This book was a recent online acquisition which I discovered when I came across the clearance page on the Waterstones website. It has been nearly four years since I have read anything by McCloy, so it seemed like a good time to return to her work. In keeping with some American vintage mystery publications, the Agora 2020 edition starts with ‘Persons of interest in this mystery’ and ‘Objects of interest in this mystery’ lists. McCoy also seems to have amused herself by giving each chapter name a single word beginning with ‘E’.
Synopsis
‘I take pleasure in informing you that you have been chosen as murderer for Group No 1. Please follow these instructions with as great exactness as possible.
On his way to visit the dean at Yorkville University, Assistant Chief Inspector Foyle seems to stumble across a murder, or at least the plans for one. Chalking it all up to a gag (because real killers don’t use the word ‘murder’), Foyle is horrified to learn about the death of Dr Konradi, a scientist at the campus. Though it looks like a suicide, Foyle isn’t so sure, and Dr Basil Willing, psychologist and sleuth, is called in to aid the investigation. With motives and murder piling up, the pair must solve the case before more lives are put at risk.’
Overall Thoughts
The first chapter gets things off to an interesting start. Patrick Foyle, Assistant Chief Inspector in the New York police, is trying to decide if Yorkville is a good place to send his son (ironically wanting to get him away from crime and violence). It is while he is pondering this question, sitting on a bench on campus, that he encounters a paper blowing in the wind. A paper which contains instructions for a murderer, pertaining to location and timings. The location is Southerland Hall, which also houses Dr Konradi’s laboratory. Is it some kind of prank? That is the stance Dr Konradi takes when he meets Foyle soon afterwards, whilst looking for some missing notes. He does not want to tell the dean and be seen as a “spoilt sport”. Nevertheless, Dr Konradi ominous parting words are: “If anything should happen this evening, I want you to remember one thing: I am just finishing important research, and nothing would induce me to commit suicide while it is still pending.” So, nothing to worry about there then… Dr Konradi is a biochemist on the teaching staff, and he is also a refugee from Europe, having escaped Dachau concentration camp.
Not long afterwards, hours before the instructions dictated, a gunshot is heard and Foyle races to Southerland Hall, only naturally to discover that it is a false alarm, the gunshot coming Professor Prickett’s experiment on his four-month-old son, a test which aims to study the fear reaction. Although it must be said Mrs Prickett is not happy about her husband making her son cry. But in the manner of doomsday clock, by the end of the experiment the gun has gone. The readers wonder if when the next time it is used, it won’t be deployed in the cause of science…
Given the presence of Professor Prickett in the plot and the fact I had read Lange Lewis’ Juliet Dies Twice (1943) earlier this year, I anticipated the letter of instructions being part of a psychology experiment involving a faked crime, as well as the fact that the killer was going to take advantage of this opportunity. However, I think McCloy creates a different sort of mystery compared to Lewis’ one, despite the use of the same plot point.
Although Patrick Foyle tells no one about the letter, he does scout out Southerland Hall and waits outside, in time for the hour stipulated by the letter. He is able to observe who goes in and out of the building and then at some point enters it himself, before getting locked inside. I have to admit this section felt a little unclear as to where Patrick was in relation to what was happening. A map would have been handy.
Nevertheless, the initial crime has a number of interesting elements. There is ambiguity over whether Dr Konradi’s death was suicide or murder. This is not unusual in mystery fiction, but McCloy puts a lot of effort into making convincing evidence for both sides. Furthermore, there is contradictory evidence about the man who got away from the scene, with the night watchman and Professor Prickett saying different things. But which one is lying? Detective fiction makes you mistrust respectability, I would argue, so I must say I was more suspicious of the professor.
Dr Basil Willing, a psychiatrist attached to the DA’s office, is called in at this juncture. There are plenty of shifty characters for him to investigate, who are invariably all on their high horses about being questioned. Willing’s approach to questioning suspects, differs from Patrick Foyle’s. This is discussed in a conversation they have. Foyle asks: “How are we ever going to clear away this fog of lies and get down to the facts?” To which Willing replies:
“I don’t want to clear away the lies […] You forget that lies are facts – psychological facts. You policemen and lawyers make a great mistake when you shut up a liar and prosecute him for perjury. If you’d only listen to him long enough, you’d learn everything there is to know about him – or her […] A lie doesn’t reproduce external facts faithfully – it is a product of the liar’s own mind, and therefore a clue to the quality and content of his mind. The liar, like any other storyteller, must draw upon his remembered experiences to build his fantasy, and his choice of detail is guided by his tastes and emotions. So if you want to learn something about a man’s emotions and memories listen to his lies.”
I felt like Willing’s idea is an expansion or extension of one Poirot shares in The ABC Murders (1936). In this earlier book Poirot says: ‘there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation!’ Poirot is suggesting how hard it is to conceal things, if you keep being asked questions and talked to. Eventually, he surmises, you will give something away.
