Ellery Queen | The Roman Hat Mystery | The French Powder Mystery | The Dutch Shoe Mystery | Influence on John Dickson Carr | The Greek Coffin Mystery | The Egyptian Cross Mystery | Landscapes: Geometry | Mathematics | Handedness | Dying Messages | The Tragedy of X | The Tragedy of Y | The Tragedy of Z | Drury Lane's Last Case | The Tragedy of Errors | Outlines in Mystery Fiction | The American Gun Mystery | The Siamese Twin Mystery | The Chinese Orange Mystery | Homages in Ellery Queen | Cartoons and Comics | Modernism | Dreams | Baseball | The Spanish Cape Mystery | An Ellery Queen Plot Idea - and its Ancestors | The Name "Ellery Queen" | The Adventures of Ellery Queen | The New Adventures of Ellery Queen | Halfway House | Crime-Scene Clues and Profiles | Left Wing Politics | Cooperatives and Leftist Anarchism | The Devil to Pay | The Four of Hearts | The Dragon's Teeth | Relationships | Radio Plays | Calendar of Crime | Impossible Disappearances and Concealed Objects | Minimalism | Calamity Town | The Murderer Is a Fox | Color | Uniforms and Color | Troopers | Leather Decor | There Was an Old Woman | Ten Days' Wonder | Q.B.I. / Queen's Bureau of Investigation | Cat of Many Tails | Double, Double | The Origin of Evil | The King Is Dead | The Glass Village | Inspector Queen's Own Case | Terror Town | The Finishing Stroke | Classical Music | Queens Full | EQMM and the Detective Story | Recommended Reading
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page | Download a free E-book of my mystery stories in EPUB or Kindle format.
The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) (Chapters 1-10, 21, 24, 30)
The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932)
The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) (Chapters 1 - 11, 17, 18, 26, 28, 30)
The Tragedy of X (1932) (Opening, Act I: Scenes 1, 2, 3, 6, 9; Act II: Scenes 2, 4, 5, 6; Act III: Scene 3; Behind the Scenes)
The Tragedy of Y (1932)
The Tragedy of Z (1933)
The American Gun Mystery (1933) (Postlude)
The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933)
The Adventures of Ellery Queen
The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) (Chapters 1-4,17)
The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) (Chapters 1-4, 8,15,16)
Halfway House (1936) (Chapters 1, 2, end of Chapter 4, finale)
The Door Between (1937)
The Dragon's Teeth (1939)
The New Adventures of Ellery Queen
The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries
Uncollected Radio Plays
There Was an Old Woman (1943)
The Murderer Is a Fox (1945)
Calendar of Crime
The Origin of Evil (1951)
Q.B.I. / Queen's Bureau of Investigation
The Scarlet Letters (1953)
The Glass Village (1954)
The Finishing Stroke (1958)
Queens Full
Q.E.D.: Queen's Experiments in Detection
The above list contains my favorite Ellery Queen stories and novels, the ones I personally enjoyed, and recommend reading.
The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries and The Tragedy of Errors are available from their publisher, Crippen & Landru.
A reader has asked me to rank EQ's top novels. Here is a list, from best to "merely" good:
EQ's early works were strongly influenced by S.S. Van Dine. Gradually, he developed a more personal style, although he always was faithful to the puzzle plot, intuitionist tradition of the Van Dine school. Along with Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, he was one of the three major writers of the puzzle plot detective story.
The influence of the gifted, and today often underrated, Van Dine on EQ was extensive and profound. Ellery Queen is a genius amateur sleuth who works in close, respectful collaboration with the police, the same pattern as Van Dine's novels about Philo Vance. Both EQ and Van Dine set their novels in New York City, largely among its intelligentsia, artists, collectors and theater people. Both write in a rich, literate prose style. Both were early advocates of including non-stereotyped minority characters in their works, something discussed in detail in the article on Civil Rights in Mystery Fiction.
Commentary on Ellery Queen:
Theater Mystery. Many theater mysteries concentrate on the stage and/or the backstage area. The theater entrance and box office can also get attention. By contrast The Roman Hat Mystery is unusual in focusing on one corner of the auditorium, its seats, offices and alley outside.
The murder in The Roman Hat Mystery takes place during a public event: the play. Similarly The Dutch Shoe Mystery will transpire during a big operation in a hospital; The Tragedy of X during a series of public transportation rides; The American Gun Mystery during a rodeo.
Mathematics. SPOILERS. Ellery does some simple mathematics, when he measures the victim's head with a string (Chapter 2). Mathematics will sometimes be used by Ellery in his detective work.
Description. The first page includes visual description. But after the play starts, the opening scenes are described mainly in terms of sound (Chapters 1, 2). The main exception to this aural depiction are:
A Man's Clothes. Victim Monte Field was always spectacularly well-dressed. His clothes, especially the title top hat, play a key role in the mystery plot. There are elaborate investigations of his wardrobe by the police (last third of Chapter 8, middle of Chapter 10). This anticipates the searches through men's large wardrobes in The King Is Dead (first part of Chapter 14) and The Finishing Stroke (middle of Chapter 7). See also the search through the victim's evening clothes in "The African Traveler". And the handsome victim's fancy wardrobe in The Spanish Cape Mystery (middle of Chapter 6, start of Chapter 8). The wardrobe in Halfway House (Chapter 1) is much smaller, but consists of elite, "swank" clothes. Otis Holderfield buys elegant men's fashions in large quantity in Double, Double. In one of EQ's final works, The Tragedy of Errors set in 1967, successful Dr. Rado "wears fashionably long hair, semi-mod clothes" and "talks with authority".
The police are impressed by Field's top hat (middle of Chapter 10). Jess notices the hat too (Chapter 3). Both accounts emphasize the hat being shiny. The glamorous crowd at the theater gets its first description as "top-hatted", at the novel's start. Handsome young actor Stephen Barry is seen in evening clothes, holding his top hat (start of Chapter 5). The wardrobe in The King Is Dead also includes formal wear and a silk top hat, like The Roman Hat Mystery. The wealthy executive in Halfway House (last part of Chapter 1) is first seen in evening wear and a silk top hat.
In The Roman Hat Mystery canes are investigated based on a suggestion by Ellery, and determined to be absent. However, they are present in quantity in The King Is Dead.
SPOILERS. Monte Field is surprisingly discovered to have duplicate top hats (middle of Chapter 10). This anticipates the even more elaborately duplicated clothes in The Finishing Stroke (middle of Chapter 7). The explanations in the two books is quite different.
Rogues. Fiction of the era was full of Rogues. These were slick, non-violent crooks, who pulled off big money swindles and jewel thefts. Rogues mainly stole from the big rich. They often pulled off their crimes by wearing the elite clothes of the upper classes themselves, something they use to con both the rich and the police. EQ was an admirer of Rogue fiction in his critical writings, especially the tales of Arsène Lupin, the famous crook and detective of Maurice Leblanc.
The victim and some suspects in The Roman Hat Mystery have aspects of the Rogues. The victim Monte Field is a crooked lawyer, and like some Rogues, he is always spectacularly well-dressed in the height of fashion. Both he and honest-but-slick theater manager Louis Panzer have elaborate, upper crust looking offices, that are most imposing. Monte Field anticipates the dishonest-but-glamorous well-dressed men in The Spanish Cape Mystery and The King Is Dead. In his own two-bit way the druggist in The Murderer Is a Fox is another unsympathetic but well-dressed man. See also the satire in "The Ides of Michael Magoon", of fictional private eyes being very well-dressed.
However the Rogues are more light-hearted and comic than these EQ characters. The crimes of the victims in The Roman Hat Mystery and The Spanish Cape Mystery are more serious than the jewel thefts of the Rogues. Also, we don't see any of these victims using their clothes to pull off con games.
Actors like Stephen Barry are also wearing upper class clothes to which they are not really entitled. And like the Rogues, Barry is using these clothes to achieve goals. Barry is using his looks, attire and grooming to marry into one of America's wealthiest families. Leading man actor James Peale also wears formal morning clothes for a meeting at the rich family's mansion (Chapter 12). (The well-dressed man in The King Is Dead has formal morning clothes as well as evening wear like tails.) The conflict between what the novel describes as this "aristocratic" family and the "bourgeois" actors is the earliest example in EQ of class conflict, a perennial theme in his tales.
Ellery and the police bear little resemblance to Rogues. But EQ's other detective Drury Lane (who will be created in 1932) resembles Rogues in a few ways:
The contacts have a police sergeant reporting to them: Thomas Velie in EQ, Ernest Heath in Van Dine. These are the main series policemen with full names in both authors. The other series cops are known only by their last names. However, the two men's roles are quite different: Velie serves as Inspector Queen's aide, Heath is head of the police Homicide squad.
One of the series policemen introduced here, Flint, is described in terms of being well-built and muscular (Chapters 2, 3). This recalls series cop Snitkin in The Benson Murder Case. Both men's names include similar sounds.
An anonymous policeman has a "massive hand" (first part of Chapter 5). This too recalls Snitkin.
A woman's evening handbag is found in the victim's pocket (Chapter 2), echoing the evening handbag found at the crime scene in Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case (1926). The handbag involves the woman who owns it, into the mystery case in both books. SPOILERS. Fairly similar explanations of the handbag's presence occur in both novels. These give a mainly innocent account of the handbag's presence.
The cheery police interview with young vendor Jess Lynch (Chapter 3) recalls the equally cheery interview with young apartment attendant Jack Prisco in The Benson Murder Case (Chapter 23). Both youths are uniformed. It's pure speculation, but one wonders if both authors are trying to appeal to young readers with these scenes. They get a pair of decent young men involved as witnesses in a police investigation, in an exciting way. The scenes can read as wish-fulfillment for young readers. (The Queen cousins were themselves in their early-to-mid twenties when The Roman Hat Mystery was written.)
EQ likes boundaries involving space, time and knowledge. He is fascinated with rooms that have not been entered, lines that have not been crossed, apartments that have been guarded and watched. He is also concerned with who knew things and didn't know things, which in turn often depends on who has participated in events and who hasn't. These become boundary markers in the complex logical geometry of his plots.
The limitations of the novel, and its reason for still classifying it as a journeyman work, deal with the solution. Later EQ novels will often have the most startling surprises in their solutions; this book runs out of steam two thirds of the way through, and its solution adds only a single new clue, together with the identity of the murderer. These are logical and fair, but not the deeply creative finales of the great EQ books. EQ, as is his wont, has given partial solutions to the crime at several stages in the body of the book, so the reader gets a full mead of deduction and revelation in the novel. But there is almost nothing left over for the finale.
Design. The furniture in The French Powder Mystery is perhaps Art Deco, although it is never called by that name in the novel. EQ calls it "modernist", and gives a vivid and accurate description of how it was viewed by its contemporaries, both artistically and sociologically. Considering the tremendous enthusiasm today for preserving America's great Art Deco heritage, with Deco societies springing up in every city, this book should be better known. EQ was deeply interested in the world around him. His books form a record of an important era in American life.
Real-life designers are mentioned: Bruno Paul from Germany, Josef Hoffmann from Vienna (Chapter 11). Lavery says he knows Bruno Paul personally. (Another real person in the book's universe (Chapter 22): Cyrus French knew writer Richard Harding Davis.)
Some of the descriptions emphasize the unusual geometry of the designs: the wall lights (end of Chapter 11), the bedroom and bathroom (Chapter 13).
Ellery's Ongoing Education. Designer Paul Lavery is one of the best characters in the novel. He's also sympathetic and admirable. SPOILERS. We learn unexpectedly that Ellery had attended one of his design lectures, before the case opened (Chapter 11).
Similarly, in Calamity Town (start of Chapter 4), Ellery learns about Wrightsville from sociology expert Pat Wright.
Cognitive scientists keep urging people to be lifelong learners. They say it is good for the brain. Ellery is an exemplar of such ongoing learning.
Information. The department store and its display window are major sources of information on advanced design of the era (start of Chapter 3). They attract massive public attention.
Housekeeper. People don't view housekeeper Hortense Underhill favorably, at first. Even her description in the cast of characters at the start is negative. Yet as the book goes on, she develops into one of the most observant witnesses in the novel. Retrospectively, Cyrus French should have paid more attention to her early on (end of Chapter 2).
Concealment. The bed in the window display is concealed in the wall (last part of Chapter 3). The bathroom medicine chest is "cunningly disguised" to make it hidden from observation (Chapter 13). Immediately before, we learn about another hidden area (Chapter 13) - not specified here to avoid spoilers.
In many later works, EQ propounded mysteries about "concealed objects" . These were cleverly hidden objects whose locales often defied the most intense searches. The disguised areas in The French Powder Mystery are imaginative. But they are not the subjects of full-fledged "concealed object" mystery puzzles.
Influence on The Tragedy of X. At first glance The French Powder Mystery (1930) is very different from The Tragedy of X (1932). But there are signs that aspects of The French Powder Mystery might have influenced The Tragedy of X:
The mid sections of the book are mainly character studies of the suspects, looks at motives for the murder, etc. They include a well done portrait of a religious fanatic, which is countered and balanced by many sympathetic quotations from Ellery about religion. Religious imagery will go on to be present in many of EQ's late novels. All in all, this is a decent novella which has unfortunately been expanded to novel length.
The book perhaps shows the influence of the Freeman school, with its medical setting, its background of a hospital, its timetable crime, deductions from physical evidence (the shoes of the title), and its solution through that Freeman-Crofts tradition, an alibi depending on "the breakdown of identity". However the story still has an intuitionist feel to it, not to mention one of the fullest imitations of S.S. Van Dine's mannerisms in the Queen canon. Unlike Freeman, medical knowledge plays no role in the mystery, although the hospital setting is deeply integrated into the plot. Most importantly, the logical precision with which the characters move through the floor plan seems very intuitionist indeed. It recalls Chesterton, and his rearrangement of characters and bodies in space and time.
The initial murder shows some of Ellery Queen's surrealistic flair, without reaching the flamboyant extremes of much of his later work. The book has a visionary quality, perhaps because it seems to be the product of something truly imagined, to borrow a phrase of Ursula K. Le Guin's. The book is organized around imagery of total whiteness, appropriate for a hospital of the 1920's. Together with the rectilinear architecture of the floor plan, it recalls the abstract art of its time, especially Malevich's Suprematism, and his painting "White on White". The effect of a "white-out", of a world turned totally white and disappearing into an haze of light, seems strong in this book.
EQ Institutions. The hospital in The Dutch Shoe Mystery anticipates the Shakespeare library in Drury Lane's Last Case. Both:
SPOILERS. The elevator is where the killer puts on and later takes off a disguise. It serves as a zone of transition between two modes of being. In this it anticipates the title building in Halfway House.
Detection. Ellery gets a new fact about the second murder (end of Chapter 24), quite some time after the murder is first investigated (Chapter 21). This missing piece of evidence allows Ellery to solve the crime, at long last. This is an approach that will show up in later EQ novels, such as The Spanish Cape Mystery and Calamity Town. In Calamity Town, the time gap between the initial events and discovery of the missing fact is pushed to an even greater length.
SPOILERS. Who has, or does not have, key information, plays a role in Ellery identifying the killer at the end. Such access-to-information based deductions play a role in other Queen works too, such as The French Powder Mystery and Halfway House.
The Opening: H.C. Bailey. The opening recalls H.C. Bailey, and the start of his short story "The Young Doctor", included in his collection Mr. Fortune's Practice (1923). Both "The Young Doctor" and The Dutch Shoe Mystery:
Influence from Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case. A few aspects of the hospital architecture recall The Benson Murder Case (1926) by S.S. Van Dine. The Benson Murder Case mainly takes place in a Manhattan brownstone. Stone steps lead up from the street, to the entrance of the brownstone. Inside, there is a vestibule, with doors leading into the rest of the building. Similar features are in the hospital in The Dutch Shoe Mystery - only on a larger scale, as befits a huge building like the hospital.
The elevator in the hospital perhaps echoes an elevator in an apartment building in The Benson Murder Case (Chapter 23).
The guard Isaac Cobb in the vestibule is described as "burly", like the cop Snitkin in The Benson Murder Case (Chapters 2, 3). The big strong policeman or guard is a standard image of the era. Both men use "double negatives" in their dialogue, showing they are uneducated.
When Ellery enters his friend Dr. Minchen's office, Minchen has a swivel chair behind his desk. This recalls the office of District Attorney Markham in The Benson Murder Case (start of Chapter 7). Both men are authority figures. Both are personal friends of the detective heroes of their novels.
I don't know if these features result from an influence of Van Dine on Ellery Queen. They could simply reflect common real-world architecture of the era.
Hospital Mysteries. The Dutch Shoe Mystery has a different focus in its depiction of hospital life, than do hospital mysteries by Rinehart and her follower Eberhart. In "The Amazing Adventure of Letitia Carberry" (1911) by Mary Roberts Rinehart, and The Patient in Room 18 (1929), From This Dark Stairway (1931) and Man Missing (1953-1954) by Mignon G. Eberhart:
The central focus of The Dutch Shoe Mystery on a single event (the operation), plays a major structural role in the book's construction. There is something very EQ-like about this unified focus. In Halfway House there will be a relentless look at reconstructing events based on evidence at the crime scene.
Influence on Marsh. A book like The Dutch Shoe Mystery shows much of the technique that would later dominate Ngaio Marsh's novels:
A Good Guy. Dr. John Minchen is introduced right away as a friend of Ellery. Like others of Ellery's friends, the Judge in The Spanish Cape Mystery and Duval in "The House of Darkness", I don't think we are meant to suspect that Minchen is possibly the culprit. Instead these men are Good Guys, people whose honesty and truthfulness we readers can rely on. The Dutch Shoe Mystery persists in this attitude through the entire book: an admirable approach, in my judgement.
