Helen McCloy and The Murder Room
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Crime fiction has always held up a mirror to society. The Victorians were fascinated by sensational murder and the emerging science of detection; now we are obsessed with the forensic detail of violent death. And no other genre has so captivated and enthralled readers.
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From the genteel amateur private eyes of the Golden Age and the femmes fatales of pulp fiction, to the morally ambiguous hard-boiled detectives of mid twentieth-century America and their descendants who walk our twenty-first century streets, The Murder Room has it all. ›››
The Murder Room
Where Criminal Minds Meet
Cue for Murder
Helen McCloy
THE MURDER MYSTERY at the Royalty Theatre was solved through the agency of a house fly and a canary.
The fly discovered the chemical evidence that so impressed the jury at the trial, but the canary provided a psychological clue to the murderer’s identity before the murder was committed. Basil Willing is still troubled by the thought that it might have been prevented if he had read the riddle of the canary sooner.
It began with the canary. Though birds are unblessed with public relations counsels this one made the first page of the
BURGLAR FREES BIRD
On April 28 at eleven o’clock in the morning, Dr. Basil Willing unfurled a copy of the
Why risk incurring the severe penalties for burglary by breaking into a shop without stealing anything? Why prolong the risk by lingering on the premises to free a canary from its cage? Was this erratic burglar a man of sentiment who broke into the shop solely in order to free a bird from a cage that was cramped or dark or dirty? A telephone call to the A.S.P.C.A would have been far less risky and more permanent in its effect. But if freeing the bird were an afterthought, what sort of burglar would be distracted from the serious business of burgling by such a frivolous impulse?
At the moment Basil believed his knowledge of this “crime” would always be limited to the few facts contained in the news item. The construction of a plausible hypothesis within such narrow limits was a mental exercise as strict, and therefore as stimulating, as the composition of a sonnet. But the longer he played with those few facts, the more clearly he realized that no hypothesis he could construct embraced all the facts adequately. If this were an anagram, some of the letters were missing. The letters he had spelled only nonsense words and stray syllables, unintelligible and tantalizing as a message in an unknown code.
That afternoon Basil stopped at Police Headquarters to discuss a sabotage case with Assistant Chief Inspector Foyle of the Police Department.
“Well, well!” For once the Inspector’s shrewd, skeptical face was off guard, relaxed and friendly. “I thought you were marooned in Washington for the duration!”
“At the moment I’m working with the New York office of the F.B.I.”
“As a psychiatrist or an investigator?”
“A little of both. Very much the sort of work I used to do for the D.A. If it weren’t for you I’d be in uniform by this time.”
“What have I to do with it?”