McCloy, Helen

Helen McCloy is an American crime writer born in New York. She grew up in a book-loving family. Her mother, Helen Worrell McCloy, was an author and her father, William McCloy, was the editor of the New York Evening Sun. As a result, Helen McCloy read from an early age; she was especially fond of the Sherlock Holmes stories. She attended a Quaker school in Brooklyn, and in 1923 she went to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. She worked as freelance journalist after graduation before returning to the United States where she contributed to, among others, the New York Times and the London Morning Post as an art critic and freelance journalist. During this period she started to write crime stories. The first, Dance of Death, came in 1938 and she soon became very successful.