Mr Splitfoot (Dr Basil Willing)
Page 20
Panic (1944)
She Walks Alone (1948)
Better Off Dead (1951)
Unfinished Crime (1954)
The Slayer and the Slain (1957)
Before I Die (1963)
The Singing Diamonds and Other Stories (short stories) (1965)
The Further Side of Fear (1967)
A Question of Time (1971)
A Change of Heart (1973)
The Sleepwalker (1974)
Minotaur Country (1975)
The Changeling Conspiracy (1976)
The Impostor (1977)
The Smoking Mirror (1979)
In memoriam, for my cousin Miriam Worrell Webb.
Helen Worrell Clarkson McCloy (1904–1994)
Born in New York City, Helen McCloy was educated in Brooklyn, at the Quaker Friends’ school, and later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1927–1932 she worked for Hearst’s Universal News Service after which she freelanced as an art critic and contributor to various publications, including the London Morning Post. Shortly after her return to the US she published her first novel, Dance of Death, in 1933, featuring her popular series detective-psychologist Basil Willing. The novel Through a Glass Darkly, a puzzle in the supernatural tradition of John Dickson Carr, is the eighth in the Basil Willing series and is generally acknowledged to be her masterpiece. In 1946 McCloy married fellow author Davis Dresser, famed for his Mike Shayne novels. Together they founded Halliday & McCloy literary agency as well as the Torquil Publishing Company. The couple had one daughter, Chloe, and their marriage ended in 1961. In 1950 Helen McCloy became the first woman president of the Mystery Writers of America and in 1953 she was awarded an Edgar by the same organisation for her criticism. In 1987, critic and mystery writer H.R.F. Keating included her Basil Willing title Mr Splitfoot in a list of the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published.
An Orion ebook
Copyright © Pollinger Ltd as Literary Executor of the Estate of Helen McCloy 1968
The right of Helen McCloy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook first published in Great Britain in 2013
by Orion
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
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An Hachette UK company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4719 1255 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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