Better Off Dead by Helen McCloy

After fifteen years living under an assumed name, he returns to accuse five charming people of his murder! Helen McCloy, author of the Basil Willing mystery series, packs a lot of punch into this short thriller.

All of New York knows the name Stephen Longworth, now a man of the world. In his youth, he was a boatman for the wealthy Vanbrugh family, under his real name Frank Bly. How did they explain his sudden disappearance? Returning to Yarborough to discover who attempted to kill him, he finds their home threadbare and gloomy; the once beautiful Tessie, when she was still married to Geoffrey, now looks strained ('as wasted and hoary as one of the Fates'!); their little daughter Nan, enamoured of Frank when she was just 5, is now a young woman. Frank has also changed, unrecognizable at thirty-two with his hair flocked with grey. As before, neighbour Dick Strawn is there with his wife, Denise de Beaupre. It began with delivery of a French antique wrapped in newspaper, and the payment of $5000 going missing. Frank was deemed guilty and fired. Later that night, one of those five attempted murder and his body thrown into the river.

They quickly see through his ruse of having met Frank in the past, for his dead body was fished from the river after he disappeared! Mysteriously, the missing money had been anonymously returned and the boathouse burned to the ground. Frank was now a murder victim investigating his own murder!

Frank falls into a trap of guilt when he decides to leave the past behind, on the very night the police announce someone has been murdered. It's a pleasure to discover a tight plot that grips you; it could have been expanded to double the size of a Dell 10¢ digest.

Helen McCloy always satisfies with her psychological mysteries. She was the first woman president of the Mystery Writers of America, and was married to Davis Dresser, better known as the writer Brett Halliday, famous for his Mike Shayne mystery novels.

Better Off Dead is available as an eBook from Orion Publishing.

1949 / Paperback