Dr. John Minchen is a person of accomplishment. He's a medical director of a hospital. Early on (Chapter 1) the book makes clear that the hospital has Charity Wards: a place where the poor are treated for free. Queen's left-wing sympathies are showing here at an early date.
Minchen is also "athletic": like many men that Ellery admires, he's in good shape. Please see this article's section on relationships. Our first view of Ellery in The Roman Hat Mystery (Chapter 2) describes him as "athletic".
Reader Mark Tilford sent interesting e-mail on this subject: "I was recently thinking about Carr's The Arabian Nights Murder, and realized it seemed to be rather Queen-like. In particular, Hadley's section (which was my favorite) reminded me of Queen's solutions: the detective notices several 'stray points': the disconnected beard, the fainting spell, etc., and puts them together with a beautiful chain of deductive reasoning which converges on the identity of the killer. The book also has two solutions, which EQ frequently did."
Another area where Carr's writings modeled themselves on Queen's was that of the radio play. EQ was apparently the pioneer mystery author to move from prose fiction into the radio drama. Carr would follow along this path shortly after, as did Anthony Boucher.
EQ's later books are not formally organized around multiple solutions; in The Greek Coffin Mystery, the four solutions are the key structural underpinning and organizational principle of the book's design and storytelling. But he retains the technique of partial solutions growing into ever deeper solutions; it returns again and again as a key feature of his detectival technique.
Before either EQ or Anthony Berkeley, was an author who influenced them both. E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913) contains three solutions to its mystery.
Music. The book's opening compares the plot to a piece of classical music. This is a profound analogy. It is true not just for The Greek Coffin Mystery, but for much of mystery fiction.
"All art aspires towards the condition of music." Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1873). And "All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song". "See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it." Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes (1840).
Surrealism. The results of Ellery's deduction are a prime example of surrealism in Ellery Queen's work (Chapter 6).
Mystery: Missing Object. The Greek Coffin Mystery opens with the mystery of a missing object (Chapters 1-6). Like all such missing object mysteries in EQ, this object's location evades the most intensive search.
Ellery comes up with a solution (Chapter 5). While his solution is brief, it does more than simply tell where the object is. Instead, Ellery comes up with a profile, in this case three characteristics that the object's locale might have. The EQ mysteries are full of profiles. (Please see this article's section on Profiles.) This profile is non-standard for EQ, however:
The profile in The Greek Coffin Mystery and its characteristics are set forth in a single sentence. Please see the sentence immediately after "to ask me the enlightening question:" (Chapter 5).
Mystery: Knowledge. As in The French Powder Mystery, what people could have known, and not known, plays a key role in the solutions. These limits of knowledge are also sometimes tied to geographical areas, as in the earlier novel.
Mystery: First Solution. BIG SPOILERS. Part of the first solution has some broad family resemblance to the solution of The Dutch Shoe Mystery.
A related part of the first solution involves mathematics (Chapters 10, 15).
The items on the tea tray form a sort of still life. They anticipate the still life on the desk and nearby coffee-table in The Tragedy of Z. In both books, the still life is explored for clues.
Forensics and Smell. Forensics specialists make discoveries using their sense of smell:
Map. The map, which shows a whole New York City block occupied by the rich, was perhaps influenced by the maps in S.S. Van Dine's The Bishop Murder Case (1928).
The houses on the block are all around a central courtyard or private lane. This anticipates the four houses and their common landscape center in The Devil to Pay. In both The Greek Coffin Mystery (Chapter 1) and The Devil to Pay (Chapter 2), the houses are inside a walled compound. The compound is besieged outside by crowds. The crowds are ordinary people, far less affluent than the wealthy residents of the houses.
Men's Clothes. Art gallery director Nacio Suiza is dressed with prefect correctness (Chapter 1). In this he anticipates the hotel manager Nye with his elegant cutaway, in The Chinese Orange Mystery (Chapter 3). In other works EQ shows a preference for men who are sloppily dressed.
Regular Habits. The victim had exceptionally regular habits, which we learn about in detail (Chapter 9). Several of these are unusual, and thus interesting. Similarly, the victim in The Tragedy of X (Act I, Scene 7) had regular habits, although more common ones.
Please see this post by Hsin-Hao Yu, about vision science in The Greek Coffin Mystery.
It is apparently the first EQ book to invoke Alice in Wonderland, to describe the events of the story; this will become common in later EQ books, not to mention the Alice inspired crimes in "The Mad Tea-Party" (1934). Alice is also evoked in The Tragedy of Y (1932). It is not clear which novel was written first.
Plot Developments. Two good later chapters (17, 18) develop plot ideas found in the long opening (Chapters 1 - 11). These answer some mysteries in the opening. They also continue exploring characters and facts from the opening.
Both of these later chapters include male bonding.
SPOILERS. A plot gambit (end of Chapter 17) involving a uniform, anticipates the solution to the radio play "The Disappearing Magician" (1940).
SPOILERS. The chauffeur's situation (Chapter 18) has deep roots in mystery fiction. It comes from Tom Taylor's play The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863). The play's central situation still regularly appears in crime fiction and television.
The police search for information on the chauffeur. First, we learn that a search in the Eastern USA has failed (start of Chapter 13). And that the police have started looking further west. This Western search hits pay dirt (Chapter 18), with info from Illinois. This geographical pattern to the police search, is satisfying as a formal pattern. It also tells about how information was handled in 1932.
The chauffeur represents the difficult lives many working class people were living. Life is plainly a struggle for him, especially to get and keep a job.
Detection. The Egyptian Cross Mystery is one of the first stories in which Ellery finds a hidden pattern in a series of phrases or names (Chapter 5). This will become a prominent part of the EQ saga in such stories as "The Inner Circle" (1947; based on a 1942 radio play) and "Payoff" (1964), and is related to plot ideas in Ten Days' Wonder (1948), Double, Double (1950), The Origin of Evil (1951) and The Finishing Stroke (1958). This plot approach seems related to the Dying Message: in both Ellery has to find a hidden meaning or significance in symbols or phrases.
This sort of plot has a surreal feel, both in The Egyptian Cross Mystery and many of the later works.
Much of the information that is unearthed about the characters, consists of their financial transactions. There is even a chapter titled "The $100 Deposit". In 1932, this was the most typical "paper trail" Americans left behind. Today, phone records, surveillance, computer use, etc would all be available.
There is some good deduction in Chapter 26, which involves reconstructing one of the crimes, based on a logical analysis of a crime scene. This does not reveal the murderer, or much about the main plot of the mystery, but it is a nicely done set-piece of deduction all the same.
The solution to the mystery is set forth in the novel's finale. We get a final crime (Chapter 28), then a logical analysis and solution of the crime (Chapter 30). This detective work and solution are fairly simple compared to other early EQ books. Its simplicity, and effect of working within a tight plot with little room to maneuver, does anticipate the minimalist works of the 1940's, such as Calamity Town.
Gas Pump. One of the first things Ellery sees in Arroyo is a gas pump (Chapter 1). This anticipates the red pumps at the gas station in The Spanish Cape Mystery (Chapter 2). And the millionaire family with their own gas pump in their yacht basin, in Inspector Queen's Own Case.
See also the gas station in Halfway House.
All of these sites are technological. And related to transportation, an EQ theme.
Religion. The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) contains ideas and techniques that will resurface in EQ's books starting in the late 1940's. Much of the imagery involves religion, as in The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) and "The Invisible Lover" (1934), a subject that will return in many post-1945 Queen novels, such as Ten Days' Wonder (1948), Cat of Many Tails (1949), The Player on the Other Side (1963), and And on the Eighth Day (1964).
Many of these ideas and mystery puzzles involving religion, will have surreal qualities.
A Killing's Effect on a Community. The early scenes showing the effect that a killing has on a rural community, anticipate the more elaborate portrait of a killer's effect on New York City in Cat of Many Tails. The citizens of the country town Weirton ultimately come off better in EQ's depiction, than do people in New York in Cat of Many Tails, panicking less, and behaving more responsibly. Both portraits are somber, and attempt a reflective commentary on society.
Weirton: An Ancestor to Wrightsville. Weirton is very much a real city in West Virginia. So are other towns named in The Egyptian Cross Mystery, but not seen: Chester, New Cumberland and Pughtown (since renamed New Manchester). There is a nearby real-life town called Arroyo, but it is not on the New Cumberland - Pughtown road as in the novel, and it is unclear if EQ's tiny village Arroyo is supposed to be a portrait of this real town with the same name. All of these are in Hancock County, in the far northern tip of West Virginia's Northern Panhandle. These are all close to the major city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a fact that plays a role in the novel.
EQ creates an elaborate portrait of the Weirton area, including both a host of government officials, and many people with small businesses or farms. As is often the case in Ellery Queen, more attention is paid to people with very small businesses, than to factory workers. We get vivid portraits of a Weirton man with a small garage, and an Arroyo village storekeeper. The garage owner is sympathetically depicted as an archetypal poor American working man of the era. Not shown at all are the steel plants that were the center of Weirton's real-life economy, or the men that work there: a typical EQ omission.
Citizens of Arroyo are shown as valuing education, and respecting their school teacher. The politicians come off less sympathetically, being depicted as pompous and trying to make political gain from the murder, and the local constable is actually caricatured, as the sort of hick lawman popular in books and films of the day. However, the politicians are lacking in malice, and the portrait as a whole is refreshingly free of hillbilly stereotypes. Instead, it comes across as a "typical American small town". In this, it is a precursor to the Wrightsville novels and stories EQ would write from 1942 on. While the portrait is inevitably less detailed than the multi-volume Wrightsville saga, the picture of Weirton and its environs is an impressively complex conception, with many interlocking business, cultural and political activities.
The region shows up in non-Queen works:
Please continue reading the next section, with a look at landscapes in the novel.
The locale of the second crime is a seaside neighborhood in Long Island (start of Chapter 8). The area turns out to be striking geometrical. There is a semi-circular bay, with the houses arranged along it. And a circular island more-or-less in the bay's center.
The first crime is set in a simpler but still fully geometric locale (Chapter 1). It involves straight lines, while the second crime's landscape is circular. It uses land roads, while the second crime's landscape uses sea routes.
The building in Arroyo where Ellery soon goes, is also rectilinear. It's compared to a "box" (Chapter 1).
Inspector Queen's Own Case will also be set in a strikingly geometric locale. It too involves an island.
Other EQ works with geometric landscapes include The Tragedy of Z, The Siamese Twin Mystery, Halfway House. The last two books include semicircles, like The Egyptian Cross Mystery.
There Was an Old Woman (1943) (end of Chapter 3) has a circle of greenery in front of the mansion, surrounding the giant metal statue of a shoe. The family in the mansion made their money manufacturing shoes. A presumably round tower in the mansion also has a circular room and a "coil of steps" inside (first part of Chapter 4).
Ten Days' Wonder (1948) (Chapter 2) has a circular swimming pool.
There is a straight line of footprints that form a clue in "The Adventure of the Haunted Cave". The landscape is otherwise irregular and non-geometric.
"Snowball in July" (1952) has train tracks and an accompanying road that are perfectly straight. The tale explicitly compares them to parallel lines. The geometry gives a heightened intensity to the story.
The street map of Wrightsville mixes numerous straight lines with a single circle. The circle is the town "Square (which was round)"; the straight lines are the streets radiating off it. This pattern is established in the first Wrightsville book Calamity Town (Chapter 1). Later Double, Double would include a full map showing this.
The King Is Dead is mainly set on an island complex. The island has a distinctive geometric shape (first part of Chapter 3). The shape is three-dimensional.
EQ's mathematics-based solution in The Tragedy of Y, seems modeled on the similar math-based deductions in S.S. Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case (1926) (Chapter 9). Which follows a tradition leading from Gaston Leroux's Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room) (1907).
SPOILERS. Part of the solution of The American Gun Mystery involves the angle of the bullet's path. This might be seen as simple geometry.
Some tales use mathematics for subjects other than mystery or detective work:
SPOILERS. See:
It is not known which mystery writer was the first to use this device. Early examples:
The dying message is found in the works of several later authors, all American, most of whom were probably directly influenced by Ellery Queen. These include:
There is also a British thriller tradition, in which the dying person gasps out, not the identity of the killer, but some information about the thriller plot, often fairly cryptic. This is a fundamentally different kind of story. Examples include:
A predecessor to dying mesasge tales: Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) (Franklin Blake's first narrative, Chapter 9). A doctor tries to augment and expand a patient's delirious words, so that they become meaningful. Here the doctor is trying to expand something a man said, rather than trying to interpret it, as in a true dying message tale. Still, he is trying to bring meaning out of something said that is obscure, as in true dying message tales.
The least interesting dying message tales in EQ are the pure ones, in which Ellery investigates the possible meanings of a message, and little else: such tales as "The Adventure of the March of Death" (1939) or "Mum Is the Word" (1966). (Counterexample: "Dead Ringer (1965) is a pure dying message tale, and pretty good!) The dying messages become more ingenious when the message concept is mixed in with more complex variations. These tend to be structural variants on the whole concept of the dying message. Trying to discuss such tales, or even name them, risks giving away that such stories are in fact variants on the dying message gimmick: something that is often not obvious at first in the tales themselves.
Detective: Drury Lane. EQ created a new detective in retired Shakespearean actor Drury Lane, starring him in four novels of 1932 - 1933. Like Ellery Queen, Drury Lane is an amateur detective of genius who works closely with the police, in the Van Dine school tradition.
His first appearance is in The Tragedy of X (1932). The best parts of that book concern the character of Drury Lane himself, his associates, and his gift for disguise. His estate on the Hudson shows EQ's interest in design, just like the references to Art Deco in The French Powder Mystery.
Disguise. Drury Lane's theories about disguise are discussed (Act II: Scene 5). Similar ideas are briefly explored in "The One-Penny Black".
Please see my article on Doubles for a discussion of Drury Lane's special abilities in disguise. He and many related characters are surveyed in section 9.
The Accounts of the Crimes. Among the best episodes in The Tragedy of X are the accounts of the three murders:
The solutions to the first and third murders have a similar structure. SPOILERS:
Lane's solution to the first killing is based, in part, on a fact he says "everyone knows". That might have been true for New York City residents in 1932. But it hasn't been true throughout my lifetime, and I didn't know it.
BIG SPOILERS. The special pocket used to carry the weapon in the first murder, anticipates a different kind of special pocket in There Was an Old Woman, also used to carry the murder weapon. Another pocket with a weapon, is in "Long Shot". The pockets are used in completely different ways, in the mystery plots of the three stories.
SPOILERS. The issue of the open versus closed windows of the streetcar (in Act I: Scene 6 and in the "Behind the Scenes" finale), gets echoed in "The Two-Headed Dog" (1934) with the open versus closed cabin windows. How this is used in the plot is completely different in both works, though.
Armchair Detective. Drury Lane starts out as an armchair detective, offering the police his solution to the John Cramer murder. He gets his information on the case out of newspaper articles. "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" by Poe is explicitly cited as an inspiration for this. It also recalls the Old Man in the Corner by Baroness Orczy. Unfortunately we learn nothing about this mystery, which is simply mentioned in passing at the start of The Tragedy of X.
Later we learn of a second early case Drury Lane worked as an armchair detective (first part of Act III: Scene 3). This time we learn about the mystery puzzle and Lane's solution.
Drury Lane works as an armchair detective too, in the first murder in The Tragedy of X. Indeed, he has most of the clues he needs to identify the killer, by the time he asks the questions about the windows (Act I: Scene 6). He gets a final clue he needs through a later question (Act I: Scene 9). Unfortunately, we don't learn his reasoning or conclusions till the novel's end.
Ellery Queen will later work as an armchair-detective-of-sorts in "The Adventure of Mr. Short and Mr. Long". And in the 1960's and 1970's come the five little EQ tales about the Puzzle Club, also armchair detection. "Mr. Short and Mr. Long" is not quite pure armchair sleuthing. Ellery actively directs a police investigation by telephone, even though he is laid up in bed with a cold. In pure armchair detection, the sleuth gets information, asks questions, and spins theories, but does not take an active role in any on-site investigation.
Suspects. The suspects are an unlikable lot: conformist, crude, unpleasant, sometimes exploitative rich people. None of them are of the slightest interest as human beings. This is likely deliberate: EQ is trying to critique their social milieu, probably. But it doesn't make them more enjoyable to read about. The interest of the novel declines, when any of the suspects show up.
C. Daly King and Kit Lord. Young-perfect-but-dull hero Christopher "Kit" Lord is at least honest and decent. His name perhaps inspired C. Daly King's series sleuth Michael Lord. Both men are upper class: something perhaps symbolized by the name Lord. The Tragedy of X was reportedly published in January 1932. Michael Lord debuted in Obelists at Sea (1932), a book reviewed in November and December 1932. Both young men are tall. Kit Lord is blond, while Michael Lord is dark-haired.
See also the artist-detective hero Kit Storm of Willetta Ann Barber, in the 1940's.
Van Dine. It shows the strong influence of S.S. Van Dine. Like Van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928), this story concerns the members of a single well to do family, all of whom live together in a gloomy mansion in New York City. In both books the family is under siege, with many of its members finding horrible fates. Both novels' most ingenious plot twists have a certain resemblance, although Queen's is original and much more surrealistic than Van Dine's. (In Queen's novel this twist occurs towards the start of Act III, in Van Dine's in Chapter 26).
