Above you see a cover effort by Gerald Gregg for Helen McCloy’s 1945 mystery The Man in the Moonlight. This is from Dell Publications, and you probably recognized it right away as a mapback edition. You see that here too, with its fictive university campus.
The story is a variation of a locked room mystery, however it requires more than the usual helping of suspension of disbelief from readers. Basically, a university psychologist stages an experiment that’s, more than anything, a form of live action role playing in which a colleague is to attempt to achieve the circumstances needed to commit a murder. But the psychologist is really testing more than his willing maze rat suspects, which is why in the midst of the experiment the parameters suddenly change in a way designed to induce panic. We won’t get into the ethics of that.
It’s during this emotional experiment that the murder occurs, and it just happens that police detective Patrick Foyle is on campus when it happens. He’s on the case in seconds, but much of the investigation (and narrative) falls to a psychiatrist named Basil Willing. Between cop and headshrinker the culprit will out, as they always do. We didn’t really buy any of it, but we did like the fact that the story was set in 1940 and brought in the specter of Nazi involvement. Here’s a fun line: Even in the infinitely remote world of the molecule [no-spoiler] ran afoul of Nazi policy. It’s always been true—fascists get their noses deep into everything.
