prove to be her most trustworthy ally. Or is he really at the core of it all? Typical of these kinds of suspense thrillers the element of paranoia, Edith's constant weighing of who is trustworthy or not, takes over. Though we see the action only through Edith's eyes it is just as difficult for the reader to determine who are the good guys and who are the baddies.

FFB: Mr. Splitfoot - Helen McCloy

Although published in 1968 and with only a trace of the 1960s present in the person of two very modern young people Mr. Splitfoot is in many respects a throwback to McCloy's first book Dance of Death. Her post World War 2 books played with the espionage genre and the straight suspense book which she would completely embrace in the 1970s. But this penultimate case for Basil Willing is very much a traditional whodunit loaded with tropes from the Golden Age of Detective fiction. There is an group of suspects shut up in a snowbound mansion, talk of ghosts, a haunted room that could have come from a book by John Dickson Carr, a verbal dying clue picked up by a mimicking parakeet, and an ingenious impossible crime.

The book opens with two young people plotting a vicious prank. They will pretend that a poltergeist is haunting the home. The two, Lucinda and Vanya, make for a devilish and manipulative couple - Vanya moreso than poor Lucinda. Misunderstood, unloved, ignored by her parents Lucinda desperately wants to be noticed. This ghost prank is her final revenge for being ignored. She will pretend to hear some rapping and call out "Do as I do, Mr Splitfoot!" then clap her hand three times. Vanya will respond from a hidden spot with another three raps.

All goes as planned until someone brings word that Vanya has called the house. He is ill and his mother won't let him leave the house. Lucinda, who has just completed her role in the prank, is stunned. Who made the raps in response to her shouting out? She faints dead away. The ghost appears to be genuine.

Basil and his wife have been given refuge in the snowbound household. They have had a car wreck and Basil's wife Gisela hurt her ankle in the long grueling trek from the road to the house. They are allowed to stay for the night. This decision leads to the revelation of an unused room.

The room has, according to family history, remained unoccupied for several years. Legend holds that three people who slept in the room were found dead the following morning. Superstition has prevented anyone from using the room since those deaths several decades ago.

One of the men dares to suggest that someone sleep in the room to see if the legend will hold true. They cut cards and the man with the lowest card will sleep in the room. Precautions are taken. They rig up a bell to signal to the others in case of any unusual event and a parakeet is brought into the room. Since birds have delicate respiratory systems it would fall ill to any deadly gas or vapors before the occupant did so.

Only a few minutes pass before the bell in the room starts to ring. More than the three times they had all agreed upon. They rush to the room and discover that David Crosby - the unlucky low card recipient - is dead. The parakeet is chattering "Too brood, too brood." The curse apparently still holds fast.

The reader, however, should be skeptical. Earlier in the book Lucinda discovered a secret room with a passageway that allows someone to overhear conversations in the bedrooms below. It is entirely possible that someone else in the house knew of the secret room and used it to commit the murder. Basil is certain that Lucinda's fainting spell is indicative of something not right, that she is hiding facts. It will take some time for him to get her to open up and come clean. It's an interesting blend of the detective novel and the suspense novel - rather Hitchcockian in fact.

The two young people continue their mischief. Lucinda tells Vanya of a conversation she overheard in which Serena Crosby, the wife of the murdered man, was accused of being unfaithful. They suspect that this is the reason Crosby was killed and want his wife implicated. They create a fake love letter in order to force out into the open the idea of infidelity. But they are teenagers, after all. In trying to create a love letter written by adult they fail miserably. To their shock the discovery of the letter not only opens the door to a discussion of sex and infidelity, but also results in a second murder.

In keeping with the retro traditional whodunit structure McCloy has Basil gather the household in one room to reveal the truth of the crimes. The explanation of the impossible crime in the haunted room is on par with some of the best of Carr's novels. It's the most ingeniously devised of any of McCloy's plots. The architecture of the house plays an important part, but I doubt any reader will come up with the devious way in which the killer managed to make it appear that a ghost was at work.

*  *  *

This is my weekly contribution to Friday's Forgotten Books usually hosted by Patti Abbot. This week, however, our congenial guest host is Richard Robinson. Go here for the list of usual suspects and other great reading long overlooked.

FIRST BOOKS: Dance of Death (1938) - Helen McCloy

I was surprised to find that very little is written about Helen McCloy on the various crime fiction blogs. I have always felt that she has been overlooked and to a certain extent ignored as someone who was rather pivotal in the development of the modern crime novel. Her detective, Dr. Basil Willing, is one of the earliest of the American fictional detectives to incorporate scientific and clinical explanations for the psychological motives of a killer. More importantly her books are cleverly constructed detective novels that are excellent and entertaining examples of an American mystery writer showing mastery of the fair play technique.

Anthony Berkeley was one of the first to pioneer the psychological facet of the modern crime novel. He eschewed the usual emphasis on physical evidence of the crime and instead focused on the victim in the crime. He said in a dedication to E.M. Delafield that he hoped she would appreciate his attempt "to substitute for the materialism of the usual crime-puzzle of fiction those psychological values which are ... the basis of the universal interest in the far more absorbing criminological dramas of real life." After all, the truly interesting thing about any murder is why the person was killed in the first place not what kind of cigarette ash was left on the floor of the crime scene. But unlike McCloy he did not quote or employ the work of scientists and psychologists as aids to the detective in arriving at his solution. His detective Roger Sheringham was a mystery writer with an acute insight into human behavior. All of his pronouncements were not so much scientific as they were based on observations and inferences.