There are other aspects of the book that recall Van Dine:
Originality. Despite all these similarities, Queen's book ultimately contains a frightening originality. It is one of the most surrealistic of all Golden Age detective novels. Its surrealism is not so much in the details of the particular crimes themselves, but in the slow melt-down the book eventually employs on the conventions of detective fiction.
Francis M. Nevins has pointed out that much of The Tragedy of Y can be read as a political allegory. The book paints an extremely negative picture of almost all aspects of human society, including capitalism, science and ultimately detective fiction itself. We are used to seeing writers of both left and right depict promiscuous sexuality and the Family as polar opposites. The Tragedy of Y is unique in literature in condemning both of them, painting both sexuality and the Family in terms of absolute horror and disgust.
Egg-nog. The subplot about the poisoned egg-nog anticipates the poisoned prune juice in "The Wrightsville Heirs". Both are strong-flavored but non-alcoholic drinks, in these EQ tales. Both mysteries lead to similar investigations. However, this subplot eventually becomes far more complex in The Tragedy of Y than in "The Wrightsville Heirs".
Opening. The opening of The Tragedy of Y takes place among working class characters, who discover the body. The rest of the novel transpires in an upper class mansion. This "working class opening to a higher class novel" anticipates mysteries by other authors:
Poetess. Barbara Hatter is America's most famous woman poet, according to The Tragedy of Y. In real life, that position was held by the great Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay lived in Greenwich Village, like the fictional Hatters.
Other fictitious woman writers appear in EQ: the novelists Jo Temple in The Chinese Orange Mystery, Karen Leith in The Door Between, Emilie Eames in "The Bleeding Portrait"; gossip columnist Paula Paris in The Four of Hearts; the reporters Ella Amity in Halfway House and Roberta Roberts in Calamity Town. See also the painter Aunt Fanny Adams in The Glass Village.
Civic Corruption. The Tragedy of Z takes place in a town in upstate New York. The town is dominated by a crooked boss and his sinister political machine. This is yet another example of Golden Age writers recognizing the reality of civic corruption. Please see my lists of Civic Corruption and Police Corruption in Mystery Fiction.
The clean cut young county District Attorney John Hume is opposed to the boss, and is running on a reform ticket. This anticipates the D.A. series by Erle Stanley Gardner, which began in 1936. The D.A. books are set in a small city in Southern California, while The Tragedy of Z is set in a small city in New York. However Gardner's D. A. is a genuine Good Guy, while EQ's John Hume has a dark side.
Watching pathetic Aaron Dow get railroaded for the murder anticipates Calamity Town and The Glass Village. Social corruption in EQ often takes the form of a town unfairly trying an innocent man for murder.
The Murder Setting. The scene of the first crime is a cliche in mystery fiction:
There is something remarkably orderly about the crime scene. Clues are neatly laid out on the victim's desk and nearby coffee-table. These constitute a "still life" of objects. We read that the victim had a passion for order.
However, surrealism is never very far away in Ellery Queen. The detectives soon are investigating a very strange toy box found on the victim's desk. The way the box is sent as a series of presents anticipates "The Mad Tea-Party" and The Finishing Stroke.
The crime building is being watched, to see who enters and leaves. This is part of a long tradition in Ellery Queen. Often the watcher sees a parade of suspects. However in The Tragedy of Z the watcher sees only one person, the killer. Unfortunately the killer is all bundled up, and cannot be identified. A similar mystery visitor is in The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932) (Chapter 7), also bundled up, witnessed, but not identifiable at all. See also the masked medical workers being hard to identify in The Dutch Shoe Mystery. The man who hires the car in The Egyptian Cross Mystery (Chapter 2). And the unidentifiable veiled woman witnessed in Halfway House.
Cognitive Psychology. The in-depth discussion of handedness (Chapter 9) takes The Tragedy of Z into the realm of Cognitive Psychology: the study of how people think, perceive and learn. Cognitive Psychology is regularly found in works by Helen McCloy.
Science Fiction. Like Calamity Town, The Tragedy of Z has brief science fiction imagery. It refers to a Martian forest (start of Chapter 2), and "intergalactic space" (Chapter 22). Calamity Town will also refer to Mars and Outer Space. Perhaps this should be described as "space" imagery, rather than "science fiction".
Buildings and Heights. The prison is on top of a conical hill in The Tragedy of Z (start of Chapter 2). This anticipates the mountain house in The Siamese Twin Mystery. And the house on a remote mountain top in The Four of Hearts.
The way the hill is "conical" introduces a geometric element to the landscape.
The Bus Company. A company that runs tour buses in New York plays a role in the opening (Chapters 1, 3).
Each murder in The Tragedy of X had been built around a different mode of transportation (trolley, ferry, trains). The buses in Drury Lane's Last Case recall this transportation-centric approach. Buses had not been used in The Tragedy of X, so they also form something new.
The tour-bus is also on the fringes of show business. Entertainers and show business are a frequent background subject in Van Dine School writers, the group that contains Ellery Queen. As earthy, working class men involved with show biz, they recall the rodeo cowboys in The American Gun Mystery.
The driver's interest in boxing anticipates EQ's "Mind Over Matter" (1939).
The bus driver is referred to as "proletarian" (Chapter 1). He and the other drivers are explicitly seen as working class men. They are different from EQ's most common working class characters, caretakers of buildings. As automotive employees, they recall the small town garage owner in The Egyptian Cross Mystery. However the garage owner owns his business, however tiny, while the bus drivers are employees of a firm - and thus more archetypally working class.
Uniforms. The bus drivers in Drury Lane's Last Case wear spectacular uniforms, and are very handsome. This anticipates the more elaborate depiction of the island in The King Is Dead, with its fancy uniforms and good-looking men. The uniforms in both works include boots. In both books the uniforms are described with color imagery. (Ellery himself wears the macho outfit of jodhpurs and riding boots, in the mountain climbing scenes of The Siamese Twin Mystery (last part of Chapter 12).)
In The King Is Dead (1952) the uniforms are linked to Fascism, and are therefore depicted as sinister. This is not true in Drury Lane's Last Case. The uniforms in Drury Lane's Last Case are described as being "military" in style. But this is as far as Drury Lane's Last Case goes, in suggesting any political meaning to the bus company and its uniforms. Instead the bus drivers' uniforms are seen as harmless, and mainly glamorous and sexy.
The uniform in Drury Lane's Last Case includes a chest harness (Chapter 1). It is what is known as a Sam Browne belt, although that term is not used in Drury Lane's Last Case.
The use of uniforms in Drury Lane's Last Case often involves their caps' visors:
The Shakespeare Library. Much of Drury Lane's Last Case takes place at the fictitious Britannic Museum in Manhattan. This museum is famous for its collection of rare books linked to Shakespeare. In real life, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC had just opened the year before (1932), with a similar collection of rare books. So such libraries had probably been much in the news, during the period when Drury Lane's Last Case was being written.
Drury Lane's Last Case treats it as a given, that Shakespeare scholars would be fascinated by reading rare books on Shakespeare. However, I am not convinced. If you want to study Shakespeare, why not just get a cheap paperback edition of Hamlet or Twelfth Night, and read it? Or watch these plays onstage or in faithful film versions?
The Britannic is one of the museums that frequently serve as background subjects in Van Dine School writers.
Shakespeare Biography. Drury Lane's Last Case also argues that Shakespeare's biography is important in understanding Shakespeare. Once again, I'm a skeptic. In general, I think that the biographies of people in the creative arts are not the meanings of their work, or especially relevant to understanding their output.
My skepticism about the value of rare books and/or biography to the understanding of Shakespeare, means that I am out of sync with main premises of Drury Lane's Last Case.
For the record, I fully share the widespread belief that Shakespeare is a great writer, probably the greatest who ever lived.
Partners in Crime. Aspects of Drury Lane's Last Case recall Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime (collected 1929 in book form):
The Symbol: Mystery Subplot. There is a mysterious, hard-to-interpret symbol (introduced Chapter 11). Its meaning is eventually solved (Chapter 23). This "understand the symbol" mystery has similarities to the "dying messages" in other EQ books, although it is not actually the work of a dying man - nor is it a clue left to identify a murderer.
BIG SPOILERS. The technique used to interpret the symbol, resembles the approach EQ would use later in "E = Murder" (1960).
Donoghue: Not Much of a Mystery. Donoghue's disappearance looks as if it is going to be the central mystery of the novel. It is introduced immediately (Chapter 1), and assigned as the main goal of detective Inspector Thumm. However, the novel then proceeds to ignore the disappearance. Neither Thumm nor anyone else does much to investigate the disappearance. Instead all sorts of peripheral matters involving the museum and the tour get studied. And the solution of the Donoghue mystery is eventually revealed by accident, rather than through detective work or deduction (Chapter 26). All in all, the Donoghue subplot fails to provide any sort of successful mystery for the novel.
Donoghue is a likable character. And the events surrounding his disappearance (Chapter 1, 26) mildly succeed as story telling, if not as mystery.
Mathematics. The bus drivers count their passengers, and draw conclusions (Chapters 1, 3). So do workers at the hotel (Chapter 2). This is another example of mathematics as part of the mystery plot, in Ellery Queen.
The Book Mystery at the Library. The events with the books are at first pleasantly surreal, in their odd features. However, eventually the situation gets clarified. Its underlying explanation is simply one of the cliches of the mystery genre (first half of Chapter 10). SPOILERS. Like EQ's "The One-Penny Black", the book subplot in Drury Lane's Last Case shows signs of influence from Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tale "The Blue Carbuncle" (1892). EQ re-using Doyle's plot makes for a disappointing reading experience.
In the Country. It is not until the book's final section that a murder mystery gets going.
The last 100 pages of the novel (Chapters 19-30) mainly take place at a remote house in the countryside. They form a contrast to the opening sections (Chapters 1- 18) mainly set in Manhattan. We get detailed descriptions of both the interior of the house, and its exterior and grounds.
The first chapters involving the house are structured as a series of parallel searches:
Ellery Queen loved searches. These searches in Drury Lane's Last Case are somewhat different, though. Typical EQ searches look for a specific object; the house searches in Drury Lane's Last Case are massive sweeps looking for any or all evidence.
The detailed outline includes an entire murder mystery, fully solved by the end. The Tragedy of Errors makes satisfying reading.
Links to The Tragedy of X. The Tragedy of Errors recalls the earlier The Tragedy of X:
Profiles. Ellery Queen mysteries often use profiles. A profile is a list of characteristics, which an unknown culprit must satisfy to be guilty. The profiles are compared to a works's characters, to identify the guilty party.
The Tragedy of Errors has two profiles, for two different roles of people committing the crimes. The two profiles also use different detective approaches:
Proctor. A recurring character is the young Black writer Dion Proctor. Proctor was created at a time when the real-life Black Arts Movement was gaining prominence, although that is not referenced in The Tragedy of Errors.
Title. The title is a word-play on William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. Such a title recalls The Devil to Pay, whose chapter titles are mainly take-offs on the titles of literary works. The first chapter title in The Devil to Pay is "Much Ado About Something", a transformation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
Typically, Frederic Dannay plotted the Ellery Queen books, and Manfred Lee wrote them from Dannay's outline. The publication of Frederic Dannay's outline for The Tragedy of Errors (1999) gives us a chance to compare Dannay's outline style with that of the Ellery Queen novels. The outline in The Tragedy of Y seems similar in style to The Tragedy of Errors. So the outline in The Tragedy of Y might be the direct work of Dannay.
Most of the rest of the writing in Y seems to be in Manfred Lee's richest prose style. Lee especially excels at the depiction of Barbara Hatter's poetic work.
Other detective writers also included such outline-like sections, often somewhat different in form from Ellery Queen's. A list of such "outlines in mystery novels":
The book also suffers from the fact that the storytelling leading up to the finale is often stiff and uninspired. This is a common problem in EQ; many of the early novels have much better solutions than the narrative between the crime and its solution.
The solution to this book is also unusual in that it involves a whole complex, public enterprise behind the crime, one involving both the rodeo and other aspects of show biz. So many Golden Age novels involve one solitary criminal dashing around the bushes of some country house, that it is interesting to see its exact opposite here.
The Gun Subplot. The business of the disappearing gun is well done by any standards. Later, John Dickson Carr will introduce a similar disappearing gun mystery into Till Death Do Us Part (1944), but come up with a completely different solution for it.
Social Commentary. I have always thought it was some sort of political commentary, that when it came time to add an "American" book to EQ's series of country titles, he choose The American Gun. Perhaps this reflects America's gun enthusiasm.
Rodeo. The book takes place at a rodeo visiting New York City; a similar rodeo is featured in Stuart Palmer's Murder on Wheels (1932). I don't know much about the history of rodeos, but one must have visited New York in that era, and made a tremendous impression. The rodeos are clearly very similar productions in the two books, and perhaps share a common real life ancestor.
The rodeo is also referred to as a "Wild West show", and this might be a better name for it. The show consists of a series of well-rehearsed feats put on by a troupe of full-time employees. There don't seem to be any competitive events open to public contestants, as in a modern rodeo.
The novel gives many details of the cowboy costumes, something which probably delighted most readers of the era, who loved cowboy movies.
The cowboy rodeo riders wear sombreros. So does the vaudeville performer "Tex Crosby, the Crooning Cowboy" in "The Hanging Acrobat" (1934). In real life, sombreros seem a bit atypical for cowboy entertainers.
Show Biz Dynasties. Leading characters include two veterans of show business, not related to each other, each one with an adult child, who has also entered show biz. A similar pattern of four characters is found in The Four of Hearts. In both books, the adult children include a man and a woman, who form a romantic pair.
Show business is a frequent Background in Van Dine School mysteries. The two characters in media (newsreels, newspaper columnist) also echo the Van Dine' School's interest in the intelligentsia.
The cliff anticipates "The Treasure Hunt".
The landscape eventually develops a geometric aspect, with the investigators spread out in a semi-circle (last part of Chapter 12).
Ellery and his father Inspector Queen have different roles in the outdoor sections:
A big difference: The Doll's Trunk Murder has a snow storm as its disaster, rather than the forest fire of The Siamese Twin Mystery. This makes the landscape description largely different in the two books. Another key difference: the snow is challenging for the characters in The Doll's Trunk Murder, while the fire is life-threatening in The Siamese Twin Mystery.
Reilly sometimes includes "abstract" passages in her writing; The Siamese Twin Mystery has something similar. This is discussed in the section on Abstraction in Helen Reilly.
The Doll's Trunk Murder was reviewed in December 1932. The Siamese Twin Mystery was published in book form in October 1933.
Horror. There are mild horror aspects to early parts of The Siamese Twin Mystery. The house is aptly compared to the castle in Dracula (end of Chapter 1). And Inspector Queen is badly scared by something he sees (Chapter 2). For that matter, the fire is scary. Such horror imagery is fairly rare in EQ.
H.G. Wells' science fiction horror novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) is also invoked (start of Chapter 3). It has similarities to The Siamese Twin Mystery:
Arrival. The opening (Chapters 1-4) of The Siamese Twin Mystery shares a structure with "The Lamp of God":
A Play. The meeting with the group (Chapter 3) prompts Ellery to think that these strange people belong on stage. There is indeed something theatrical about this section. It recalls a stage play.
Mystery Fiction. Dr. Xavier is a big fan of mystery fiction (Chapter 3). He says that it helps him cope with the "strain" of his demanding work. It sounds as if it helps him relax after the brainy toil in which he is engaged.
Later, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (EQMM) used to run celebrity endorsements for itself. These celebrity endorsements were unusual: they starred people doing brainy jobs in government or the arts. And they claimed that EQMM helped them relax after work. This is similar to the viewpoint of The Siamese Twin Mystery.
This viewpoint somewhat anticipates one popular rationale today for listening to classical music: the idea that such music can calm and defeat stress. The Siamese Twin Mystery doesn't use the word "stress". And it doesn't talk about stress in general - but rather about the strain of doing demanding jobs.
Architecture. The architecture of the house is simple. It is set forth in a floor plan (start of Chapter 5). This plan appears not at the book's start, but instead right after the murder is discovered.
The left side of the house contains "domestic living" rooms: dining room, kitchen, living room. The right side contains "thinking" rooms: the lab, study, library and game-room. Something of the same dichotomy is in the first floor layout of the mansion in The Greek Coffin Mystery - although it is less strict or consistent there.
The house has a hall and a perpendicular cross-hall. This recalls the floor plan in The Album (1933) by Mary Roberts Rinehart. The Album began serializing in The Saturday Evening Post in early April 1933, and The Siamese Twin Mystery was published in October 1933. This might have allowed time for The Album to have influenced The Siamese Twin Mystery.
Color. When the murder is discovered (first part of Chapter 5), the book erupts into many instances of color imagery. Earlier color was used sparingly: the orange flames, Mrs. Xavier's crimson gown. Similarly, this section offers the book's first detailed floor plan.
When Inspector Queen displays his gold police badge, Mark Xavier looks at it as if he were "seeing a thing of color and three dimensions for the first time" (first part of Chapter 5). Subtly, the reader is in a similar position: for the first time in the novel, this section offers much color imagery, as well as the multiple dimensions of the floor plan.
The lab has white walls, like much of the hospital in The Dutch Shoe Mystery.
Young Men. Sympathetic very young men run through the early EQ books: Djuna, Jess Lynch in The Roman Hat Mystery, the twins in The Siamese Twin Mystery.
One wonders if these are attempts by Queen to please young readers.
These young men can have unconventional, non-standard lives. The books stress how unusual Djuna's career as a majordomo is. And the twins are nearly unique.
Ellery's Childhood. References to Ellery's childhood are rare in the EQ books. The Siamese Twin Mystery has two. We learn that Ellery's mother was stubborn, and that the Inspector thinks Ellery has inherited his stubbornness from her (Chapter 1).
