McGinnis Nine-Nine: “A Change of Heart”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



A Change of Heart, by Helen McCloy (Dell, 1974).

I really haven’t given Helen McCloy her due, either on this page or in The Rap Sheet. She was quite a remarkable woman, by all reports. Born in New York City in the summer of 1904 to parents William Conrad McCloy (longtime managing editor of the New York Evening Sun) and Helen Worrell McCloy (also a writer, who contributed to such magazines as Good Housekeeping), she took up the pen herself in her early teens. At 19 years of age, she migrated to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, and following her graduation, remained in the French capital as a reporter for Universal News Services, which had been founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1918. She later became an art critic.

Different sources provide conflicting information about which year it was that McCloy finally returned to the United States (some say 1927, others 1932). But there is no disagreement about her thereafter embarking of a fiction-writing career. Having greatly enjoyed Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales as a girl, she tried her own hand at concocting mystery novels—and proved adept at the task. She introduced her series protagonist, psychiatrist-detective Dr. Basil Willing, in her first published novel, 1938’s Dance of Death. Willing would go on to appear in a dozen more of McCloy’s books, including Cue for Murder (1942), The One That Got Away (1945), and Alias Basil Willing (1951). Both character and creator are best known, though, for 1950’s Through a Glass, Darkly, a work of psychological suspense that has earned her comparisons with John Dickson Carr.

In 1946, McCloy (then in her mid-40s) wed fellow author Davis Dresser, who—using the pen name Brett Halliday—had created series private eye Michael Shayne. Together they had a daughter, and formed both a publishing company and a literary agency. Unfortunately, their marriage did not endure; they split up in 1961, but remained friends.

By then, Basil Willing’s “mother” had started composing newspaper book reviews, and in 1950 was chosen as the first woman president of Mystery Writers of America. Four years later, the MWA gave her an Edgar Award for her literary criticism. (It followed that up in 1990 by presenting her with its Grand Master Award.) And on top of all that, in 1971 McCloy helped found the first regional chapter of MWA, in New England.

(Left) Author Helen McCloy.

McCloy enjoyed a protracted and quite prolific fiction-writing career, which she did not confine to yarns involving the “tall and elegant” Willing. Under the pseudonym Helen Clarkson, she published a single science-fiction novel, The Last Day (1959), which was expanded from one of her handful of SF short stories. Among McCloy’s most celebrated crime-fiction standalones are Do Not Disturb (1943), She Walks Alone (1948), and The Slayer and the Slain (1957). Her 1980 Basil Willing novel, Burn This, won the Nero Award, an honor bestowed by a New York City-based fan organization, the Wolfe Pack, to the best American mystery of the year written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories. McCloy’s works have been lauded for their sophistication, psychological depth, and unusual elements (from split personalities and demoniac possession to doppelgängers).

A Change of Heart, first released in 1973 by Dodd, Mead (and reissued by paperback publisher Dell a year later, complete with Robert McGinnis-painted front), is not typically mentioned among McCloy’s premier tales. But the Golden Age of Detection Wiki does call it “a potboiler,” and provides this plot précis:

In 1934, schoolboy friends Lee and Laurie make a solemn vow: they will meet at the [pretentiously upscale] Crane Club in Manhattan on Lee’s fiftieth birthday.

Thirty-eight years later, Lee is a widowed translator working for a multinational conglomerate run by another school friend, Justin Carew. On the afternoon of his fiftieth he sets off to meet his friend and finds himself drawn into a web of robbery and bloodshed. Returning home, Lee has a stroke which renders him unable to communicate, and the unscrambling of the event and Lee’s involvement with it is left to his daughter Girzel—who still inexplicably loves him despite his giving her that awful name. And there is a romance, though fortunately an unobtrusive one.

The book gets off to a slow start and is padded with unoriginal homilies on twentieth-century life. The plot devices—like the stroke—creak with age, and the resolution is dull and puts it all down to the convenient scapegoat of corporate wickedness, which it assumes is capable of anything, no matter how mean or implausible. At sixty-eight [years old], McCloy may have been running out of ideas: certainly there is nothing about this book to suggest that its author had already had a long and distinguished career in GAD fiction.

Helen McCloy, who had always been modest about her impact on the crime/mystery-fiction genre, passed away in 1994 at age 90.