Shortly after Berkeley's first foray into the psychological detective novel, The Wychford Poisoning Case, was published in 1926 other writers started to explore the same territory. Some to great effect, others managing only minor success. In England Gladys Mitchell created Beatrice Bradley, an avowed Freudian psychologist, who delves into the psyche of the criminals in what are largely parodies of the traditional detective novel. In the United States Charles Dutton, who began as a pulp writer, wrote about murderers whose psychopathology I am sure was incredibly disturbing to a reading audience of the late 1920s. Helen McCloy entered the crime fiction arena in 1938 with an impressive debut that not only tackled the idea of psychology in detective novels but scored a couple of touchdowns in the process.

Dance of Death introduces Basil Willing, a psychiatrist who consults with the New York Police Department after having a fairly successful practice treating shell shocked war veterans. The novel opens with a scene featuring sanitation workers who are clearing the streets after a snowstorm. One of them uncovers the body of a young debutante buried in a snow heap. At first it seems as if the novel is going to be yet another treatment of the impossible crime – the body is extremely warm and the face is stained a bright yellow two things that seem incredible after being buried in snow. The plot gets even more strange when another young woman bearing a striking resemblance to the corpse comes forward to tell a fantastic story right out of the Sherlock Holmes canon. She was asked to impersonate the dead girl at a debutante ball and the following morning was treated as if she were actually the girl she impersonated. It is here that the book begins to emphasize the psychological approach to crime solving. Willing is asked to be present at the woman's interview to determine if she is sane or not. Her relatives insist she is Kitty Jocelyn, the dead woman, but she claims she is Ann Jocelyn Claude, Kitty's cousin.

As the story progresses Willing and Inspector Foyle will carry out numerous interviews and visit the home of the dead girl. At each interview Willing points out a "blunder" or fault on the part of the person being interrogated. Foyle is more concerned with evidence and fingerprints. Willing tells Foyle that he too is concerned with fingerprints but of an intangible kind:

Blunders, like dreams, are messages in code. By decoding them we are able to eavesdrop on the unconscious and get at the truth. For no one can control his blunders any more than he can control his reflexes or his dreams. [T]he blunders a suspect makes, the things he drops, and breaks and forgets, his stumbling and stuttering might tell the psychologist as much about his mind as the marks on a bullet tell the ballistic expert about the gun from which it was fired.

He also discusses his theory that nothing is ever really accidental at all.

In decoding a blunder, you ask yourself what unconscious wish could be back of it.  Why should such-and-such a person want to do such-and-such a thing? The idea is that no one ever does anything he doesn't want to do--either consciously or unconsciously.

These "psychic fingerprints," as Willing calls them, will manifest themselves frequently in a variety of ways: slips of the tongue, nervous manner in speech, absent mindedness, mention of "lost" items. Foyle makes an apt pupil for at the midpoint of the book he presents Willing with a list of nine blunders that puzzle him. Willing astounds him by explaining nearly every one of them as they relate to the crime. Only one of the blunders continues to puzzle him until the book's finale.

There have been other fictional detective of this era who call themselves psychiatrists or psychologists. Dr. Eustace Hailey in the novels of Anthony Wynne does an awful lot of probing of the psyche with plenty of elaborate didactic lecturing, but more often than not he seems like a droning pedant. Little of what he says is easily understood. Beatrice Bradley likes to indulge in Freudian psychobabble as well, mostly in her early appearances, but also makes up an awful lot of her "theories." To me, at least, much of what Mrs. Bradley says seems not only outdated but prejudicial rather than soundly psychological.

Willing, however, speaks in everyday language (primarily because he's talking to an unsophisticated policeman) making his psychological tools and observations easy to swallow in what may seem like large doses. He also uses the theories of established scientists in the field of psychology and openly refers to them by name. Dudley Schoenfeld, who used similar tactics when assisting police in identifying Hauptmann during the Lindbergh kidnapping, is mentioned frequently in Dance of Death. Schoenfeld's theory of the unconscious mistake being a large clue to hidden motives provides the springboard for the turning point of the case in this novel.

Apart from all this emphasis on psychology the book has a really modern tone to it. From the scientific knowledge the murderer uses in poisoning Kitty Jocelyn to the crazed popularity of the diet pill employed as a murder weapon; from the fawning over magazine endorsed miracle pills to the deeply disturbed motive of the murderer -- all of the details in the story still have resonance seventy plus years later. When I finished the novel I felt as though the book could serve as a script for any of the latest TV crime shows. Most especially the plot and Willing's investigative style reminded me of the methods of Vincent D'Onofrio's police detective and the plots written for Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Rarely did it feel as if I was reading a book written in the late 1930s. McCloy is to be admired for being something of an oracle in choosing a timeless topic and presenting her story in a manner that did not date her work.

Mysteries featuring Dr. Basil Willing

Dance of Death (1938)

The Man in the Moonlight (1940)

The Deadly Truth (1941)

Who's Calling (1942)

Cue for Murder (1942)
The Goblin Market (1943) - small role only

The One that Got Away (1945)

Through a Glass Darkly (1950)

Alias Basil Willing (1951)

The Long Body (1955)

Two-Thirds of a Ghost (1956)

The Singing Diamonds (1965) short stories

Mr. Splitfoot (1968)
Burn This! (1980)

The Pleasant Assassin (2003) short stories, some of which originally appeared in The Singing Diamonds

UPDATE: Feb 10, 2011: I was using the oldest Hubin bibliography when I copied out the Basil Willing titles and I missed two books. Also I should've added the dates of publication so they're up now.