We also learn that young Ellery went to "the Crosley School" (Chapter 2). This seems to be a name and place made up for the novel. Ellery is very well-educated throughout the series, and it is frequently mentioned that he went to Harvard. So he likely had a good education earlier in life as well. A name like "the Crosley School" sounds like a private school. But we learn almost nothing about it. And it seems not to be mentioned elsewhere in the EQ books.
There was a real-life Crosley School in Louisiana in this period, which pops up a few times in Internet searches. However, it seems likely that this is just a coincidence. It's hard to imagine that confirmed New Yorkers like the Queens would send a child to far-off Louisiana for school.
We learn that Ellery's teachers at Crosley included an elderly Greek. This anticipates the Greek professor who appears briefly at the start of "The Dauphin's Doll". And the Greek research scientist Dr. Herbert Agon in "E = Murder".
In The Egyptian Cross Mystery (Chapter 8) we briefly learn that Ellery went to a preparatory school. (This is consistent with what we learn about the Crosley School in The Siamese Twin Mystery - it could well be a prep school.) Ellery is depicted as a serious reader in his prep school days - which makes sense in terns of his erudition.
In The French Powder Mystery (last part of Chapter 12) we learn that Ellery was a childhood friend of Westley Weaver, a young man in the case. The two bunked together at school - which suggests Ellery and his friend both boarded there, away from home. Ellery also spent a summer with the friend and the friend's family in Maine.
Decades later in "Mystery at the Library of Congress" (1960; based on a 1944 radio play) we meet a cop who used to share a beat with Inspector Queen in his early years. We briefly learn Inspector Terence Fineberg "used to slip Ellery candy bars". Fineberg is a fairly common Jewish name, and Inspector Fineberg might be Jewish. (A parallel: in Cat of Many Tails, Frank Pellman Soames likes to bring home food treats such as candy bars to his children. Soames is a New York City postal worker, the way Fineberg is a New York cop.)
The Chinese Orange Mystery (Chapter 3) refers to when Inspector Queen "was a Captain in his precinct days."
I have always thought of this as the most John Dickson Carr like of Queen's novels, and regarded it as an experiment by its author in writing a "John Dickson Carr book". However, a comparison of the dates suggests that it was written before Carr became "himself", and if there were influence here it would be in the other direction. It is possible that it influenced the complexity of such Carr novels that followed, as Death Watch (1935), The Arabian Nights Mystery (1936), and above all, Carr's masterpiece The Three Coffins (1935).
The technique of the book is closely related to the "impossible crime", although EQ does not actually use it to create an impossible crime situation in the novel. Despite this, many historians of the locked room story seem to (falsely) remember it as a "locked room" book; it appeared on the poll of the top ten impossible crime books, for example, conducted by Edward D. Hoch for the Mystery Writers of America (see the introduction to Hoch's anthology, All But Impossible.) This false memory is a remarkable case of collective amnesia. On a deeper level, the mystery writers who told Hoch that it was one of their favorite locked room stories were essentially right: it does come straight out of the impossible crime tradition.
Locals. Stamp collector Glenn Macgowan specializes in "locals": stamps "issued by states or communities for local postage before there were national postage systems" (Chapter 1). This perhaps is related to all the cities which are examined in depth in EQ, culminating in the many works set in his fictitious New England city Wrightsville.
Comprehension. In The Siamese Twin Mystery (last part of Chapter 12), Ellery Queen sees a forest fire. At first, he cannot comprehend the surreal sight, and instead thinks he is having a visionary experience.
Somewhat similarly, in The Chinese Orange Mystery (last part of Chapter 2, start of Chapter 3) Ellery finds it hard to comprehend the very complex murder scene. A whole series of mental processes and adjectives are used to describe Ellery's non-comprehension of the visually overloaded scene.
Unlike The Siamese Twin Mystery, Ellery never thinks he is having a vision or optical illusion.
Ellery puts his analytic skills to work. He is quicker than other people to see organized patterns in the apparent jumble of the crime scene (last part of Chapter 3).
Architecture. The architecture in The Chinese Orange Mystery has specific features in common, with that of The Dutch Shoe Mystery:
The office and its waiting room are described far more vividly than any other locale in The Chinese Orange Mystery. Probably this is because they are the scene of the crime.
Wall Display. The crime scene room has weapons, previously displayed on the wall, taken down and used by the culprit. This idea returns in The Devil to Pay. Both rooms are linked to well-to-do businessmen.
Writers. Jo Temple in The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) and Karen Leith in The Door Between (1937) share characteristics. Both are:
The great adventure (and sometimes mystery) writers of an earlier generation (Doyle, Jack London, Robert W. Chambers, George Barr McCutcheon, Richard Harding Davis) are mentioned in The French Powder Mystery (Chapter 22). Many of these writers of classic romance are invoked again in "Miser's Gold" (1950). along with Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas, Bret Harte, O. Henry and Wilkie Collins. Adventure novelist Rafael Sabatini and playwright George Bernard Shaw are invoked at the start of "The Invisible Lover" (1934). The heroine Ayesha of H. Rider Haggard's She (1886), is mentioned in The Origin of Evil (Chapter 2). Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) is talked about in "The Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds" (1940).
Agatha Christie and S.S. Van Dine are mentioned in Chapter 1 of The Four of Hearts (1938). EQ makes clear in The Four of Hearts who his closest literary relatives are by referring to the imaginary mystery writer Ellery Van Christie. Similarly, The Tragedy of Y (1932) describes the "deductive-intellectual detective" tradition of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen himself. In "The Adventure of Napoleon's Razor" (1939) a character tells Ellery that he is his second-favorite detective, after Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Both Poirot and Chesterton are mentioned towards the end of The Dragon's Teeth (1939). Van Dine's sleuth Philo Vance is mentioned in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935). Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is invoked in The American Gun Mystery (1933) and "The Adventure of Mr. Short and Mr. Long" (1943). Rex Stout is discussed in The Finishing Stroke (1958) (Chapter 10). One also suspects that the use of the name Cazilis in Cat of Many Tails is in tribute to Mollie Casilis in Craig Rice's It Takes a Thief (1943). G.K. Chesterton's sleuth Father Brown is mentioned by Ellery in The American Gun Mystery (1933) and Halfway House (1936), and Stuart Palmer's detective Hildegarde Withers in "Mystery at the Library of Congress" (1960; based on a 1944 radio play). "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" by Poe is cited in The Tragedy of X. "The Three R's" (1946) mentions Anthony Abbot, G.K. Chesterton, Doyle, Poe, and Israel Zangwill. All of the writers in the above paragraph are members of what can be called the intuitionist tradition, the tradition to which Ellery Queen belonged himself.
English writers with ties to the Scientific and Realist schools of detective fiction also receives tributes in Queen. Ellery refers to H.C. Bailey's sleuth Reggie Fortune in The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934). Dr. Eustace in "The Teakwood Case" (1933) could be a tribute to Robert Eustace, the collaborator on a number of important scientific detective stories. The publisher Dan Z. Freeman in The Finishing Stroke (1958) might be a homage to R. Austin Freeman, a writer Queen admired. The book explicitly mentions (Chapter 5) Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), a novel whose multiple solutions probably had a strong influence on Queen's own multiple solution mysteries, such as The Greek Coffin Mystery.
Private eyes and Raymond Chandler are memorably satirized in the opening of "The Ides of Michael Magoon" (1947). Dashiell Hammett is mentioned rather mockingly in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) (Chapter 7). This story also has comic references (Chapter 9) to thriller writers E. Phillips Oppenheim and Edgar Wallace. Double, Double (1950) mentions Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Erle Stanley Gardner. Double, Double goes on to satirize private eye tales.
In the story "Cold Money" (1952), the bad guy keeps renting Room 913 of a hotel. As Francis M. Nevins pointed out, this recalls a similar situation in Cornell Woolrich's "The Room With Something Wrong" (1938), which also involves mystery in Room 913. The house dick of the hotel plays a major role in both tales, as well. This is clearly a homage to Woolrich and one of his best stories. I suspect that EQ has added little homages and in jokes to many of his works, playful references to other mystery writers' stories; I wonder if they are as numerous as Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearances in his movies.
More references to crime fiction:
References to science fiction:
The solution also shows EQ's admirable use of logic: once EQ figures out the method of the murder, he can deduce from it the identity of the murderer, in a way that seems paradigmatic for the use of deduction in the mystery.
During the latter part of the solution, Ellery develops a six-clue profile of the killer. He then uses the profile to eliminate all but one of the suspects. Such profiles are a key part of EQ's mystery plot technique. The first three clues in this profile deal with who might have known certain facts. Such "knowledge of information" plays a role in a number of EQ solutions.
However, the solution of The Spanish Cape Mystery is fairly simple, the plot is not especially complex, and the body of the book is over long for the substance of the plot. The whole thing would be better as a novella, of around half the length of the novel.
Tiller. If The Spanish Cape Mystery has a hero, it is the valet Tiller. Tiller is intelligent, observant and insightful. He also makes unexpected comments. This is one of the more sympathetic, non-stereotyped portraits of a servant in Golden Age mystery fiction.
Tiller is of mixed European and Asian ancestry: what used to be called "Eurasian" in that era (Chapter 5). His positive portrayal reflects the pro-Civil Rights attitude of EQ throughout his career.
The Dream. The Spanish Cape Mystery has a memorable dream sequence (start of Chapter 8). It mentions that Ellery had hoped to get insight into solving the crime through his dream, but that this did not happen. Such dreams about a case will be a recurring event in the mysteries of Stuart Palmer.
Both the dream and the valet's account (middle of Chapter 6) show the handsome Marco in a variety of very dressy men's clothes. This anticipates the look at the victim's spectacular wardrobe of clothes in The King Is Dead (first part of Chapter 14). And some specific outfits recall EQ tales: the "doublet and hose" evokes EQ's Shakespearean actor sleuth Drury Lane, although Marco is singing, not acting in the dream.
Marco changes sizes from giant to miniature in the dream. This recalls that EQ favorite Alice in Wonderland, whose heroine also changes size.
Marco is first seen in the dream on a ship. Similarly Earle Cort is first seen driving a "high-powered car". Male virility is linked to vehicles.
Earle Cort. Earle Cort (last part of Chapter 2) anticipates Crowe Macgowan in The Origin of Evil: both are skimpily dressed, tanned young muscle-men. Earle Cort's aristocratic name recalls Kit Lord in The Tragedy of X. The names are also one-syllable. Both Earle Cort and Kit Lord are blond. (So is the less sympathetic muscle-man Harkness in "The Treasure Hunt".)
Lord, Cort and Macgowan all mainly serve as sympathetic boyfriends to the books' young heroines. They are not treated seriously as suspects. They are there to provide romance.
Landscape. The book shows EQ's ability to create a natural landscape, and integrate it into a story. It seems unusual for EQ, after the urban setting and delightful floor plans of so much of his fiction. "The Treasure Hunt" (1935) of the same year also has a dramatic, isolated natural location, one with heights and water. Such lonely buildings in inaccessible settings are a tradition in 1930's mysteries: one thinks of The Phantom of Crestwood, Benighted (filmed as The Old Dark House), Rebecca, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and Hake Talbot's Hangman's Handyman. The first four were made into movies, and the lonely mansion near the sea on a dark and stormy night is a staple of the 1930's Hollywood whodunit.
Film Version. The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) was made into a mediocre B movie that same year.
The film's best sequence has nothing to do with the novel. This is the opening, in which Ellery helps Inspector Queen solve a jewel robbery. This prologue is unrelated to the rest of the story.
Romantic leading man Donald Cook does a decent job, playing a suave, well dressed, often witty and humorous Ellery. He does not much resemble the Ellery of the novels, however. During the years 1932-1936, Cook appeared in a remarkable number of who-done-its, many adaptations of famous mystery novels. None of these films has developed much of a reputation. The ones I've seen range from the pleasant: Murder in the Fleet (Edward Sedgwick, 1935); to the awful: The Circus Queen Murder (1933).
Some short works in the above series, "The African Traveler", "Mind Over Matter" and the radio play "The Adventure of the Forgotten Men", all show interesting social commentary. One the surface, there seems no inherent reason why works in this puzzle plot tradition should involve social issues. But the plots and social ideas seemed to be linked in EQ's creative imagination.
Ancestors?. A possible ancestor to all of the above EQ works is E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913). Chapter 11 of Bentley's novel sets forth mystery solution ideas that bear some relationship to EQ's later mystery concepts. Bentley's plot seems both related to, and distinctly different from, Ellery Queen's.
Rufus King's first Lt. Valcour novel, Murder by the Clock, was apparently serialized in magazines starting in late 1928, before its book publication in 1929. It has a simple plot idea involving men's hats. It is possible that EQ used King's work as a jumping off point for the far more complex ideas in The Roman Hat Mystery, and the subsequent works listed above.
Later Writers. King and Queen in the 1920's apparently influenced later writers who used similar plot ideas. Dashiell Hammett in The Glass Key (1930) used plot concepts about men's hats related to Murder by the Clock and The Roman Hat Mystery.
Stuart Palmer, in The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), "The Riddle of the Double Negative" (1947) and "Once Upon a Crime" (1950), also uses ideas related to King's and Queen's in constructing his puzzle plots. Palmer became interested in these ideas' potential for symmetry; EQ occasionally created symmetric plots, as well. In general, Palmer's plotting approaches often ran parallel to those of Ellery Queen: both men also wrote many tales of Impossible Disappearances, as is discussed below.
G.D.H. Cole's The Brooklyn Murders (1923) contains a mystery writer turned amateur sleuth named Robert Ellery. He is called "Ellery" throughout the book, accentuating his resemblance to EQ.
The One-Penny Black & The Glass-Domed Clock. EQ's first short story "The One-Penny Black" (1933), and "The Glass-Domed Clock" (1933), share features in common. Both:
"The One-Penny Black" shows signs of influence from Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop (1919) and Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle" (1892).
The Teakwood Case. "The Teakwood Case" (1933) is a quintessential early EQ, investigate a situation in-depth puzzler. It adopts the same approach as such novels as The French Powder Mystery (1930). Ellery learns more, then deduces some more, then gets deeper in investigation, precipitating more things happening, followed by more deductions... The chain of deductions ultimately becomes very satisfying.
Ellery eventually develops two whole solutions, a false (but insightful) earlier solution, then a deeper and correct solution to the crime. This recalls the four solutions in The Greek Coffin Mystery. The first solution is in the tradition of The Roman Hat Mystery, and other EQ works; the second involves complex riffs on this approach.
SPOILERS. The first solution is a variant on a persistent EQ mystery plot, one found in The Spanish Cape Mystery, The Roman Hat Mystery and many others. Usually these plots involve men's clothes. But in "The Teakwood Case", the plot involves not clothing per se, but the teakwood case of the title. The case is like clothes, in that it is carried by men in their clothing.
The story shows EQ's interest in symmetric patterns. The two apartments are fascinating.
The bedroom has multiple exits - like the operating theater in The Dutch Shoe Mystery. Each has one exit that is non-standard or unusual, although in a completely different way.
SPOILERS. The tale shows EQ's motif of surrealistically repeated crimes, as in The Egyptian Cross Mystery.
There are references in "The Teakwood Case" to the Roman Theater, scene of EQ's first mystery novel The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). Later the Wrightsville books will be filled with shared references. However these are rarer in New York City set EQ works like "The Teakwood Case".
The African Traveler. "The African Traveler" (1934) involves no less than four solutions. The solutions do not build on each other, in the manner of the more complex "The Teakwood Case", but simply exist as alternate explanations. Still, this is impressively ingenious.
SPOILERS. The first and fourth solutions develop the approaches found in The Roman Hat Mystery, and many other Queen works. In fact, the key idea of the first solution is related to the first clue in the finale of The American Gun Mystery (1933), also in this same tradition. The second solution is distinctly different: it is a scientific detection, based squarely in the work of R. Austin Freeman, and his microscopic look at dust.
The fourth solution has an exciting series of deductions, in which Ellery eliminates large groups of people as suspects, eventually narrowing down on the killer. This too recalls deductions at the end of The American Gun Mystery, in which Ellery drastically narrows the pool of suspects down from the 20, 000 people present at the rodeo.
SPOILERS. The fourth solution uses that EQ favorite, the "negative clue": an object that should be there, but isn't. In this case, the missing object is absent from a long list of the victim's clothes. This anticipates The King Is Dead, which also has a negative clue that is missing from a long inventory of a man's clothes. In both works, the clothes are fancy and suggest getting dressed up.
As Ellery leaves the university's Arts Building, it's architecture - elevator, corridor, steps outside - recalls another Manhattan institutional building, the hospital in The Dutch Shoe Mystery.
The three students who work with Ellery, anticipate the amateur QBI helpers in Cat of Many Tails.
"The African Traveler" is structured in three scenes, each at a different location, and with different subject matter. This gives a logical organization to the story. In order of appearance:
The Hanging Acrobat. "The Hanging Acrobat" (1934) is poor, aside from some vaudeville lore. It reads as if EQ were trying to add some spice to his tales to increase their salability, an experiment he did not repeat, although he came close with the perversity of "The Bleeding Portrait" (1937).
The mystery plot is simple and uninspired. We don't get the key fact till late in the tale, which allows Ellery to figure out the solution immediately.
The stage performer "Tex Crosby, the Crooning Cowboy" is a satire on two show biz crazes of the era: singing cowboys, and crooners. There is something absurd and funny about these two concepts being merged together. The name Crosby echoes a famous real-life crooner, Bing Crosby. Despite this, Tex's stage act is described admiringly by the story, as is Sam the comedian's. These accounts are high points of the tale.
