The Deadly Truth by Helen McCloy

 The Deadly Truth by Helen McCloy

published 1941

 

[excerpt]

A butterfly in a beehive could not have looked more out of place than Claudia Bethune in the vestibule of the Southerland Foundation. The piratical rake of her black straw hat and the sly cut of her black crêpe dress came from the world of fashion and frivolity. The brilliants that winked from the rim of her onyx watch would have kept one of the Foundation’s research chemists in comfort for a year. The staccato click of her three-inch heels wakened echoes unfamiliar in a hall where ears were tuned to the rubber-shod tread of laboratory assistants, and the delicate spice of Angèle’s Nuit de Mai bemused nostrils that had savoured nothing more subtle than carbolic for years.

 

comments: I never don’t enjoy a Helen McCloy book and this one sums up why – great clothes descriptions, fancy black dresses, and a dysfunctional family. And then the slightly unexpected trope of a truth drug. Semi-scientific mumbo-jumbo, but who can resist a scene where a dinnertable-ful of people is going to be given the truth drug, then left to talk their way out of the resulting trouble...

‘It’s a derivative of scopolamin that I’ve just succeeded in isolating’ says the boffin. ‘‘Truth serum’ is just the popular name. Actually, it’s an anaesthetic which dulls pain without obliterating consciousness. It was called ‘twilight sleep’ when used in childbirth because it creates a twilit state between sleeping and waking.’

These drugs feature in novels of the era, and used to puzzle me. In one of the Mapp and Lucia books, a character is ‘seen with’ some twilight sleep, giving rise to a rumour that she is pregnant. I didn’t really understand it till I read Jessica Mitford’s book on the history of maternity care in the US, The American Way of Birth – very helpful and informative.

And as for the same drug under the name scopolamine (in general it seems to have the e at the end) – at a young and impressionable age I went through an Alastair MacLean books phase. In The Guns of Navarone, there is a piece of dialogue about a character who might be captured:

‘They’ll make him talk. Scopolamine will make anyone talk.’

‘Scopolamine! On a dying man?’ Miller was openly incredulous.

Well! I was filled with curiosity, I didn’t understand any aspect of this, and in those days you couldn’t just Google the answers.

So I have form with these drugs….well, fictional form.

 And I have form with dressing-gowns:

“Peg! How often have I told you not to come down to breakfast in a dressing gown! If you can’t get dressed by nine o’clock I’ll have a tray sent to your room.”

“This isn’t a dressing gown — it’s a hostess gown! Some people wear them for dinner.”

The whole dressing gown, hostess gown, teagown, housecoat has had a good going-over on the blog over the years (for example in housecoat mode in an entry on another McCloy book here, and in Margery Sharp here) – I think the key definition in older times was that you didn’t wear the constricting foundation garments – corset, stays, later girdles – under them, so it was more comfortable. The pattern here is a gown which was considered suitable as a negligee or as an evening gown. It doesn’t look quite as loose and comfortable as you might expect… that’s quite a small waist…

There is surprisingly dangerous jewellery, and there is ‘violent magenta lipstick’ – always a warning sign in books see Patricia Wentworth’s The Dower House Mystery  where the heroine is asked why she dislikes (mistrusts) someone: “Well, I expect it was her magenta lips.” 

A character is compared to a painting by John Singer Sargent, Astarte.

 

The plot involves all kinds of weird things. Series detective Dr Basil Willing is a psychiatrist, and although he makes a reasonable sleuth, he’s not someone you would lightly invite to dinner – a pompous judgemental knowall. Also, views on psychology have changed a lot over the years, making his certainties less attractive. But, he catches murderers…

Black outfit from Glamour magazine, via the Clover vintage tumbler – some years later than the date of the book.