McCloy, Helen - Panic (1944)

According to the blurb on the (Gollancz) cover, this is a "mystery thriller which 'works' on three levels: as a case of sudden death; as a whiff of the supernatural; and as a ... puzzle in cryptanalysis". Fair enough. The story is simple; an elderly professor dies and leaves his secretary-niece a complex coded message. The cipher in which the message is written is a military secret which defies analysis; but the niece can solve it, the book implies, because she knows her uncle so well. Niece goes off to recover at one of the convenient rural cottages with which New York mystery stories abound, taking the code with her: but there are footsteps in the night, unexplained movements of furniture and ultimately another death.

Superimposed on this are passages of less-than-convincing psychiatric analysis and passages invoking woodland spirits. The solution to the murder is fairly well clued but I found the motivation thin. As for the cryptanalysis, most of it went over my head; and the ultimate solution didn't actually have much to do with the uncle at all. If you really want to spend a week trying to unscramble the code then all the materials are there, but I doubt whether more than one reader in a thousand would be bothered. And would a dying man really spend his last hours scrabbling through coding sheets? Surely it would be better to call a doctor.

Readable but not revolutionary.

Jon.