In addition, this idea is picked up later in the novel, when Basil Willing opines:
“A real clue is objective […] Like a photograph, it’s a product of external circumstances – accidents of time and space, force and matter, light and shadow. But a false clue is subjective. It’s like a Chinese painting, a product of internal circumstances – the imagination and personality of the murderer himself. In these days of mass production a button or a cigarette stub found at the scene of a crime can rarely be traced to a single individual. But a trick contrived by a murderer’s mind and executed by his hands must always be a clue to his mental processes and manual training. Like all creations, it’s stamped with the traits of its creator, and therefore it may be a clue to his identity.”
I found this to be an interesting idea, but I was a little on the fence with it. What if a murderer uses mass produced objects to create false clues? Or is it being suggested that the way the murderer would do this, would still give them away? If anyone has some thoughts on the idea, do let me know!
I enjoyed Willing’s involvement in the questioning, as it injected a note of humour. This is one of my favourite examples:
‘“You actually suspect me?” cried Prickett. “This is absurd! What possible motive could a professor of psychology have for such a crime?”
Basil smiled. “You might have thought it would intensify the emotional reaction of your subject.”
Prickett looked as if such flippancy were beneath the dignity of a psychologist but exactly the sort of thing you might expect from a psychiatrist.’
Nevertheless, Willing does not push suspects when questioning them, like a police officer would. Yet he does ultimately find things out, although he raises the issue of needing to decide which information is true.
An interesting aspect of the investigation is that on the night of Konradi’s death, Professor Prickett is very keen on the suspects being questioned using the lie detector test. However, over the next 24 hours everyone, including himself, refuses to take part. Now the killer might have obvious reasons for refusing, but what about everyone else? What is motivating them?
Via the character of Dr Albert Feng Lo, Professor of Abnormal Psychology, The Man in the Moonlight, also indulges in a moment of metafiction, during a conversation Basil has with Dr Feng Lo:
“I don’t believe you’d suspect me at all if I didn’t happen to be Chinese! He smiled once more. “The sinister Chinese person is a familiar figure in your western detective stories.”
“All that changed when Charlie Chan superseded Fu Manchu,” returned Basil. “Today it’s one of the rules of the game that the murderer must never be a servant, a madman or Chinese.”
“How consoling! But do the police realise that this is only a detective story? I’m afraid they’ll forget the murderer must never be Chinese when they find that I have no alibi.”
Through the character of Basil, McCloy is referencing Ronald Knox’s Decalogue, as well as the work of Sax Rohmer (creator of Fu Manchu) and Earl Derr Biggers (creator of Charlie Chan). It is a shame Joan Cowdroy’s Mr Li Moh doesn’t get a mention, but I suspect Cowdroy’s books were not very well known. (The Dean Street Press have reprinted some of these mysteries though). Over the course of the 1940s Juanita Sheridan would introduce the world to two Chinese amateur sleuths, Angie Tudor (featuring only in What Dark Secret (1943)) and Lily Wu (who starred in four mysteries, starting with The Chinese Chop (1949)).
It was interesting to see that as the case develops, suspicion turns on Konradi. Was he who he really said he was? Was he secretly a German spy? He had been given an expensive laboratory, but he did not seem to be doing anything with the equipment. Mice were brought to his lab each day, but nothing seemed different about them, which was odd since he was experimenting on them to identify factors which cause cancer. What experiments he was doing were too simple for what he should be doing. He had no lab assistants, only a secretary who understood little to nothing about chemistry. I found this added an extra strand to the investigation and I think it was used well in the overall plot. This is a mystery with multiple deaths, and I found it engaging that it was not immediately obvious how the deaths connected with one another, particularly the third one.
Humour is not the overriding tone of the narrative, but it certainly has its place at times, and I liked how it turned up in unexpected places. For example, at one point McCloy is describing how hard it is for a group of characters to avoid talking about Dr Konradi’s death at dinner:
‘So many avenues of thought led back to Konradi – it was difficult to avoid them all. Mrs Lysaght told a story about some member of the faculty – only to realise to late that he was biochemist. The Dean plunged to the rescue with politics – and in a moment someone was talking about the Nazis. Basil thought French art would surely be a safe subject – but mention of Fragonard’s drawings evoked Vienna. Finally Southerland began talking about the car made to his order last winter. This miracle of engineering was an inexhaustible subject. The piston rings alone lasted from salad to dessert.’
One wonders if McCloy suffered such an automobile-based conversation in real life!
I thought WW2 might just be a background theme to the novel, as America had not joined the war yet. There are no restrictions placed upon German residents and Nazi propaganda is freely sold in shops. But as the book progresses this global conflict becomes increasingly important to understanding the crimes that have taken place. I appreciated how the motive intertwines the global with the personal. It is the sort of thing you might expect to find in a thriller, but this is a detective novel and as such the theme is handled in a very interesting fashion. The killer is surprising, but I am not sure if it is in a good way. There are certain clues which I think the reader will struggle to pick up, either due to missing technical knowledge, or because the lay of the land is less clear. Moreover, the only way the killer is caught is because they try to kill Basil, although they provide a handy confession out of arrogance, before that. The appearance of the killer is abrupt, out of pace with the rest of the story and the ending concluded on an unexpected and perhaps jarring note. However, there is much to test your little grey cells in this book, and I am still keen to track down a few more of the earlier Basil Willing cases, as McCloy offers plots which are a bit more complex and/or rich in social context.
Rating: 4.25/5