Helen McCloy (1904 – 1994)

Helen McCloy, in full Helen Worrell Clarkson McCloy, was a prolific writer of mystery novels and a major influence on the genre. She wrote as Helen McCloy and as Helen Clarkson.

McCloy was born in New York City, on 6 June 1904 to writer Helen Worrell McCloy and William McCloy, managing editor of the New York Evening Sun. She was educated at the Brooklyn Friends School, run by Brooklyn’s Quaker community. At fourteen, she published a literary essay in the Boston Transcript; at fifteen, she published verse in the New York Times. She lived in France for eight years, studying at the Sorbonne in 1923 and 1924. McCloy was Paris correspondent for the Universal News Service (1927-31) and the monthly art magazine International Studio (1930-31). She also was London correspondent for the Sunday New York Times art section and wrote political sketches for the London Morning Post and the Daily Mail.

After discovering a love for Sherlock Holmes as young girl, McCloy began writing her own mystery novels in the 1930s. In 1938, shortly after her return to the US, she introduced her psychiatrist-detective Dr Basil Willing in her first novel, Dance of Death. Dr Basil Willing features in 13 McCloy’s novels as well as several short stories; however, both are best known from McCloy’s 1955 supernatural mystery Through a Glass, Darkly — hailed as her masterpiece and likened to John Dickson Carr.

In 1946 McCloy married Davis Dresser, who had gained fame with his Mike Shayne novels, written under the pseudonym Brett Halliday. In 1948 they had a daughter, Chloe. She founded with Dresser the Torquil Publishing Company and a literary agency (Halliday and McCloy). Their marriage ended in 1961. McCloy went on in the 1950s and 1960s to co-author a review column for a Connecticut newspaper. In 1950, she became the first female president of Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and in 1953, she was honoured with an Edgar® Award from the MWA for her critiques. She helped to establish MWA’s New England Chapter in 1971, and was named an MWA Grand Master in 1990. Her contributions to the genre are recognized today by the annual Helen McCloy/MWA Scholarship for Mystery Writing. Helen McCloy died in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 December 1994. aged 90.

Dance of Death features her detective, Dr. Basil Willing, a psychiatrist and an expert in forensic medicine; he appears in many of what are considered her strongest novels. The social satire in such novels as Cue for Murder (1942) and Two-Thirds of a Ghost (1956), as well as the fine presentation of New York society in Alias Basil Willing (1951) and Unfinished Crime (1954), suggests, as Erik Routley has indicated, that McCloy is one of those mystery writers in whom “there is a good deal of straight novel-writing.” Anthony Boucher believed McCloy “has always resembled the best British writers of the Sayers-Blake-Allingham school in her ability to combine a warm novel of likeable people with a flawless deductive plot.”

McCloy’s choice of a psychiatrist-detective as hero reveals her interest in psychology, especially in its more paranormal manifestations, as is evident in Through a Glass, Darkly (1949), Who’s Calling? (1942), and The Slayer and the Slain (1957). Her interest in the fragile structure upon which an individual’s personality is based is shown in The Changeling Conspiracy (1976), which deals with political kidnapping and brainwashing. This and recent novels reflect McCloy’s interest in contemporary affairs; The Goblin Market (1943) and Panic (1944), which were written during World War II and deal with problems created by the war, suggest this interest is not new.

In general, critics have preferred McCloy’s novels of detection to the novels of suspense or terror. McCloy herself believed the current popularity of detective stories is related to “some lack in the accepted literary diet.” The “moral understanding of common minds which results in sympathy for common lives” and the themes “that mean so much to the common man—love and death”—are missing from modern novels. In her best works, McCloy’s success in providing interesting characters and themes is matched with her ability in plotting.

The Dr Basil Willing Mysteries: Dance of Death (1938) (UK title: Design for Dying); The Man in the Moonlight (1940); The Deadly Truth (1941); Cue for Murder (1942); Who’s Calling (1942); The Goblin Market (1943); 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; Mister Splitfoot (1968); Burn This (1980); and The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr Basil Willing (Crippen & Landru, 2003) short stories, some of which originally appeared in The Singing Diamonds.

Helen McCloy – by Michael E. Grost

In the words of Curtis Evans at The Passing Tramp: “Though largely forgotten today, McCloy, like so many worthy older crime writers, maintains a following among crime fiction connoisseurs.  She was an early prominent employer of psychiatry in detective fiction (many mystery writers of the period tended to ridicule it) and she has the literate style that today so many people tend to associate almost exclusively with the English Crime Queens Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.  In an ideal world, McCloy would feature more prominently (or at all) in genre histories of detective fiction, because she was a notable practitioner within the genre.”

