McCloy, Helen - The One That Got Away (1945) 

By Mike Grost 

The One That Got Away (1945) fails as a puzzle plot story. It does have some good descriptive writing about Scotland in it. It also has some very sophisticated writing about Fascism in it, which by 1945 was a subject of deep horror to the author. McCloy's take on Fascism is that it is rooted in woman hatred, and rejection of a mother's tender care of children. She cites the Hitler Youth as examples of how the Nazis wanted to replace the female headed home by public macho-oriented programs of child rearing. This political theme of the book is mirrored in the puzzle plot of the story, which is about a young man who keeps running away from home. In contrast to these Nazi ideas, McCloy includes two female headed households in her work: one run by a widowed Scots farm woman, the other a marriage of two writers where it is the wife who earns the big bucks, and is the financial support of the family. There is also much discussion of the Picts, an ancient Scottish ethnic group wherein descent and property passed matrilineally. I am not sure that this is a complete analysis of Fascism, but it is certainly an interesting set of ideas.

McCloy's take on Fascism is oddly similar to Borges' in "Deutsches Requiem", wherein Borges sees the essence of Fascism in the celebration of brutality. McCloy completes Borges' analysis by showing how this brutality is going to be inculcated in children through the destruction of motherhood as an institution. Both McCloy and Borges are also deeply worried that although the Nazis have been defeated militarily, the ideas of Fascism will live on and be incorporated into Western Civilization. McCloy seems much more interested in current affairs than many of her mystery writing contemporaries, both here and in The Singing Diamonds. However, the latter story succeeds brilliantly as a mystery tale, whereas One falls flat. Much later McCloy would write a short look at the hippie era college scene, The Pleasant Assassin (1970), that is full of detailed observation. Read today, it seems like a time capsule of the period. Like all of McCloy's political writings, it contains disturbing undertones. Here a sinister behaviorist psychology professor is proposing a new society based on conditioning and drugs to control child rearing. Like the vicious Nazi apologist in The One That Got Away, he has surface respectability as he undermines the basic principles of Western society. As in the earlier novel, the story shows his devastating impact on impressionable young people.

The wife in this book who writes popular fiction is a recurring character in McCloy's books. Earlier, there was a somewhat similar although far less sympathetic woman author of lucrative but low brow popular novels in McCloy's Who's Calling? (1942). In that early book, McCloy seems to follow the standard literary party line, depicting popular fiction as worthless, formulaic pap. By the time of The One That Got Away (1945), McCloy is far more admiring of the skill it takes to write popular fiction. By Two-Thirds of a Ghost (1956), there is a spirited defense of mystery fiction, and a more skeptical look at standard "serious" literature. However, there is reason to believe that McCloy had positive feelings towards mystery fiction right from the start. The dust jacket of her first novel, The Dance of Death (1938), contains a quote from McCloy comparing the prejudices facing mystery fiction in the 1930's to those faced by the Novel itself in the 19th Century, and declaring her intention to write many more mysteries.