The ex-movie cowboy Buck Burnshaw in The Tragedy of Errors recalls "The Hanging Acrobat". Buck has "an old Western costume"; Tex has the "gaudiest stage-cowboy costume". However Buck a far grimmer character than the upbeat Tex Crosby. SPOILERS. Buck is found murdered, hanging by a rope, like a different victim in "The Hanging Acrobat".
The Three Lame Men. "The Three Lame Men" (1934) is also poor. Its depiction of a Black maid is distasteful: a rare lapse for the normally pro-Civil Rights Ellery Queen.
The mystery plot centers on Ellery reconstructing the events at the crime scene, based on interpreting footprints and other traces. This is a type of mystery plot I usually find thin and uncreative. That's the case with "The Three Lame Men", once again. SPOILERS. On the plus side: the tale does a good job with interpreting the scratch on the waxed floor. The mystery of the scratch is solved twice, in the Queen manner. The first solution is by Velie, the second one by Ellery.
Ellery also does not-bad reasoning about the window.
Such macho men as Bill Kittering and Mac McKee are simply-but-enjoyably characterized. They are fantasy-identification figures for readers, who would enjoy their enviable lives. More about these characters:
The Invisible Lover. "The Invisible Lover" (1934) has some good ideas, but the tale never really gels as a whole. One likes the way EQ makes the crime essentially be impossible, by having the hero insist that he had sole possession of the gun through the hours of the murder.
SPOILERS. But the central explanation of this breaks with the basic paradigms that make detective stories possible. It is clever, but it is more of a stunt than a fair play solution. Variations on this approach were used by Erle Stanley Gardner in several novels, and by Edmund Crispin in some of the stories in Beware of the Trains.
Still, there is all sorts of plot inventiveness throughout the story. At the end, Ellery offers a long series of solid clues to the killer's identity.
SPOILERS. The way the boarding-house rooms are all identically furnished, is nicely surreal. It also offers some good mystery plot possibilities. The mystery plot takes advantage of this situation in two ways.
The hero is never "on stage" during the story. He is talked about, but not shown directly doing or saying things. Sections of the story have different strategies to effect this:
The murder victim is a well-known painter. This is an example of the Van Dine School's interest in the arts.
The Two-Headed Dog. "The Two-Headed Dog" (1934) is a combination puzzle plot and Nancy Drew type adventure story (ghost and treasure at sinister cabin). The mystery solution is unveiled at the end, Agatha Christie style, without the sort of intermediate deductions of "The Teakwood Case". This story is quite entertaining, with good New England atmosphere, and its solution is clever. EQ includes more than one mysterious surprise in the solution - like several of his best short works, it involves multiple mysteries.
Ellery appreciates the traditional New England inn in the story, the same way he will appreciate the archetypal New England city Wrightsville.
"The Invisible Lover" and "The Two-Headed Dog" have similar structures in their long openings. This structure has little to do with their mystery plots, but much to do with the tales' story-telling strategies:
The Seven Black Cats. Some of the best tales in the collection are the last. "The Seven Black Cats" (1934) is very clever. "The Seven Black Cats" bears structural resemblances to "The Two-Headed Dog" of the same year, and "The Hollow Dragon" (1936) to come:
More distantly, "The President's Half Disme" has some related features:
The Mad Tea-Party. "The Mad Tea-Party" (1934) is a classic of misdirection. EQ picked it as his best short story; after Agatha Christie's "The Affair at the Bungalow", it is the subtlest and most deceptive of all detective short stories. It was made into a superb and faithful TV show, as an episode of the 1975 Jim Hutton Ellery Queen TV series. The story was first broadcast October 30, 1975 and was scripted by Peter S. Fischer, and directed by James Sheldon.
"The Mad Tea-Party" opens with Ellery arriving in the country at night, as do "The Two-Headed Dog", "The Lamp of God", "The Emperor's Dice".
In both "The Two-Headed Dog" and "The Mad Tea-Party", Ellery wakes up in the middle of the night, and learns what time it is from his watch with its luminous dial. See also the green and red luminous arrows in "The House of Darkness", a tale that also mentions the possibility of luminous watches.
SPOILERS. Soon Ellery sees a large clock with a luminous face. It's like a giant version of his watch. Such a change of size recalls the Alice books. It also has a surrealist dimension.
The theater aspects of "The Mad Tea-Party" reflect the Van Dine School's interest in drama and show business.
The wealthy Wall Street financier Owen is seen as a repulsive person. This is left-wing social commentary.
Ellery's speculation (near the start of Part 2) is science fictional, rather than supernatural. Unlike many impossible crime writers who like supernatural imagery, EQ does not include the supernatural.
"The Lamp of God" has affinities with The Tragedy of X (1932). Both deal with a long complex history, in which villains engage in elaborate plots. Neither is especially plausible. Both have a somewhat sinister atmosphere.
In different ways, "The Lamp of God" is similar to "The Bearded Lady" (1934), in which complex family relations converge on sinister events at an isolated house.
Characters in "The Lamp of God" and The Dragon's Teeth (1939) are similar:
The House of Darkness. "The House of Darkness" (1935) and "The Treasure Hunt" (1935) show EQ's skill with elaborate, surrealistic backgrounds for his fiction. Both stories are also good mystery puzzles, not too realistic, but imaginative in their plotting.
The cubist inspired designer of the "The House of Darkness" is a Frenchman, and recalls the similar French designer of the Art Deco furniture in The French Powder Mystery (1930). The tale explicitly evokes the motion picture The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), surrealism and cubism, as well as Alice in Wonderland, showing that EQ was linking his work to these anti-realistic artistic traditions. The spectacularly fantastic Dante's Inferno is also invoked.
A noteworthy feature of the early EQ stories is the presence of Black people among the suspects and witnesses. EQ is clearly trying to treat them in non-stereotyped ways. They are most fully present in "The House of Darkness". Please see my list of Civil Rights in Mystery Fiction.
The elaborate architecture of the "The House of Darkness" goes well beyond the demands of the mystery plot. EQ has imagined the whole architecture of the funhouse in detail. It is a key example of the interest in architecture in Golden Age mystery fiction.
The octagonal room is also mathematical, geometric imagery.
The House of Darkness is called a "haunted house" near the start of the tale. But there actually is little in the story about the House featuring fake hauntings, ghosts or the supernatural. Ellery Queen was just not interested in the supernatural (which is fine by me). Instead, we learn about the strange architecture of the house, and what it does to people. Designer Duval is praised for his "mechanical" entertainments. This is like a "funhouse", not a "haunted house".
Amusement parks are not usually thought of as militaristic enterprises. But this park is patrolled by khaki-uniformed police: khaki being a traditional color for uniforms. And the young barker outside the funhouse is uniformed too. He's unusually slick and articulate for a barker, and seems good at manipulating the crowd. The story recognizes his outstanding verbal skill by calling him an "orator". Like the funhouse and the rest of the park, the barker and police seem carefully planned. So does the attendant who takes tickets. His contemptuous thumb gesture pointing visitors to the House entrance also seems like a deliberate piece of planned theater.
The characters (other than Ellery and Djuna) fall into three groups:
The Treasure Hunt. The estate of the retired General in "Treasure Hunt" recalls that of retired actor Drury Lane in The Tragedy of X (1932). The General's estate is staffed with retired soldiers, just as Drury Lane's is with retired theater people. Both staffs seem mainly male. The General's estate has a militaristic feel, while Drury Lane's is theatrical. Both estates are on the Hudson River.
The saluting and related "discipline" in the General's estate recalls the police saluting in The Roman Hat Mystery and Drury Lane's Last Case. Much more sinisterly, they anticipate the military discipline of the militia groups in Cat of Many Tails (Chapter 8).
The Hollow Dragon. "The Hollow Dragon" (1936) is another tale in the same mode as "The Seven Black Cats" (1934) and "The Two-Headed Dog" (1934). These stories start with an event whose significance is puzzling, and which is hard to explain coherently. Then Ellery eventually develops a logical explanation. The sequence in which Ellery elicits possible motives for the events, in a Socratic dialogue, seems directly modeled on a previous one in "The Seven Black Cats". Here, the initial strange events are simpler than those of the earlier stories, and the explanation developed is ultimately less creative too, although still inventive.
However, as a compensation, Ellery solves this case twice, as in "The Teakwood Case" and The Greek Coffin Mystery. And once again, the two explanations interact in ingenious ways. The twin solutions are less complex than those of the earlier stories: this tale is constructed on a smaller scale than earlier works. But it is still a satisfying instance of Queen imagination. EQ would go on to use the ultimate solution as a subsidiary mystery subplot in "The Fallen Angel" (1951; based on a 1939 radio play).
The Bleeding Portrait. "The Bleeding Portrait" (1937) has some good atmosphere in its first half, but never builds up much of a mystery plot. It is one of those stories in which detectives interpret trails of physical evidence, to reconstruct a crime. This is an ancient tradition in mystery fiction, going back to Émile Gaboriau, and it was common in a writer EQ idolized, Melville Davisson Post. EQ offers more fair play clues than Post often did, showing all the physical evidence to the reader. EQ also gives this a Queenian twist, by solving the crime twice. Despite this technical skill, I confess this type of mystery plot is not my cup of tea, either in Post or EQ, and this story is my least favorite in The New Adventures. The grim story line does not help.
Natchitauk is a fictitious region, created for the story. An internet search for "Natchitauk" reveals only references to "The Bleeding Portrait". Natchitauk is the center of an artist's colony. In this it resembles the real-life Provincetown in Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Natchitauk's "rambling roses" are also a Cape Cod feature. However, the name Natchitauk also recalls the real-life Montauk in Long Island.
Ellery wears a leather jacket in this story. This is one of the few times we learn about how he is dressed. One can guess that he mainly wears suits. In this era, men got to wear leather jackets when they were on vacation in the country - which is exactly what Ellery is doing.
Paula Paris: The Sports Stories. After writing 14 short stories, including a novella, in the three years 1933-1935, EQ largely gave up the form in the next three, publishing only two shorts in 1936-1938. In 1939 EQ returned to the short tale with a series of four stories, all with sports Backgrounds. Each co-stars Paula Paris, with whom EQ fell in love in The Four of Hearts (1938). She is a good character, but unfortunately she seems never to have returned after these works.
Van Dine School mysteries often have a Background, that takes one backstage in some branch of show business. These sports mysteries can be seen as a special case of this, with the show business specifically involving sports. The crimes take place at big public sporting events, whose show business aspects are emphasized.
For example, "Long Shot" shows different kinds of race track officials, and various kinds of equipment. These help create a Background, giving an inside look at a race track.
The four Paula Paris short stories and their sports Backgrounds:
Man Bites Dog. "Man Bites Dog" (1939) has affinities with the minimalist tales of poisoning EQ was essaying in these years, such as The Four of Hearts and Calamity Town (1942).
Its three solutions also place it in the tradition of multiple-solutioned EQ mysteries.
Its setting, a box at a sports arena, full of suspects both from sports and show biz engaged in romantic triangles with each other, is similar in locale and denizens to the opening of The American Gun Mystery.
While The American Gun Mystery took place at a rodeo, "Man Bites Dog" is set at baseball's World Series. So is EQ's radio play "The World Series Crime" (1942), although it is more set at events leading up to the Series, than during a game itself. Later, Rex Stout will set his novella "This Won't Kill You" (1952) at a World Series.
The brief airplane opening of "Man Bites Dog" recalls The Four of Hearts.
Long Shot. "Long Shot" (1939) returns to the turf of The American Gun Mystery (1933), with a tale combining Western characters, horses, and guns, the same elements as the earlier book. See also the stage performer "Tex Crosby, the Crooning Cowboy" in "The Hanging Acrobat". What "Long Shot" doesn't have are any cowboys, that staple of Westerns. Instead, it centers on horse racing.
SPOILERS. If "Long Shot" relates to The American Gun Mystery in subject matter, as a puzzle plot mystery it is closer to The King Is Dead (1952). "Long Shot" is a borderline-Impossible Crime tale, with amazingly successful actions happening at a distance. This sort of puzzle becomes a full-fledged Impossible Crime in The King Is Dead.
Comedy elements in "Long Shot" anticipate later mysteries by other writers:
Sports in the United States are frequently linked to ideas of masculinity. The heterosexual-but-un-macho boyfriend in "Long Shot" embodies several aspects of non-macho attitudes and behavior. The boyfriend gets more space in the story than any other character. The boyfriend is mainly treated sympathetically by the story. SPOILERS. The boyfriend is successful in his endeavors, unlike the "brutally-masculine" boxers in "Mind Over Matter". This too suggests that the stories approve of the boyfriend, but not of the boxers.
Mind Over Matter. "Mind Over Matter" (1939) feels archetypically Queenian in its mystery plot. Its plot resembles other EQ tales, in various aspects. SPOILERS:
SPOILERS. "Mind Over Matter" shows fixed boxing matches and sinister gambling dodges around boxing, as well as the brutality of the sport. It is a more negative portrait than the depictions of other sports in the Paula Paris tales. These depictions of the crooked side of boxing perhaps bring "Mind Over Matter" into "hard-boiled" subject matter. However, the humorous satirical tone "Mind Over Matter" applies to this material feels more Golden Age than tough or hard-boiled.
The brief appearance of a police "radio-car man" testifies to the importance of radio in this era. In real life, Ellery Queen was launching a successful career in radio drama, at this time.
The 1939 sports stories often scrutinize different kinds of masculinity. "Mind Over Matter" focuses on extreme "conventional masculinity" in its portrait of the boxing world. It views this boxing world negatively. And it sees the "masculinity" in this world very negatively, as in its portrait of the vicious champion. The boxers' masculinity is eventually seen as in opposition to Ellery's skill at reason. This gives rise to the title "Mind Over Matter": Ellery represents Mind and the physically strong boxers represent Matter.
Other characters in "Mind Over Matter" have professions that in the 1930's were seen as linked to masculinity: a chauffeur, a police radio-car man. These characters are not idolized, but they are fairly sympathetic, and turn out to be innocent of any wrongdoing. These characters suggest that at least some men have found ways to utilize their masculinity in socially constructive professions. These men form a counter-balance to the boxers and their negative, toxic masculinity. One difference: the chauffeur and radio-car man are linked to technology, while the boxers are not. This technology gives a leaven to these men, not found in the boxers' world.
SPOILERS. The corruption in the boxing world provides a motive for the killer. And provides reasons for other characters' actions. These motives and reasons are one of the two main links between the boxing aspects and the tale's murder mystery. The other link: An aspect of the night's boxing lineup provides a clue to the killer.
Ellery's body gives him premonitions when a murder is about to take place. This is based on Ellery's years of experience: there is nothing psychic or supernatural about it. This is years before Spiderman and his "Spidey sense" in the 1960's, which warned him of danger.
"Mind Over Matter" is an early tale, in which Ellery doesn't want to go to a public event, because whenever he does, a murder occurs. This is a nice bit of self-parody.
Trojan Horse. The first three Paula Paris stories are well done, and even the weaker final tale "Trojan Horse" (1939) is a game attempt with some pleasant mystery. Like "The Treasure Hunt" it involves a long search for some stolen jewels. These are examples of the Impossible Disappearance tales that EQ did so well.
Pop Wing is a man-boy: an adult given over to childish enthusiasms. He anticipates Horatio in There Was an Old Woman, and Edmund Black in "Black Secret". Pop Wing's eternal boyhood is seen as a barely functional kind of masculinity. Various kinds of masculinity often appear in the 1939's sports tales.
As an extreme football booster, Pop Wing anticipates characters in Coffin Corner (1949) and Dead Drunk (1953) by George Bagby. Bagby is much less sympathetic to these characters and their booster activities, than is EQ. However, even EQ suggests that Pop Wing could be annoying and weird. EQ's attitude is more one of amused toleration, than endorsement.
Pop Wing's home includes a private museum displaying his collections. Museums, both public and private, are a Van Dine School tradition.
A warning to readers: most editions of Halfway House contain spoilers on their back covers, that give away some of the novel's early surprises. One is advised to ignore these, and just read the book without glancing at them. This is good advice in general: most blurbs reveal too much!
The early surprises (Chapters 1 and 2) are foreshadowed by plenty of clues. This make their wild developments more pleasing and acceptable to readers - unlike the equally baroque (if very different) revelations at the end of The American Gun Mystery, which only had two slim clues to support the major plot twist.
The woman reporter covering the events anticipates the one in Calamity Town.
Still Life. The objects on the table form one of the still lifes sometimes found at EQ crime scenes.
Landscape. The opening of Halfway House (Chapter 1) benefits from a detailed landscape. The landscape includes man-made features: buildings, roads, driveways. The area includes water (the Delaware River). EQ likes water-side areas: The Greek Coffin Mystery, The Spanish Cape Mystery, Inspector Queen's Own Case, "The Bleeding Portrait".
The landscape mixes different geometrical forms:
Trenton. The crime takes place in Trenton, the capital of the state of New Jersey. The opening links Trenton to historical Americana. EQ loves American traditions. Trenton is seen as part of the history of America, like the New England inn in "The Two-Headed Dog".
Trenton resembles Wrightsville to come:
Trenton is unusual in EQ in that it is the state capital. EQ usually didn't write about political cities. And Trenton's political role is mainly just briefly noted at the opening. (Cat of Many Tails does show New York City's Mayor and his public challenges. But it doesn't include "normal" politics like political parties, legislation or elections.)
Gas Station. The gas station and its owner on Lamberton Road (first part of Chapter 3) recalls the one in The Spanish Cape Mystery. Both gas stations are just a bit outside the main locales of the stories.
