Forgotten Book - Panic

Helen McCloy was one of the most interesting American woman crime writers of the twentieth century. I say this on the strength of having read less than half of her extremely varied output, but it's a claim I make with some confidence. Her debut, Dance of Death (1938) introduced her series character Dr Basil Willing and was an extremely impressive performance; it marked the start of a long and impressive career.

Today, though, I'm focusing on a stand-alone novel that she published originally in 1944. This was Panic, a book that I think is not only very unusual but also very well-written. However, the novel wasn't published in the UK until 1972. According to that edition (under the admirable imprint of Victor Gollancz), British publishers turned it down 'on the curious grounds that English readers were not interested in such puzzles'. That edition was also modified to remove some wartime references.

This does seem amazing, but it's a little easier to understand when you discover that a large portion of the novel is devoted to discussion of a complex cipher, created by elderly Felix Mulholland, an expert in the ancient Greeks, whose death from an overdose of digitalis occurs right at the start of the story. Even though McCloy's explanation of how different ciphers work is lucid, the material is challenging, and I must admit I didn't try to solve the cipher.

But there's more to the book than that. Has Felix been murdered, and if so, by whom? And when his niece Alison takes refuge in a remote cottage in the middle of nowhere, is she really safe - or at greater risk than ever before? McCloy combines an ingenious puzzle with skilfully created suspense and a decent whodunit (although some of the information about the culprit's motive was not foreshadowed quite as much as I'd have liked). This is a memorable novel, despite some imperfections, and I plan to talk about it in more detail in a future Life of Crime newsletter.