THROUGH A GLASS,
DARKLY :
The Detective
Fiction of Helen McCloy
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Helen McCloy is without any
doubt the best
of the American detective writers (I view John Dickson Carr as trans-Atlantic, and more
British than
American). She is much less pretentious
than
Ellery Queen but has more intellectual power and subtlety, using
psychology and
history not merely as window-dressing but as vital ingredients of the
plot and its
detection. She has the power to evoke a
genuine atmosphere of unease rising to dread, notably in the superb Through a Glass, Darkly, whose heroine
is haunted by her doppelganger. She has
the power to construct sound plots which are full of meat but do not
feel like an
academic treatise, and to devise solutions which are ingenious without
being
over-elaborate. All in all, she deserves
to be much better known.
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These pages copyright Nicholas Lester Fuller,
2000--2010. Created 5th December 2004.