(Facsimile Dust Jacket, Morrow Mystery (USA), 1941)

Product Description: When Dr Basil Willing rents a small shack for a vacation on Long Island he becomes embroiled with his landlady, Claudia Bethune. Claudia wants to learn the secrets of her relatives and friends, so she steals a truth serum and holds a dinner party for her nearest and dearest. In the early morning hours, as Dr Willing returns to his cottage, he sees what he thinks is a fire and investigates. He finds Claudia near death at the table and hears footsteps fading up the stairs. Someone didn’t want Claudia to learn the truth about them, and soon Dr Willing finds himself a suspect in murder. (Source: Amazon and The Murder Room)

Review of Helen McCloy’s The Deadly Truth, at Pretty Sinister Books (J F Norris)

Updated 07/04/2021

G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the “prince of paradox”. Time magazine observed of his writing style: “Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.” Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and wrote on apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an “orthodox” Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, his “friendly enemy”, said of him, “He was a man of colossal genius.” Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin.

Chesterton was born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, the son of Marie Louise, née Grosjean, and Edward Chesterton. He was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England, though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians. According to his autobiography, as a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards. Chesterton was educated at St Paul’s School, then attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. The Slade is a department of University College London, where Chesterton also took classes in literature, but did not complete a degree in either subject. Chesterton married Frances Blogg in 1901; the marriage lasted the rest of his life. Chesterton credited Frances with leading him back to Anglicanism, though he later considered Anglicanism to be a “pale imitation”. He entered full communion with the Catholic Church in 1922. The couple were unable to have children.

Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on the morning of 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His last known words were a greeting spoken to his wife. The sermon at Chesterton’s Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox on 27 June 1936. Knox said, “All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton’s influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.” He is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery. Near the end of Chesterton’s life, Pope Pius XI invested him as Knight Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great (KC*SG).

Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4,000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, The Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.’s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition (1929). His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel.  (Source: Wikipedia)

Mike Grost on GK Chesterton: G.K Chesterton wrote five story collections about Father Brown. The best are the first, The Innocence of Father Brown, which contains Chesterton’s most ingenious paradoxes serving as detective concepts, and the third, The Incredulity of Father Brown, which offers his best put together impossible crimes. Chesterton’s impossible crimes in Incredulity all involve action – they focus on some ingenious way of committing murder, often involving moving both the killer and/or the victim’s body from place to place. Chesterton’s vision is architectural, as well, involving the layout of buildings and rooms. As in John Dickson Carr, Chesterton’s solutions are even more imaginative than the impossible problems themselves.

These books are among the high points of the puzzle plot mystery story. Chesterton’s fiction seems to be the main model for the great works of the Big Three puzzle plot detective novelists, Christie, Queen and Carr. (Keep reading here)

Selected bibliography: His most famous character is the priest-detective Father Brown. Father Brown appeared in 53 short stories, most of them compiled in five books, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), The Secret of Father Brown (1927) and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935), and three uncollected stories: The Donnington Affair (1914), The Vampire of the Village (1936, included in later editions of The Scandal of Father Brown), The Mask of Midas (1936).

Impossible Crimes. “The Secret Garden”, “The Invisible Man”, “The Hammer of God”, “The Salad of Colonel Cray”, “The Fairy Tale of Father Brown”, “The Vanishing Prince”, “The Soul of the Schoolboy”, “The Hole in the Wall”, “The Arrow of Heaven”, “The Oracle of the Dog”, “The Miracle of Moon Crescent”, “The Dagger with Wings” are impossible crime tales, Many of Chesterton’s impossible crimes revolve around architecture. They depend on the geometric, spatial arrangement of their setting. (Mike Grost)

(Facsimile Dust Jacket, Macaulay (USA), (1911) c1919 reprint)

The first of G.K. Chesterton’s books about seemingly hapless sleuth Father Brown, The Innocence of Father Brown collects twelve classic tales: “The Blue Cross”, “The Secret Garden”, “The Queer Feet”, “The Flying Stars”, “The Invisible Man”, “The Honour of Israel Gow”, “The Wrong Shape”, “The Sins of Prince Saradine”, “The Hammer of God”, “The Eye of Apollo”, “The Sign of the Broken Sword”, and “The Three Tools of Death”. Father Brown is a direct challenge to the conventional detective and in many ways he is more amusing and ingenious.