If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

McCloy, Helen

Page history last edited by Jon 12 years, 4 months ago

Helen McCloy Helen Worrell Clarkson McCloy (1904-1994) was an American mystery writer, creator of the detective psychologist Dr. Basil Willing.

McCloy was born in New York City and educated at the Friend's School, run by Brooklyn's Quaker community. In 1923 she went to France and studied at the Sorbonne. After finishing her studies, she worked for Hearst's Universal News Service (1927-32). Then she was an art critic for International Studio and other magazines, and a free-lance contributor to London Morning Post and Parnassus. McCloy returned to the United States in 1932.

Her first novel, Dance of Death was published in 1933. Cue for Murder (1942) was a story of murder during a Broadway revival of Sardou's Fédora. The One That Got Away (1945) explored the psychology of Fascism. A non-Willing mystery, Panic (1944), was set in a remote cottage in the Catskills and was notable for its use of cryptanalysis. In Mr Splitfoot (1968) Dr. Willing and his wife explore a haunted room in a house in New England. Through a Glass Darkly (1950) is a puzzle in the supernatural tradition of Carr.

"You enter a room, a street, a country road. You see a figure ahead of you, solid, three-dimensional, brightly coloured. Moving and obeying all the laws of optics. Its clothing and posture is vaguely familiar. You hurry toward the figure for a closer view. It turns its head and - you are looking at yourself. Or rather a perfect mirror-image of yourself only - there is no mirror. So, you know it is your double. And that frightens you, for tradition tells you that he who sees his own double is about to die..." (from Through a Glass, Darkly, 1950)

McCloy used the double theme also in A Change of Heart (1973). In The Impostor (1977) a woman, Marina, recovers consciousness after a car crash to find herself in a psychiatric clinic. She recalls the accident clearly but she's told that all is her delusion. A man arrives, not her husband, but the get away she accepts the impostor.

"'We live in a curious culture today. Everyone wants money and notoriety, but everyone hates the few who actually get the money and notoriety. They immediately become the targets of envy and malice. People watch them for the first sign of weakness the way vultures watch a dying animal. Do you want that?'" (from The Impostor, 1977)

The Slayer and the Slain (1957) deals with amnesia. The first part is narrated by a young man, Harry Vaughan, who falls down, and loses part of his memory, about half an hour. He feels himself ten years older, suffers from headaches, meets people who know him but he doesn't remember them. The books ends in a locked-room mystery: Harry is shot dead in a room where all the doors and windows are locked.

In 1946 McCloy married Davis Dressler, who had gained fame with his Mike Shayne novels, written under the pseudonym Brett Halliday. She founded with Dressler the Torquil Publishing Company and a literary agency (Halliday and McCloy). Their marriage ended in 1961. In the 1950s and 1960s McCloy was a co-author of review column for Connecticut newspapers and in 1950 she became the first woman to serve as president of Mystery Writers of America. In 1953 she received an Edgar from the same organization for her criticism. McCloy helped to found in 1971 a New England chapter of the Mystery Writers of America in Boston.

Nick Fuller on Helen McCloy

Helen McCloy is arguably the best American detective writer. (As I've said before, I see Carr as a British - or at most trans-Atlantic - writer.) I've only read a handful of her books (Design for Dying, The Goblin Market, Through a Glass Darkly, Mr Splitfoot, Cruel as the Grave and the excellent C&L short story collection The Pleasant Assassin), but there wasn't a dud among them. Her books are subtle and well written, using morbid psychology, obscure historical facts and literary allusions to unsettle the reader and to fuel the extraordinary power of her plots. Through a Glass Darkly, for instance, is among the top twenty best detective stories ever written, both for the way in which its horror arises almost entirely from Jamesian understatement (suggestion and the incongruous presence of the normal create the feeling of something terribly wrong) and for the ambiguous solution.

Mike Grost on Helen McCloy

Helen McCloy also has affinities with the Freeman-Crofts tradition. Her psychiatrist-detective Dr. Basil Willing is in the Dr. Thorndyke tradition. There is a great deal of science of all types in McCloy's tales. Dr. Willing is especially interested in human sensory perception, the mechanisms by which people see, hear and feel. These often play crucial roles in the stories. Although the designation of Willing as a psychiatrist might lead one to assume that Willing is a specialist in Freudian psychoanalysis, in actual fact he seems most interested in perception and thinking, what today we would call "cognitive psychology". There are also scientific backgrounds to many of the tales, such as the lab and truth serum in The Deadly Truth (1941), and the UFO investigation in "The Singing Diamonds" (1949).

Some of McCloy's best known works use approaches to mystery plot construction pioneered by earlier writers in the realist tradition. McCloy's Through a Glass, Darkly is in the tradition of realist writer Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Image in the Mirror". There is also an effort to focus on Croftsian timetables and alibis, in the early novel [Cue For Murder.]

A persistent theme of McCloy's work consists of characters who are alone in a private world, one limited and closed off by their perceptions, perceptions of reality that are different from other people's. Sometimes these "private" ways of perception emerge from the character's physical and mental states; in other stories the perceptions are imposed on them by other characters, often the villains of the story up to some nefarious plot. In some of her early stories, it is Dr. Willing who uses his expertise in cognitive psychology to explore and define the parameters of these private worlds. Later on, in a novel like The Sleepwalker (1974), these concerns are woven into the fabric of a suspense novel. I have to be a bit vague about the actual mechanisms and content of these private perceptual worlds; they usually form the basis of either the solution of McCloy's works, or major plot surprises that she throws out midway. An example, that can be mentioned here without spoiling anybody's fun, is the heroine of Through a Glass, Darkly, who keeps thinking that people are encountering her double.

McCloy's characters tend to have detailed life histories. These are often explored and probed over the course of a novel, with new aspects coming to light. An archetypal situation in McCloy is a vulnerable young woman, living in a building full of potentially menacing strangers. There is the poor cousin staying with her rich relatives in Dance of Death, the young traveler to New York staying in the sinister hotel in Do Not Disturb, the young art teacher Faustina Crayle in Through a Glass, Darkly staying at the forbidding girl's school, and the heroine of The Sleepwalker (1974) at her rooming house.

McCloy is a graceful, literate writer. There are descriptive passages of the rain and the ocean in The Deadly Truth, which are really beautiful. McCloy also has the "readability" of the best storytellers: you can read her books in a single sitting.

McCloy's early novel Cue For Murder (1942), for a long time was her most famous. It is nowhere as good, in my opinion, as her later works, those from Through a Glass, Darkly (1948) on. While most Golden Age writers did their best work before 1945, and declined thereafter, McCloy did exactly the opposite: except for her well crafted The Goblin Market (1943), her post World War II tales are generally better than those before 1945. The later McCloy works are really dazzling, and the reader should run, not walk, to get hold of copies of them.