Helen McCloy Biography and List of Works

American mystery writer, whose series character Dr. Basil Willing debuted in DANCE OF DEATH (1938). Willing believes, that "every criminal leaves psychic fingerprints, and he can't wear gloves to hide them." He appeared in 12 of McCloys'novels and in several short stories.

"'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)

Helen McCloy was born in New York City. Her mother was the writer Helen Worrell McCloy and father, William McCloy, was the long time managing editor of the New York Evening Sun. She was 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 free-lance contributor to London Morning Post and Parnassus. McCloy returned to the United States in 1932.

Having read Sherlock Holmes as a young girl, McCloy retained an interest in mysteries and began to write them in the 1930s. Her first novel, Dance of Death, was published in 1933. It was followed by several other crime publications in the 1940s. CUE FOR MURDER (1942) was a story of murder onstage during a Broadway revival of Sardou's Fédora. THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY (1945) explored the psychology of Fascism, postulating that it is rooted in hatred of women, and rejection of a mother's tender care of children. A non-Willing mystery, PANIC (1944), was set in a remote cottage in the Catskills and was notable for its use of cryptoanalysis.

In MR. SPLITFOOT (1968) Dr. Willing and his wife take shelter at a remote house in New England, where they must lodge in a haunted room. McCloy's acknowledged masterpiece is the eighth Basil Willing novel, THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY (1950). In the story, art teacher Faustina Crayle is dismissed from Brereton School for Girls, without reason. Willing is brought into the case by his fiancée Gisela. It appears that Faustina frequently appears in two places. The theme of doppelgänger in solved cleverly in the end - 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 delusion. A man arrives, not her husband, but to get away she accepts the impostor. McCloy used in the story a cryptological double bluff. She had read about it in 1944 when she was writing Panic, but because she was unable to trace the source, she improvised her own version of it.

In 1946 McCloy married Davis Dresser, 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.

"Mystery writers are often asked why the detective story is popular. Could this popularity come from the fact that the detective story is one of the few surviving forms of storytelling? Love of the story is older than any folklore we know, as old as human language itself."
(from Crime & Mystery Writers, 1996)

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. McCloy helped to found in 1971 a New England chapter of the Mystery Writers of America in Boston.

Dr. Basil Willing: tall and elegant, comes from Baltimore, but had a Russian mother. Willing became interested in psychiatry when he saw 'shell-shocked' soldiers during his World War I service. He studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, then in Paris and Vienna. Willing married an Austrian refugee, Gisela von Hohenems, who first appeared in The Man in the Moonlight (1940). Later he is widowed, removed from Boston, and living with a daughter named Gisela after her mother. He writes books and lectures at Harvard. Although Willings background refers to his expertise in Freudian psychoanalysis, he is interested in perception and thinking, how the villain's perceptions are different from other people's. - Willing appeared mostly in novels but also first time in the short story 'Through a Glass, Darkly' which was a retelling of the legend of the Doppelgänger and was expanded into a novel of the same name in 1950. In 'The Singing Diamonds' Willing investigated reports of flying saucers; it became the title story of a 1965 collection of works by Helen McCloy.

For further reading: Crime & Mystery Writers, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996); 'Women of Mystery' by Robert Allen Papinchak (1998, in Mystery & Suspense Writers, vol. 2, ed. by Robin W, Winks) - For further information: Helen McCloy by Michael E. Grost

DANCE OF DEATH, (1938)
THE IMPOSTOR, (1977)
THE SMOKING MIRROR, (1979)
BURN THIS, (1980)