The gas station in Halfway House extends the technological foundation of the tale's landscape.
Influences?. The concentration on using evidence at the crime scene to explore and reconstruct the crime, recalls Émile Gaboriau.
A crime at a lonely locale at night, involving passions from personal life, recalls Anna Katherine Green. Green's crime sometimes have political dimensions. The class conflict in Halfway House is political.
Rogues. The victim's behavior recalls that of fiction's Rogues. SPOILERS. Early Rogues sometimes maintained dual identities to commit crimes. Later Rogue-inspired sleuths sometimes used dual identities to do detective work. Both kinds of characters sometimes maintained places where they could change identities:
The victim in Halfway House differs from all of the above characters, in that he is neither a criminal nor a detective. Instead he is motivated by his romantic life to maintain two identities.
The Opening: Structure. The series of facts about Trenton that open Halfway House, anticipate in form the fact-filled openings of some tales in Calendar of Crime. (More facts appear in Halfway House at the start of Part III, a similar structural effect.) "The Death of Don Juan" (1962) is a novella that opens with facts.
Halfway House opens in a cozy setting, before moving on to a sinister locale. Such a "cozy beginning, then moving to crime scene" recalls "The Seven Black Cats", "The Two-Headed Dog", and "The Hollow Dragon" (1936).
The next section will continue the discussion of Halfway House - so please keep reading.
It is similar to the deductions from the shoe in The Dutch Shoe Mystery, although the clues in Halfway House are less purely physical than those in Dutch Shoe. As in The French Powder Mystery, some of the best deductions turn on the flow of knowledge, such as who knew things and who did not. And also on what people might have known, had they been observant.
The revelations in the early chapters recall The French Powder Mystery in another way: they deal with different geographical zones, and their boundaries.
Fans of pure detection will enjoy this, and the book follows in a honorable tradition of "deduction through clues" in the detective story. It pairs with The French Powder Mystery as a book with a continuous stream of interesting detection and deduction, with a special emphasis on investigation of a crime scene. But the finale seems mild compared to EQ's best work. There is no complex plot, no wild crime schemes or final revelations. Some of Queen's logic is interesting, especially his reasons for concluding one character is speaking the truth.
No Parking. Twenty years later EQ would write "No Parking" (1956). This short story is like a miniature version of Halfway House, with new plot ideas, but many similarities to the novel. Both have:
Miracles Do Happen. "Miracles Do Happen" (1957) is another little short story, in the same mode as "No Parking". Both are tales in which three suspects visit a soon-to-be murder victim, a common paradigm in late Ellery Queen. Both follow the Halfway House approach of Ellery making deductions from clues at the murder scene. "Miracles Do Happen" is the simplest of the three: there is really only one clue. But the story is highly satisfying, partly because of the storytelling.
"Miracles Do Happen" follows in the tradition of Halfway House, in showing the extreme difficulties faced by a sympathetic lower middle class family.
"Miracles Do Happen" reuses as its main clue the central plot idea of "Cold Money" (1950), a short tale in Q.B.I.
Driver's Seat. "Driver's Seat" (1951) is a tiny tale. It has the class conflict of Halfway House, the three suspects visiting the victim of "No Parking", and the rain, cars at the crime scene, and deductions from evidence of both stories.
The Robber of Wrightsville. "The Robber of Wrightsville" (1953; based on a 1940 radio play) is further away from Halfway House, in terms of its story action. But it once again is about class conflict, with the upper and lower classes surrealistically joined through romance. There is a crusading character of working class origin in the story too, as in Halfway House. The highly satisfying puzzle plot is also in the Halfway House mode, with detection from the crime scene emphasized, and the flow of knowledge playing a key role. Ellery builds up a two-clue profile of the criminal, which fits exactly one character in the story.
Black Secret. Two of the three mystery subplots in "The Adventure of the Black Secret" (1939) are solved using profiles.
Mouse's Blood. "The Adventure of the Mouse's Blood" (1940) is a radio play. Ellery solves it by creating a one-clue profile of the killer. Also, Ellery watches suspects going into and out of the murder building: fairly common in EQ profile mysteries.
Dying Scarecrow. The radio play "The Adventure of the Dying Scarecrow" (1940) has Ellery studying the crime-scene of the second murder, and developing a two-clue profile of the killer from it. He shows that only one character fits this profile. Oddly, he learns nothing from the first murder. BIG SPOILERS. The two clues are 1) access to a corncob pipe; 2) strength to commit the crime.
"Dying Scarecrow" takes place in the snow, not the rain. And otherwise, it has few of the story elements found in Halfway House and "No Parking".
The Mischief Maker. "The Mischief Maker" (1944) is a radio play. Ellery tries to determine who is sending a series of anonymous letters. He first establishes the culprit must be a resident in a small apartment house. Ellery then develops a one-clue profile of the villain. Ellery then compares this profile, to all the residents of the apartment building, deducing who the culprit is.
The profile depends on an obscure piece of information.
"The Mischief Maker" shares elements with Halfway House:
Ancestors. An early example in detective fiction of a "profile approach" is E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913). Chapter 11 of Bentley's novel reconstructs hidden aspects of the murder, develops from this a profile of five elements that must fit the killer, then deduces a unique suspect who fits all five criteria for the murderer. This is the approach EQ will later use in Halfway House and elsewhere.
Before Bentley, the technique can also be found in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story, "Silver Blaze" (1892). Doyle arranges his profile of the killer less systematically than Bentley and EQ will: both Bentley and EQ make explicit lists of profile elements, and Doyle does not. But the Doyle tale does unearth two hidden clues about the events of the crime, which in turn work together to indicate one and only one suspect. Doyle's work has the whole technique in its essential form.
Other mysteries whose solutions involve profiles:
Also:
EQ is certainly not a Proletarian writer of the kind once favored by the Communists. One might note that actual working class people with jobs in industry are fairly rare in Ellery Queen: the factory worker Harry Potter in "The Seven Black Cats" (1934) comes to mind, and left-winger Delbert Hood's brief employment in a factory in "The Robber of Wrightsville" (1953), but very few others. (Potter was named decades before the famous children's novels, and has become a popular Trivia question in recent years.) Queen tends instead to write about people with very small businesses, such as barbers or inn-keepers, or the garage-owner and the storekeeper of The Egyptian Cross Mystery. These people have to be classified as lower middle class, even if they are presented by EQ as financially struggling Average Americans. Working class Americans in EQ tend to be workers taking care of buildings: cleaning ladies, doormen, handymen at inns.
Odets' Waiting for Lefty is full of vignettes, showing poor people's desperate struggles to make a living, and stay afloat financially. Queen will look at similar subject matter in Cat of Many Tails (1949) and "Miracles Do Happen" (1957). Odets' vignette technique, giving brief looks at the entire lives of various characters, might also have influenced Queen's story-telling techniques in such works as Q.B.I. and Cat of Many Tails.
The early The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) opens with Ellery's disinterest in "isms and ologies". However the examples given, like "pragmatism", are more philosophical than political.
In the early 1950's at the height of both the Cold War and the McCarthy era, Ellery Queen produced his two most political novels: The King Is Dead (1952). and The Glass Village (1954). Both are written from a liberal point of view; both center on attacks against right wing villains; both also condemn Communism.
Earlier in The Tragedy of X (1932), actor-sleuth Drury Lane's theater director is named Kropotkin, recalling the anarchist leader Pyotr Kropotkin, and there is a suspect named Michael Collins, recalling the Irish revolutionary. The Tragedy of X also centers on the murder of a crooked stockbroker.
Two Ellery Queen radio plays embody cooperatives: the economic form advocated by leftist anarchists:
Other mystery writers examined cooperatives and worker-owned businesses:
For mysteries set at non-profits see:
Bigotry. A major failure of both novels are bigoted concepts:
Mystery Plot. The Devil to Pay has a simple but occasionally interesting detective plot.
EQ's mystery plot ideas about men's camel hair coats would find more logical expression in his short story, "Mind Over Matter" (1939).
After the initial investigation of the crime scene, Ellery comes up with a list of three questions that need to be answered (Chapter 6). Such lists of still-unsolved mysteries, have a long history in crime fiction. Ellery's list consists of puzzling aspects that Ellery discovered through brain power. This makes them especially interesting. They are not obvious questions that would occur to just anybody.
Objects involved in the case just show up (second half of Chapter 7). No one knows how they got there. This sort of "plot development without a known cause" is fairly frequent in Ellery Queen works. In The Devil to Pay, the characters soon guess that two of the objects were planted there by the killer.
The Lawyer: Mystery Subplot. The subplot about the lawyer is fairly simple. But it is well-plotted. It has two good ideas. Plus a good clue. SPOILERS. This is another EQ story in which a marriage is sinister.
Solution. BIG SPOILERS in this section. Once Ellery develops the fundamental account of what happened during the crime, the solution rapidly moves to incorporate standard EQ features:
SPOILERS. The Devil to Pay is an example of something I have always disliked in mysteries: having the killer at the end revealed to be a likable character. This always seems to me an unpleasant development. It also is not plausible: I doubt if the nice character in The Devil to Pay could harm a fly.
Landscape. A positive feature: the elaborate landscape of the house terraces and what lies between. This landscape also incorporates architectural features, notably the house rooms that open on the terraces. These have glass walls and glass doors, making everything that happens in the rooms completely visible from outside. This setup shows EQ's creativity with landscape and architecture.
The landscape is circular. This anticipates the circular layout of downtown Wrightsville. A map of Wrightsville is in Double, Double.
Swindler. The theme of the swindling financier attacked by some of his victims, is an old one. It's the subject of the classic film Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916).
The swindler refers to the "Securities Act of 1934" (Chapter 2). This far-reaching regulatory legislation helped found the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The mystery novel Old Lover's Ghost (1940) by Leslie Ford, involves the SEC.
The title is perhaps misleading: there are no supernatural elements in The Devil to Pay - or in any other of Queen's works. Instead, the title comes from the book's vicious businessman being called a "devil" by the angry stockholders he's swindled (Chapter 2).
The Ohio River Region. A key plot event, which happens "off-stage" and is only talked about, is the flooding of the Ohio River. Earlier, The Egyptian Cross Mystery was partly set in the West Virginia Northern Panhandle, also on the Ohio River. The flooding in The Devil to Pay ruins important plants and machinery (Chapter 2). In real-life this region is indeed an industrial area. EQ's interest in it anticipates his later looks at Wrightsville, his (fictitious) industrial city in New England.
Energy. The book's Ohipi scheme is a little vague. But we do learn it centers on plants with "hydro-electric machinery" along major rivers (Chapter 2). This sounds like these plants produce electricity from water power. Please see my list of mysteries on Energy, Oil, Power and Physics. As the list shows, these were common subjects in traditional mystery fiction.
Structure. Several early EQ novels begin with a "cast of characters". The Devil to Pay does not. But it does something similar: the first few pages discuss the main characters, introducing them in an almost list-like fashion. A similar approach opens The Chinese Orange Mystery (Chapter 1).
The murder in The Devil to Pay involves sports. This anticipates the four sports mystery short stories EQ would publish in 1939. They too mainly have a Hollywood setting.
The Van Dine School. Aspects of The Devil to Pay reflect the approaches of the Van Dine School.
The chapter titles are take-offs on well-known works of literature. They are examples of the Van Dine School's use of stylized chapter titles. Such stylized chapter titles are not much found in Van Dine himself. And it might be possible that Ellery Queen was the first member of the Van Dine School to use stylized chapter titles.
Two of the characters are newspaper people. This is an example of the Van Dine School's interest in the intelligentsia.
The Van Dine School liked private museums in people's homes, as well as big public museums. In The Devil to Pay the body is found in the study in the millionaire's mansion, with many antique weapons on the wall. This is essentially a tiny private museum. The mansion across the way is filled with every kind of athletic equipment - not quite a "museum", but close.
The movements of the characters at the time of the killing are investigated. This is a frequent subject in Van Dine School mysteries.
For more on the mystery plot of The Four of Hearts, please see this article's section on Minimalism.
Film Industry. The Four of Hearts (1938) is the only one of his Hollywood books to have a setting within the film industry itself.
EQ does not really like Hollywood; despite what one might think or expect about the Great Surrealist of the detective story finding an ideal home for his fiction in that topsy turvy city, the fusion never takes place. Dannay and Lee apparently had terrible personal experiences in that city, with their talent wasted on some small pictures, and a humiliating lack of personal success. The team would find a much more sympathetic home in radio, but their basically negative feelings about Hollywood permeate what could have been better books. The closest literary ancestors for Queen's portrait of Hollywood are such 1930's Broadway plays as Samuel and Bella Spewack's Boy Meets Girl (1935) and Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime (1930). These works take a comic and satiric approach to Tinsel Town, describing it as a place where talent is wasted and the normal laws of business do not apply. Queen does not essentially add much to this tradition.
Mauritz Stiller. An unusual feature: the mini-biography of Greta Garbo, includes information about her mentor, director Mauritz Stiller (Chapter 2). Stiller directed such silent film classics as Sir Arne's Treasure (1919) and Erotikon (1920). It is rare to see references to actual film directors in literature of this era.
Prestige Actors. The Chinese Orange Mystery has respectful references to high-brow movie stars: the Barrymores (end of Chapter 1), Greta Garbo (Chapter 2). These are stars known to and watched by his New York characters. A guess: intellectuals like Ellery Queen and his characters, thought that such prestigious performers were suitable for viewing. Both Garbo and the Barrymores will be mentioned again in EQ's Hollywood novel The Four of Hearts (first part of Chapter 2). There someone is proposing to make biographical films of their lives.
Gossip Columnists. Paula Paris, the gossip columnist heroine, is depicted as sweet as sugar. This is not what history shows about real-life Hollywood gossip columnists. The two famous ones, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, are seen as remarkably unpleasant people. Note that these first names all end in "a". And the name "Paula Paris" is alliterative like "Hedda Hopper", and that both names are in trochaic meter.
Paula Paris has characteristics in common with Karen Leith in The Door Between Both:
Architecture. Paula Paris' office (Chapter 3) recalls rooms in the murder scene in The Devil to Pay. Like them, it has glass doors looking out on a terrace. Both books' terraces are paved with flags.
Gambling Club. Ellery visits a Hollywood nightclub devoted to gambling (Chapter 3). This is a sort of parody or spoof of the tough nightclubs found in pulp fiction. Everything is exaggerated in a comic way:
Tuxedo. Ellery wears a tuxedo again, for the finale of The Four of Hearts. There is a long tradition in Hollywood films, especially musicals, of the hero wearing formal wear at the climax of a film. The formal wear suggests both success, and romantic passion. Perhaps that tradition is echoed in The Four of Hearts. Ellery is certainly experiencing romance at the end of The Four of Hearts.
Ellery had previously worn a tuxedo in The Chinese Orange Mystery. This was to attend a private dinner party in Manhattan: a far more respectable event than a gambling den visit.
Healthy Eating. The millionaire is opposed to consuming tobacco, coffee, tea and white bread (Chapter 3). This recalls Pink in The Devil to Pay (Chapter 1), who is an expert vegetarian dietician. The books neither endorse nor condemn these ideas. They do come across a bit as Los Angeles fads.
Plot. The Dragon's Teeth is part of a series of EQ stories in which a family with a complex history all gather for sinister, suspenseful events in a remote estate in the countryside surrounding New York City; these works include The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932), "The Bearded Lady" (1934), and "The Lamp of God" (1935). All of these works also contain plot twists and developments with a broadly similar approach. The millionaire in The Dragon's Teeth who spends most of his time on his yacht at sea reminds one of the similar character in The Egyptian Cross Mystery.
SPOILERS. There are also resemblances between he millionaire in The Dragon's Teeth and the reclusive old millionaire in the previous EQ novel, The Four of Hearts (1938). The books develop complex plot twists around both men, plot ideas that share a family resemblance. I prefer the light-hearted riffs on the subject in The Dragon's Teeth; in fact, they are the novel's most ingenious mystery plotting (Chapter 20). Related plot ideas appeared earlier in The American Gun Mystery.
Mystery Plot: The Connection. SPOILERS. The killer's secret connection to the crime (Chapter 23) recalls a similar such connection, at the very end of The Dutch Shoe Mystery.
In The Dragon's Teeth, the connection is linked to that favorite EQ subject, the flow of knowledge. The killer's connection is seen as the best way for the killer to have obtained the proofs-of-identity that play a role in the plot. The proofs-of-identity are a kind of knowledge or information.
A Search. Heroine Kerrie looks for a way out of a trap (Chapters 8, 9). Her exhaustive look for methods of rescue, seems analogous to the exhaustive searches for hidden objects in other EQ works. Both kinds of searches involve coming up with a series of ingenious ideas, where the searches might succeed.
Locales. Some of the early sections of the book take place in Hollywood (Chapters 3, 4). By this time, EQ is completely "at home" there, and it seems to be as much a home base for his fiction as New York City and its environs.
The millionaire comes originally from the real-life city Windsor, Vermont, and inherited his father's ironworks (Chapter 1). This references New England manufacturing, anticipating EQ's New England manufacturing city Wrightsville. We get a detailed account of the millionaire's business history, anticipating the even more detailed business accounts in the Wrightsville novel The King Is Dead.
We do not get any idea of the geographical layout of either the mansion or its grounds. This is a bit odd for a Golden Age detective novel. The whole place can seem a bit unreal.
Social Class. The heroine's generous actions, exemplify solidarity among the poor (Chapter 4). This is another example of EQ's interest in social class.
