McCloy, Helen - The Goblin Market (1943)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

The “goblin market” is the secret to preserve which an American journalist is murdered on the island of Santa Teresa early in the War. Despite the Nazi activity, submarines, street-fighting and codes, which make this McCloy’s most violent novel, she does not neglect construction of plot, resulting in a vivid detective story, reminiscent of middle-period Carr at his best. Detection by the journalist’s replacement, a mystery man, is generally good. The goblin market clue itself, though, is rather vague, and too similar to Ellery Queen. Dr. Willing is rather unnecessarily brought in at the end. Since this appeared in the same year as Marsh’s Colour Scheme, it would be interesting to know whether one was at all inspired by the other.

by Mike Grost

The Goblin Market (1943) is one of several novels McCloy wrote with a spy background during World War II. Despite these elements of international intrigue, the book is constructed as a classic puzzle plot mystery. McCloy opens with a murder, and the rest of the novel shows her hero detecting the solution to the crime. Along the way, there are a whole series of subsidiary mysteries; the hero solves these one at a time, in a succession of chapters lasting throughout the book. In many of McCloy's novels, the biggest surprise is not at the finale, but comes half way through the book, usually in the form of a carefully planned plot revelation sprung on the reader. Here, however, there is a steady stream of ingenious twists and revelations throughout the entire story.

There is a tiny flaw in the logic of this otherwise ingenious mystery novel. McCloy does not close her circle of suspects. That is, later in the story McCloy shows that only one of the principal characters in the book could have committed the murder, and there are abundant, well planned clues demonstrating this. However, McCloy never establishes that no outsider could have committed the crime. It seems perfectly possible that some person we had never seen or heard of could have committed these crimes; there is no clue in the story indicating otherwise. Other than this small nit, the book shows an excellent sense of logic, with deduction used to reconstruct the crime, the circumstances leading up to the murder, and the killer.

There is only a little about cognitive psychology in this tale. Instead, this is one of several works McCloy wrote centering on codes and ciphers. In this novel, the "code" is cablese, the shorthand jargon newspaper correspondents use for sending journalistic cables to the home office. McCloy had been a newspaper correspondent herself, in Paris, so she was familiar with the profession from the inside. There is a whole Background in this book depicting the lives of foreign correspondents. It shows with a wealth of intriguing detail, most of which is used to develop ingenious mysteries in the puzzle plot.

"The Pleasant Assassin" (1970) is one of a series of late McCloy short stories that center around secret codes. These stories seem to begin with "Dead Man's Code" (1954). This piece is signed by McCloy's husband at the time, mystery writer Brett Halliday, and stars his series detective, private eye Mike Shayne. However, Halliday's 1955 introduction to the tale states that it was largely ghost written by McCloy while he was busy with a novel. These very short code stories - each is around 10 to 12 pages - are jammed with enough plot and background to furnish a whole novel. Their plotting tends to suffer from coincidence and improbability, but they can be fun to read, anyway. McCloy's novel Panic (1944) also contains a code, as does the story "Murder Ad Lib" (1964).

Chapter 8 of The Goblin Market, "Missing Answers", contains a clever self parody of psychiatry, and of McCloy's previous works with a psychiatrist-detective. It is good to see McCloy being able to poke fun of herself. It also might indicate a change in direction of her work: Willing would appear less frequently in McCloy's books from this point forward. The chapter also contains a reference, although not by name, to the "Trojan Horse" episode in McCloy's earlier [Who's Calling?] (1942). Warning: it gives away the only good plot twist in that dismal novel, probably McCloy's poorest.

Some elements in The Goblin Market (1943) anticipate McCloy's later novel, Through a Glass, Darkly. Both books explore the world of superstition, and use it as a background for some ingenious mystery plot twists. Both also use a 19th Century Victorian poem dealing with supernatural events to create atmosphere and add meaning to the tale. Both novels also look sympathetically at the world of demimondaines, with the feminist McCloy arguing that such women are often unjustly undervalued by society. However, there is little of the earlier book's political commentary in Glass. Instead, its place is taken structurally by much analysis of psychical research: to me a much less significant subject.