Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing

"Remarkable, Highly Imaginative, Fiercely Independent" With these words, B. A. Pike in Detective Fiction: The Collector's Guide described the extraordinary novels and short stories of Helen McCloy (1904-1993). Beginning with Dance of Death (1938), her first novel about psychiatrist-detective Dr. Basil Willing, McCloy experimented with daringly imaginative concepts within the framework of the formal, fairplay detective story. Her short stories, for example, include "The Singing Diamonds," which combines death, detection, and apparently genuine sightings of flying saucers (in the shape of diamonds), and in her classic "Through a Glass, Darkly," McCloy deals with the issue of the doppelganger or the unknown double that we all (supposedly) have.