By contrast, lawyer Lloyd Goossens is seen as an example of the rich. He is explicitly thought of in this way, by hero Beau (middle of Chapter 2), who also thinks "it must be swell to be rich" like Goossens. Goossens inherited both his business and his money from his successful lawyer father, something the book emphasizes. Social class is seen as hereditary.
Similarly, the millionaire inherited the ironworks from his businessman father - although he went on to expand his fortune. And poverty-stricken heroine Kerrie is the daughter of a hard-working poor woman. Both have "inherited" their places in the class structure.
The millionaire's viciousness towards his poor relatives, is likely supposed to stand for the bad treatment of the poor by the rich, in general.
Anti-Marriage. A wellspring of the plot, is the millionaire's hatred of marriage as an institution. This echoes the anti-Family sentiments of The Tragedy of Y.
Tails. Handsome hero Beau Rummell gets dressed up in white tie and tails to go to the theater (Chapter 5). He is allegedly (emotionally) uncomfortable wearing them, which is perhaps part of their mystique. Wearing white tie and tails was a cultural ideal in that era. Readers would have been pleased the hero got this opportunity. Please see my list of characters in white tie and tails.
Beau is wearing "tropical tails": presumably light-weight clothes for summer wear. These would have looked identical to regular tails, only been less hot to have on in the summer. Beau is depicted throughout the book, as a highly competent man who knows what to do in a large variety of situations. He would know the "right" kind of tails to wear.
In Cat of Many Tails (1949) (Chapter 2) madcap heiress Monica McKell gets a kick out of dragging her wealthy escorts onto the democratic subway, when these men are in upper-class white tie and tails. This too links tails to a bit of emotional discomfort, in a fun sort of way.
Robert Taylor. The women in The Dragon's Teeth repeatedly compare Beau to Hollywood star Robert Taylor. Taylor was mainly known for being very good-looking, and a romantic favorite of women moviegoers. He looked refined, not like a tough guy, and definitely not like a Bogart-style private eye. People in that era would have known Taylor as the handsome co-star of:
Artist Gil Kane would later use Robert Taylor as the model for his comic book super-hero The Atom.
Robert Taylor was mentioned earlier in EQ's The Four of Hearts (Chapter 1). There he was cited, somewhat derisively, as an example of of man who was too perfectly dressed. He was indeed usually well-dressed in his leading man screen roles.
Ellery's meeting with the lawyer in The Dragon's Teeth is termed "the beginning of a beautiful friendship". Today, this phrase is famous from its use in the motion picture Casablanca (1942), made three years after The Dragon's Teeth. The line was reportedly added to the motion picture by its producer Hal Wallis, a month after principal photography ended. In both mystery novel and film, it is used to describe a special friendship between men. It is unclear whether EQ was the originator of this line. The EQ novels are full of quotations from famous authors, in a style familiar from E.C. Bentley and H.C. Bailey, and this phrase could be one. But a search of reference books of quotations and the Internet has so far proved negative. It might also be Hollywood slang - the Queen team had recently worked in Hollywood as scriptwriters.
Later the same year, in the radio play "The Adventure of the Black Secret" (1939), Ellery will have a friendly rivalry with the policeman turned insurance company investigator Mike Callahan. The young lawyer-private eye in The Dragon's Teeth comes from a police family, and is introduced to Ellery by Inspector Queen; Callahan is also an old friend of the Inspector's, and is introduced to Ellery by the Inspector at the start of the play, just like the opening of The Dragon's Teeth. Callahan reportedly appears in several EQ radio plays, but "The Adventure of the Black Secret" is the only one currently available. He differs from the private eye in The Dragon's Teeth in being a friendly rival, not a partner, of Ellery's. The play ends with a dinner to celebrate the special friendship between Ellery and Callahan.
In The Door Between (1937), Ellery and Inspector Queen have made friends, before the book opens, with young private eye Terry Ring. Terry is as broad shouldered as the lawyers Ellery meets in Halfway House and The Dragon's Teeth, but he comes from a downright slum background, has no police or legal background, being a former baseball player instead, and is a natty dresser, whose appearance is far from rumpled. Ellery notices his muscles in Chapter 13, the same section in which we learn most about Terry's friendship with Inspector Queen. This chapter also brings Sgt. Velie into the circle of friends, which will recur in "The Adventure of the Black Secret".
It is perhaps odd that these male sleuths for whom Ellery develops friendships appear at the same time period as Paula Paris, Ellery's first continuing girlfriend in the series. Paris appeared in The Four of Hearts (1938) and the four sports stories of 1939. And with launch of the Ellery Queen radio show in mid-1939, Ellery's secretary Nikki Porter will be introduced. In the radio shows, she has an apparently unrequited crush on Ellery.
Other meetings: in The Four of Hearts (1938), Ellery bonds at the opening with young Hollywood executive Jacques Butcher. It is Butcher's downright slob-appearance that causes Ellery initially to like him: an extension perhaps of the rumpled clothes of the lawyer friends. But Butcher is far from being any sort of sleuth.
Big Bill Tree in "Man Bites Dog" (1939) is a baseball player, like Terry Ring, but much more famous. Tree is hero-worshipped by Ellery, who emphasizes Tree's muscles in his dialogue.
At the beginning of Ten Days' Wonder (1948), there is a flashback to 1940 Paris, and Ellery's first meeting with his friend Howard Van Horn. Howard is a similar physical type to the young lawyers and Terry Ring, a hugely muscular and well-built man, something Ellery once again notices in detail. And as in Ellery's analysis of Terry, Howard is classified by him into a special category of he-men: something Ellery is not, according to The Door Between. However, there is a disturbing undertone in Ten Days' Wonder not present before, with Ellery believing that these looks are deceiving, and hiding serious mental problems.
Some years after his initial meeting with Ellery, Howard Van Horn will develop a left-wing social conscience (Chapter 2).
Ten Days' Wonder shares imagery with The Four of Hearts: Ellery and Jacques Butcher undress and shower together, sobering up after a drinking bout, and Ellery's encounter with Howard opens with him stripping and bathing Howard after one of his mental attacks. "The Adventure of the Mouse's Blood" (1940) has a boxer taking a shower in his dressing room while other men are around. His manager orders the boxer to take his trunks off. We later learn the boxer is a muscle-man, and compared to Tarzan. The well-built boxer in "Mind Over Matter" (1939) also showers.
When looking at all these examples, which stretch over five novels, a short story and a series of radio plays, a conclusion is inescapable: Ellery Queen, the detective character, has a gay side. The actual stories read even more gay than do the above summaries, vividly depicting Ellery's feelings. They show Ellery attracted to well-built men of his own age, who come from the lower levels of society, are strong achievers, and who have a social conscience.
Most of the above works, Halfway House (1936), The Door Between (1937), The Four of Hearts (1938), The Dragon's Teeth (1939), "Man Bites Dog" (1939), "The Adventure of the Black Secret" (1939), "The Adventure of the Mouse's Blood" (1940), take place in what Francis M. Nevins has analyzed as Period II in Ellery Queen (1936-1940). Even when EQ returned to the subject in Ten Days' Wonder (1948), he back-dated the material to 1940 Paris.
Superman. The subjects of Ellery's feelings, well-built lower middle class achievers with a social conscience, were something of a cultural ideal in late 1930's America, which had long been wracked by the Depression. In 1938, the debut of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman created a nationwide sensation, turning comic books from a low circulation curiosity into a major industry. Superman was as strong and well-built as EQ's heroes. His secret identity Clark Kent was a reporter for a crusading liberal newspaper, making him a prototypical lower middle class man who was championing social justice. The original Superman tales also focused on Superman's liberal quest to right social wrongs.
Superman is referred to in There Was an Old Woman (1943). Ellery is ironically called Superman in "The President's Half Disme" (1946; based on a 1942 radio play). Media hype compares Ellery to Superman in Cat of Many Tails (Chapter 9).
Related Men. A precursor of these men can be found in The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) (Chapter 1). Ellery's friend Dr. John Minchen is described as "athletic"; he's an achiever, as Medical Director of a hospital; and the hospital has Charity Wards that treat the poor, indicating a social conscience. Ellery himself was called "athletic" in his first appearance in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) (Chapter 2).
In The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) Ellery enters the case as a casual friend of young publisher Donald Kirk. Kirk is broad-shouldered (Chapter 5), but sloppily dressed (Chapter 3).
Cat of Many Tails (Chapter 3) introduces young Jimmy McKell. Jimmy McKell is a newsman, has left-wing political values, and wears a "disreputable" suit. However Jimmy McKell is not a friend of Ellery: he's part of the book's pair of Young Lovers. Jimmy McKell also differs from Ellery's friends in that he is from a wealthy family.
"The Three R's" (1946; based on a 1939 radio play) has Ellery meet young Professor Bacon. Despite his youth Bacon is a full professor of biochemistry. Bacon is a muscular, powerful young man and an achiever. Bacon is compared to a baseball player in his behavior.
In the Queen tales, we usually see Ellery's relationships with his muscle-men friends through Ellery's eyes. In the Drury Lane novel The Tragedy of X (1932), the opposite point-of-view occurs. Here we have an intellectual sleuth Drury Lane, who is as brainy as Ellery. And a policeman Inspector Thumm, whose big size and muscles are emphasized in his characterization. During the men's first meeting (Act I: Scene 1), it is Inspector Thumm who is suddenly seized with strange emotions about sleuth Drury Lane. Thumm does not fully understand what he is feeling, and wonders if it is hero-worship. "Hero-worship" was a fairly socially acceptable way for men to describe strong emotional feelings in favor of other men in this era: it shows up in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Later, Drury Lane will impersonate Thumm (Act II: Scene 9), something he does looking at Thumm with "affectionate amusement". Actor Drury Lane's ability to impersonate other men, assuming all of their characteristics, can be seen as a form of homoerotic imagery.
Gay Content. Other types of form and content in Ellery Queen, which can be seen as expressing a gay sensibility:
Not Friends. Some EQ works introduce men who at first bear some similarity to Ellery's friends. But they do not develop into close Ellery friends. And have key differences as well.
At the start of There Was an Old Woman (1943), Inspector Queen introduces Ellery to another young lawyer, whose father the Inspector once again knew, just as in The Dragon's Teeth. However, the differences turn out to be more numerous here than similarities. The lawyer comes from an upper middle class background, not lower middle class, and he shows no signs of social idealism or rebellion. He is not a sleuth of any sort, Ellery pays little attention to his looks, and while he and Ellery strike up an acquaintance, there is no sign of any real friendship.
Double, Double has young doctor Kenneth Winship, who is very well-built. He works for an idealistic older doctor, who specializes in helping poor patients (Chapter titled "Monday, April 10"). He is not a special friend of Ellery, however.
More Men. The Origin of Evil (1951) introduces two glamorous women, in the first two chapters. After this, four macho men make entrances: Roger Priam, Alfred Wallace, Crowe Macgowan and policeman Lieutenant Keats. None of these bond closely with Ellery, although Ellery and Lt. Keats form a close working relationship. The book once again emphasizes how muscular these men are, and how broad their shoulders and big their torsos are. The most physically impressive of all the men, Crowe Macgowan, also has curly hair and is associated with the color brown (his tanned skin), like cowboy Curly Grant in The American Gun Mystery. There are predecessors to Crowe Macgowan in previous EQ books:
Uncle Malachi in "Miser's Gold" (1950) is considered "queer" by his neighbors because his "one notable passion" is collecting and reading books.
The Glass Village (1954) contains a portrait of a somewhat effeminate man in art critic Roger Casavant. He is likely intended to be gay, although this is not explicit. Casavant is a bit prissy and pedantic, but he is basically a sympathetic character and one who helps other people.
The Finishing Stroke (1958) has a young country Trooper Sergeant Devoe as its main police character. When introduced, he is described as "gigantic" and handsome (Chapter 4). Later, Ellery perceives his "beautiful figure" (Chapter 17).
Brown. Romantic men are sometimes linked to the color brown:
The radio plays use the familiar cast of Ellery Queen, Inspector Queen, Sgt. Velie and Nikki Porter. They are puzzle plot detective tales, just like the prose mysteries EQ authored. The quality of the plays available today ranges from very good, to poor.
Napoleon's Razor. Some of the radio plays are startling for the amount of sheer mystery they contain. "The Adventure of Napoleon's Razor" (1939) has both the impossible disappearance of some gems, and a full murder mystery. The two plots are essentially separate from each other, and the reader gets two entire and very clever mysteries for the price of one. This is one of the most delightful of the EQ radio plays.
The murder mystery seems like an unusual variant on the concepts in The Roman Hat Mystery and many subsequent works. It brings out aspects of symmetry in these concepts.
Black Secret. "The Adventure of the Black Secret" (1939) has three separate mystery plots, all fairly clued. While two of them are easy to solve, albeit well-constructed and imaginative, the actual murder mystery is a humdinger. It involves a clever dying message, and other ingenious situations to boot, only tangentially related to the message.
The first two mysteries are solved by Ellery using profiles. Profiles are a technique that runs through EQ's fiction:
Characters in "The Adventure of the Black Secret" anticipate the eccentric Horatio in There Was an Old Woman:
The book store setting recalls "The One-Penny Black" (1933).
In EQ's stories about rare books or manuscripts, forgery of such books is always a possibility, introducing crime fiction elements to the tale. See Drury Lane's Last Case, "The Adventure of the Black Secret", "My Queer Dean!", "The Adventure of Abraham Lincoln's Clue".
Subjects in "The Adventure of the Black Secret" recall Drury Lane's Last Case:
Gum-Chewing Millionaire. "The Adventure of the Gum-Chewing Millionaire" (1939) was the first EQ radio play to be broadcast. It was later "novelized" into a prose story "The Adventure of the Murdered Millionaire" by an unknown author - not EQ. This novelization is the only form that is available today; so far the radio play "The Gum-Chewing Millionaire" has not been published.
"The Adventure of the Murdered Millionaire" is dreary and mainly uninspired. It has a skimpy plot with a single clue to the killer. Francis M. Nevins offers an expert analysis in The Sound of Detection: Ellery Queen's Adventures in Radio. Nevins thinks this version is poor, too.
"The Adventure of the Murdered Millionaire" has a lot more romantic banter between Ellery and Nikki, than is typical. It is also an early example of Ellery sending Nikki out on a job, so that she can do detective work.
Haunted Cave. "The Adventure of the Haunted Cave" (1939) focusses on an impossible crime. Unfortunately I found the impossible crime easy to figure out. Because of this, I've thought of the play as a lesser EQ work. However, maybe I was just lucky to figure the mystery out. And the mystery plot might be better than I give it credit for.
On the positive side:
SPOILERS. The clue about the footprints being in a straight line, is well-done, however.
The story's landscape requires a mountain setting. The radio play is duly set in the Adirondacks, mountains in the far north of New York State. While the Adirondacks are in fact rather far from New York City, the play treats them sociologically as a resort area for New York City people like Nikki Porter.
Last Man Club. "The Adventure of the Last Man Club" (1939) recalls several EQ works, especially The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932) and "The House of Darkness" (1935), as Francis M. Nevins pointed out. 1) Its clue used to identify the killer recalls a twist used to explode the first solution in The Greek Coffin Mystery, and a subplot in "The House of Darkness". The subplot is not fully integrated into the main mystery in "The House of Darkness", and gets a more central workout here. In both stories it is logically linked to some of the characters being involved in the arts. In "The Adventure of the Last Man Club", it reflects a much used approach in EQ: find characteristics of the killer, and match them against the suspects in the tale, to identify the villain. 2) The mechanism used to create a Least Likely Person in "The Adventure of the Last Man Club" recalls the second solution in The Greek Coffin Mystery. The complex, ingenious pattern also seems a bit related to a similar intricately plotted misdirection in "The Two-Headed Dog" (1934). The plots are different, but both build up a circle of causality among a pair of criminal events, and both move towards the same Least Likely Suspect. Margery Allingham had used a somewhat similar approach in Police at the Funeral (1931).
EQ would go on to rework plot ideas from "The Adventure of the Last Man Club" in "The Gettysburg Bugle" (1951; based on a 1942 radio play). Not only is the central story line situation recycled in "The Gettysburg Bugle". The mechanism used to create a Least Likely Person in "The Adventure of the Last Man Club" undergoes a nice variation in the latter tale. It leads to a different, but related, choice of killer.
"Last Man to Die" (1963) is a late work, sharing a central subject with "The Adventure of the Last Man Club" and "The Gettysburg Bugle". It is much simpler and shorter than all of these, but still a delight with its good storytelling, and clever solution. Its detective methods relate it more to those works in which EQ uses deduction to interpret the history of events at a crime scene, such as Halfway House.
Dying Scarecrow. "The Adventure of the Dying Scarecrow" (1940) deals with a series of corpses found in grotesque situations, like The Egyptian Cross Mystery. While the imagery in The Egyptian Cross Mystery is startlingly original, in this radio play the imagery seems derived from Frederic Arnold Kummer's The Scarecrow Murders (1936-1938). On the other hand, Kummer perhaps found partial inspiration in EQ's The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) - so this situation could be a two way street.
The opening has vivid story telling. We are talking about everything up through Ellery having his film developed at the drug store.
The second crime in "Dying Scarecrow" surrealistically echoes the first.
"The Adventure of the Dying Scarecrow" is interesting in the long history of the killings, with hidden events and motivations eventually emerging to fill in the story - an EQ specialty. SPOILERS. A backstory that motivates the crime anticipates Calamity Town. This backstory has a gender reversal in Calamity Town, with the roles of men and women reversed.
