The Deadly Truth

 The Deadly Truth (1941) by Helen McCloy

Honesty is the best policy. At least that the way the saying goes. But is it really? The guests of Claudia Bethune find out the answer when the wealthy beauty throws a dinner party with drinks laced with truth serum. Claudia is a fabulously wealthy socialite with a vicious sense of humor. She thinks it will be great fun to get her "friends" together and have them blurt out the truth and nothing but the truth. But she gets more than she bargained for and before the next morning comes, she's discovered strangled to death with her own platinum and emerald necklace.

Dr. Basil Willing, psychiatric consultant to the New York district attorney's office has been renting the "Hut" (a small cottage on the Bethune country estate) and he's soon asked by the local authorities to give them some help on the murder case. There's a houseful of suspects. Claudia's husband, Michael, was still in love with his ex-wife and after the beans got spilled at dinner about that little secret it may have been prudent for him to kill Claudia before she had time to cut him out of her will or divorce him. Phyllis Bethune (the aforementioned ex-wife) may have had the same thought. Charles Rodney, manager of Claudia's textile mill, has been playing games with the labor force and working on buying up stock cheap--he's almost got enough to hold the majority vote on the board. When that came out over drinks, Claudia threatened to put a stop to his anticipated future purchases. Maybe he thought it would be easier with Claudia completely out of the way. Dr. Roger Slater is the man who developed the new scopolamine derivative--and the man from whom Claudia stole the doses she dropped in the drinks. If the news of his carelessness (he left the tubes right there in front of her after all), he'll lose his job--and maybe never work again as a scientist. Peggy Titus was under a cloud of suspicion for theft and Claudia held the trump card that would prove her innocence. Peggy kept hanging around and searching the premises for the proof, but maybe she got tired of looking and decided to get rid of the source of the rumors. 

The interesting thing for me about this one is that even though motive is a driving force, it's not the important part of the investigation. The true motive is only revealed in the final pages of the story, but you don't need it to get to the solution. A lot of emphasis is placed on auditory clues and I am pleased that I can say I picked up all the correct ones (there are a few red herrings about--as you would expect in a nicely plotted mystery). I will say that if we consider the characters as real people then I am a bit surprised that the culprit fell into the trap laid for him in the semi-reconstruction-of-the-crime scene. Willing has just finished emphasizing one of the auditory clues. If I'm the killer, I'm certainly not going to follow that up by making my connection to that clue blazingly obvious. Did the culprit not hear a thing Willing just said? Maybe s/he subconsciously wanted to get caught and just couldn't help themselves.... Oh, well. Other than that, a nicely plotted and very interesting mystery.  ★★★★  

First line: A butterfly in a beehive could not have looked more out of place than Claudia Bethune in the vestibule of the Southerland Foundation.

The trooper seemed to think the fact that he had arrested Basil constituted a bond between them. In the circumstances, it was just as well. [p. 112]

No one every expects to fall in love. Perhaps no one ever really wants to. [Dr. Roger Slater; p. 136]

Last lines: "Only afterward did I realize that killing her was even more foolish than kissing her. She wasn't worth it..."
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Deaths = 4 (two natural; one strangled; one shot)