King, Rufus - Design in Evil (1942)

Design in Evil (1942) is the first of King's non-series thrillers, after he abandoned the formal detective novel with Holiday Homicide (1940). The early chapters (1 - 13) are well written, with King showing in detail the trap that confronts his heroine. These chapters show King's feel for sailing material, taking place on a sea going yacht. Unfortunately, the book as a whole is flat. King indicates that Joseph Conrad is one of his hero's favorite authors (Chapter 15). It certainly makes sense that King admires Conrad: both were sailors in real life, and wrote frequently about the sea, and both men wrote rich descriptive prose. Design in Evil is in the tradition of the "innocent young woman forced into a new identity" school. It follows such pioneering works as Helen McCloy's The Dance of Death (1938), and Anthony Gilbert's The Woman in Red (1941), the latter being made into a superb film directed by Joseph H. Lewis, My Name is Julia Ross (1945). The story is never plausible, unless everyone is in on this bizarre plot; yet King wants only one person to be guilty, and everyone else to be an innocent dupe. The later sections of the book contain a murder mystery. However, there are only two serious suspects, and the mystery is never developed into an interesting or even very elaborate plot. King is of two minds about psychiatry, then becoming unfortunately fashionable in the media. Psychiatry is treated as a serious science, and yet the older psychiatrist is the book is shown as a completely mistaken dupe. This is at least more skeptical than the religious reverence with which psychiatry was usually held in this era.

Mike Grost