Other features that anticipate Calamity Town (1942):
Woman in Black. "The Adventure of the Woman in Black" (1940) is an unexpectedly poor work. Its storytelling is repetitive, characters are undeveloped, and has little of interest in setting or background. Its impossible crime gets an inane solution, almost a cheat. One has to admit that the solution is plausible and realistic, however.
Forgotten Men. "The Adventure of the Forgotten Men" (1940) looks at a group of homeless men trying to survive in the Depression. It is an important work of social commentary. Some economic and social aspects are discussed in this article's section on Cooperatives.
Some non-mystery-plot aspects of "The Adventure of the Forgotten Men" anticipate Calamity Town (1942):
BIG SPOILERS. Aspects of the mystery plot recall "The Two-Headed Dog" (1934). These include a diamond thief murdered for his loot, police dogs, and persistent attempts to enter a locale, a cabin in "The Two-Headed Dog", a shack in "Forgotten Men". These are juggled around to connect up a bit differently in "Forgotten Men". EQ has added a new plot development to "Forgotten Men", that ultimately ables Ellery to deduce the killer's identity. And the settings and mood are completely different.
The police dogs in EQ tales perhaps recall the trained police dog Rip in the Sidney Zoom tales of Erle Stanley Gardner, which started in 1930.
The Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds. "The Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds" (1940) is an excellent impossible crime mystery.
As Ellery points out, the play contains three mystery puzzles. This abundance of mystery plot is a virtue.
Also good: the way the sleuths propose all sorts of alternative solutions to the impossible crime. Often each solution is set forth in a single line of dialogue.
The tales echoes concepts originally found in Jacques Futrelle, a writer EQ admired highly:
The four diamond experts are from four different countries. The play uses this to rapidly create some characterization.
The three European experts are all from democratic Allied nations in World War II. This would please liberals like EQ. However, many Republicans in 1940 were Nazi sympathizers. They would not like the implied sympathies for the Allies expressed in the play.
Mouse's Blood. "The Adventure of the Mouse's Blood" (1940) is a radio play with some good storytelling, and a sports milieu like the Paula Paris stories of 1939. Its mystery plot recalls Melville Davisson Post's "The Straw Man".
The best feature of the plot, is the way that many details keep dovetailing into a logical pattern. The whole plot is carefully designed.
EQ mysteries often involve profiles. In such tales, Ellery investigates the crime scene, and shows that the killer must fit a profile of clues - then goes through the list of suspects, showing that only one of them fits this profile. This is the structure of "Mouse's Blood". Ellery first creates a profile of the killer: a profile that in this tale has just one clue. Then he shows that only one of the four suspects can fit this clue.
Aspects of "Mouse's Blood" recall some other groups of EQ stories. But the resemblance is never close:
The tale creates a fictitious clothing company as sponsor of the radio broadcasts. This perhaps relates to the many EQ tales dealing with men's clothes. However, clothes play no role in the mystery plot of "Mouse's Blood".
Dark Cloud. "The Adventure of the Dark Cloud" (1940) is a dying message tale. Its solution is fairly easy to guess. But the story is full of positive features. Its shipboard setting is constantly atmospheric, and helps in the good storytelling throughout.
The word game about books is interesting. It involves the characters' names, like the puzzle to come in "The Inner Circle" (1947; based on a 1942 radio play). See also the Puzzle Club tale "The Odd Man" (1971), which centers on names, although not those of the story's characters.
Sgt. Velie gets better characterized here than elsewhere. We see a positive facet of his abilities that I don't recall in other tales. He gets good dialogue. And we see the affection with which the other series characters view him.
A writer of adventure stories for the pulp magazines appears. This is a rare occurrence of "pulp fiction" being mentioned in EQ.
SPOILERS. Using a sound recorder in a radio drama is a creative idea. It has a recursive quality: recorded sound within radio sound. In mainstream literature, a tape recorder will be used by Samuel Beckett in his stage drama Krapp's Last Tape (1958).
Foul Tip. "The Foul Tip" (1944) has a nicely done solution. SPOILERS. It reflects that perennial EQ interest the "flow of information".
The characters and setting recall earlier EQ works:
EQ clearly likes cowboy musicians like Arizona and Tex Crosby. But he regards the movie cowboy actor Chick Ames in "The Foul Tip", and most of the Western performers in The American Gun Mystery, as some sort of Other. They seem to exist at a remote distance from Queen and his world. Chick seems strange, enigmatic, and a person EQ will never understand.
Murdered Moths. "The Adventure of the Murdered Moths" (1945) investigates a crime scene, using some clever scientific ideas to interpret the history of the killing. It is a story in the tradition of "The Two-Headed Dog" (1934), "The Seven Black Cats" (1934) and "The Hollow Dragon" (1936):
The Inner Circle. "The Inner Circle" (1947; based on a 1942 radio play) has a pleasing profusion of plot.
"The Inner Circle" has two linked mysteries. SPOILERS.:
Mystery #2 has a central puzzle. But it is also broken down into a whole series of mini-puzzles. This extends its interest.
After reading "The Inner Circle" and learning who the killer is, one can go back and reread the early section showing the founding of the Januarians. The killer is depicted in negative terms there. And his main negative characteristic throws a light on what EQ saw as bad.
SPOILERS. The idea of "a club within a club" is reflexive or recursive. It reminds one of other reflexive features in EQ: the way Ellery is a mystery writer solving mysteries. And the way the Machine Shop and other Wrightsville factories make machines.
Both the opening and closing of "The Inner Circle" show university officials spreading deliberate lies to cover up the tale's events. This recalls Ellery's lies at the end of The Murderer Is a Fox.
The members of the Januarian club, and the rituals that surround them, are described throughout in religious terms. Partly, one suspects, that this is a satire on the quasi-religious rituals of real life Ivy League universities. I'm just guessing: I don't know much about that aspect of Ivy League schools.
But the tale is also suggesting that the elaborate rituals are a serious, made-up religion. This religion has the Januarians as gods. This whole approach was made up by the students in the Januarians themselves. It shows elite young men who've set up a religious cult in which they are worshipped as gods. All of this has a disturbing quality. It anticipates the elaborate society created by the rich, powerful brothers in The King Is Dead.
The religious ideas about the Januarians are rooted in traditions of Ancient Rome. This links their Ivy League school to Roman traditions. It recalls the way Ellery in early books was always displaying his Harvard education by quoting Latin writers.
The President's Half Disme. Many of EQ's previous stories had elaborate quasi-historical backgrounds, based in a family history, or an earlier crime. In "The President's Half Disme" (1946; based on a 1942 radio play), EQ takes the plunge into fiction involving actual historical characters, solving a mystery involving George Washington. Later, he was to write a similar story about another US President, "Abraham Lincoln's Clue" (1965). The collectors who show up in these stories remind one of those in "The One-Penny Black" and "The Glass-Domed Clock". Although W.W.II is not mentioned in the story, it reflects the atmosphere of wartime patriotism prevalent then. Arnold Schönberg would pay a similar tribute to George Washington in his musical composition Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte (1942).
There is a short but vivid account of George Washington at the start of Halfway House.
The tale is set in a lonely farmhouse in Pennsylvania. As in "The Adventure of the Dying Scarecrow" (1940), the farm is seen in winter and presented as a grim, serious place.
There's an elaborate depiction of Ellery's mental struggle to solve the mystery. This is part of a long tradition in mystery fiction, one that includes Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tale "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891). Ellery has to learn to understand the ideas and thinking of George Washington. This relates to S.S. Van Dine's attempt to solve mysteries by understanding people's psychology. EQ's approach here stresses what today is called cognitive psychology: how people think.
Nikki Porter jokingly calls Ellery "Superman". While this is humor - Ellery is in his undershirt - it also might reflect real similarities between the two heroes. Ellery is busy helping a person in trouble, and working for free: the sort of task often associated with Superman in the comics.
"The President's Half Disme" has no crime, and therefore no criminals. The three collectors initially look like they are going to be the "three suspects" that run through EQ short stories. But they are all in fact blameless. Also unusually, the collectors exit the scene midway through the tale, and play little further role in the story.
Instead of a mysterious crime, "The President's Half Disme" has a puzzle: a riddle that must be solved. Puzzles are a small but interesting subcategory of detective fiction. The Black Widower stories of Isaac Asimov contain a number of puzzle tales.
"The President's Half Disme" includes two false solutions, before the true one at the end. EQ liked multiple solutions. Neither of the false solutions uses mathematics. SPOILERS. These two false solutions involve a second barn; and the tree stumps. The barn solution has affinities with the solution of "The Lamp of God".
The solution of the puzzle involves mathematics.
The Ides of Michael Magoon. "The Ides of Michael Magoon" (1947) is one of EQ's poorest short stories. The mystery plot is routine. The single simple clue that identifies the killer is sound, but unimaginative.
The tale has modest merits: the plot gets fairly complex; the plot events are logically self-consistent.
The satire on private eyes at the start has its moments:
The dysfunctional, emotionally disturbed family anticipates those in Wrightsville novels, such as The Murderer Is a Fox, Ten Days' Wonder, The King Is Dead.
This first appeared as a radio play in 1940. Its negative depiction of gambling, is part of a series of EQ anti-gambling tales of that era: "Mind Over Matter" (1939), Calamity Town (1942), "The World Series Crime" (1942).
The Gettysburg Bugle. "The Gettysburg Bugle" (1951; based on a 1942 radio play) has features in common with Calamity Town. Both:
Please see this article's section on "The Adventure of the Last Man Club", for further discussion of the mystery plot of "The Gettysburg Bugle".
SPOILERS. The mystery subplot about the whereabouts of the hidden treasure, recalls sides near the start of The Greek Coffin Mystery.
Jacksburg is in Pennsylvania near Gettysburg. We explicitly learn that Jacksburg supported the Union and the North during the Civil War. So did Pennsylvania as a whole, in real life. And Ellery and Nikki are referred to as "Yanks": also a name for Union supporters. One remembers that Weirton in The Egyptian Cross Mystery is in the Union state of West Virginia. EQ's admiration for Lincoln returns in "The Adventure of Abraham Lincoln's Clue" (1965).
The Medical Finger. "The Medical Finger" (1951; based on a 1942 radio play) is one of the last and least of EQ's minimalist poisoning tales. (These minimalist stories are discussed as a group in a section below).
It features the same sort of perverse personal relations as "The Bleeding Portrait" (1937).
There is a bit of the science fiction imagery sometimes found in EQ, with a reference to the fourth dimension, and the solar system. This imagery recalls that in "The Lamp of God" (near the start of Part 2), with its talk of "transposed dimensions" and the solar system. In "The Lamp of God" this imagery is designed to "explain" the tale's impossible crime. By contrast in "The Medical Finger", the imagery is merely meant to convey Ellery's mental state. A brief bit of science fiction imagery occurs in "The Ides of Michael Magoon".
The Fallen Angel. "The Fallen Angel" (1951; based on a 1939 radio play) has a none-too-original murder gimmick. But the tale is surprisingly readable, due to a series of subsidiary mysteries along the way, that offer unexpected plot twists.
"The Bleeding Portrait" (1937), "The Fallen Angel" (1951), Ten Days' Wonder (1948), and The Scarlet Letters (1953) all share story elements. Each focuses suspensefully on a wife who is involved, innocently or not, with another man, and concerns that her husband might find out, precipitating a tragedy. In all of these stories, we share the slow concentration on this situation, before any sort of complex denouement occurs towards the end of the tale. The romantic situations are subtly different in each work. And the ultimate direction of each story is completely different, underscoring EQ's fertility with plot. The first three works also share a background in the visual arts, with one character's studio being a story locale.
"The Fallen Angel" benefits from the rich, complex architecture of the mansion and its yard. This constantly allows the creation of atmosphere throughout the tale. This is an example of the Golden Age interest in architecture. The Gothic, imitation-Cathedral style of the building allows EQ to include religious imagery in the tale, including the title. The antique mansion echoes the modern-day castle in The Tragedy of X.
The introduction of the secretary includes a swipe at the oily manners of advertising agency executives. Even in 1951, people were becoming skeptical of Madison Avenue. Mysteries like Inland Passage (1949) by George Harmon Coxe and Recipe for Homicide (1952) by Lawrence G. Blochman were taking skeptical dives into ad agency culture, although neither is as directly negative as "The Fallen Angel".
SPOILERS. Among the unexpected plot developments is the way the huge statue goes missing. This turns into one of EQ's searches for a Concealed Object. Both the unexpected introduction of this subplot, and its solution, are well-done.
BIG SPOILERS. The killer in both "The Fallen Angel" and There Was an Old Woman (1943) turns out to be a young, clean-cut college graduate who works for the wealthy family. He is seen as a corrupt person, who wants to marry into the family fortune.
The Needle's Eye. The pirate tale "The Needle's Eye" (1951; based on a 1939 radio play) has an island setting, just like "The Bleeding Portrait", but otherwise it seems far more similar in its detailed enjoyable storytelling to "The Treasure Hunt" (1935). The islands in these tales recall Oyster Island, in The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932). The New England seafaring atmosphere recalls "The Two-Headed Dog" (1934) and "The Adventure of the Dark Cloud" (1940).
"The Needle's Eye" is a richly plotted story, that has no less than three mystery subplots, each reflecting a different one of EQ's key plot traditions:
The Three R's. "The Three R's" (1946; based on a 1939 radio play) is EQ's take on an R. Austin Freeman style plot.
Like several stories in Calendar of Crime, it has elements of parody of standard mystery approaches - parodies that recall H. C. Bailey's use of comic subversion to come up with surprise mystery solutions in the 1920's.
Ellery's detective work includes him stitching together disparate events occurring over weeks and months, reinterpreting them, so that they form a logical chronology. This is an interesting kind of detectival reasoning.
Like "The Inner Circle" (1947; based on a 1942 radio play) and "The African Traveler" (1934), it has a University setting, something that always results in sophisticated wit and satire in EQ's work. "The Inner Circle" is especially satisfying as a work of storytelling. Such University settings also recall the Van Dine School tradition of mysteries set among the intelligentsia.
A professor has a room near the campus, and a cabin high in the hills. This echoes The Egyptian Cross Mystery, and its town below and a character's remote cabin in the mountains.
Just as The Egyptian Cross Mystery seems to be the only EQ tale set in West Virginia, so does "The Three R's" seem to be Ellery's only visit to Missouri. Or to Arkansas: the college campus in in Missouri, the cabin is in nearby Arkansas. However, "The Three R's" has no "local color": There are no Southern accents or Southern imagery.
The Dead Cat. "The Dead Cat" (1946; based on a 1939 radio play) has an intriguing background of a crime committed in near darkness, reminiscent of "The House of Darkness" (1935). Ellery has to figure how the crime could have been committed in the dark. In other words, these tales are "howdunits": stories in which the detective and reader have to figure out how a crime was done.
"The Dead Cat" and "The House of Darkness" share the same three part structure:
Another relevant author: Robert O. Saber (pseudonym of Milton Ozaki) tackled a similar problem of murder in the dark in The Black Dark Murders (1949), coming up with a solution that is jaw-droppingly weird (and very different from EQ's).
Animal Costume. Ellery Queen solves the mystery in "The Dead Cat" while dressed as a cat, for Halloween. Ellery's animal costume recalls those in Queen's short story "The Mad Tea-Party" (1934).
The mystery novel Death Ain't Commercial (1951) by George Bagby includes a wolf costume.
Animal costumes play a role in films:
The Telltale Bottle. "The Telltale Bottle" (1946; based on a 1939 radio play) benefits from an abundance of mystery. It has three mystery subplots:
The respectful treatment of Native Americans is notable. Please see my list of Civil Rights in Mystery Fiction.
The Dauphin's Doll. "The Dauphin's Doll" (1948; based on a 1943 radio play) is one of EQ's best impossible crime tales.
The doll collectors are an example of S.S. Van Dine's and the Van Dine School's interest in museums and collectors.
The snobbish lawyer refers to the low-income shoppers at the department store as "peasants". This is an example of the class consciousness that runs through EQ. So perhaps is the title reference to the Dauphin and the French Revolution.
An early passage describes Ellery's losing himself in a favorite activity: wrapping Christmas presents. The bright color imagery recalls the Christmas presents in the radio play "The Red and Green Boxes" (1942). Ellery isolating himself in his study to wrap, recalls Horatio's cottage and its toys and childish crafts in There Was an Old Woman. The bright colors of the cottage recalls the bright colors of the presents in the other tales.
Conclusion. The radio plays and Calendar include a new character, EQ's secretary and gal Friday, Nikki Porter. She only shows up here and in a few novels, such as the excellent The Scarlet Letters (1953), but she seems an important part of the EQ saga.
I first read the Calendar stories while I was a young teenager. They made a curiously long lasting impression on me: they seem to be the archetypal EQ tales. In fact, they seem in some ways to be embedded in my memory as the archetypal US detective stories. This is not to say that I regard them as better than other detective stories, either by EQ or other writers; some of the tales are weak, and even some good ones are not totally great. Yet if someone were to ask me to name some "typical" American detective short stories, I would immediately think of Calendar of Crime. It is unclear why this is so. Part of the answer to the impression these stories make, is in their portrait of EQ as a detective. He is helpful, responsive, flexible, with a full support team of Nikki, the Inspector, Sgt. Velie, and so on. He is open minded, intelligent, investigatory, exhaustive in his searches, fertile in coming up with new ideas, and deductive in his solutions.
People also evaporate in EQ's impossible crime tales, such as the radio play "The Disappearing Magician" (1940), the radio play known variously as "The Adventure of Mr. Short and Mr. Long" / "The Disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore" (broadcast January 1943, published 1944), and the Q.B.I. tale "Double Your Money" (1951). Both of these latter two stories show some resemblances: both deal with the vanishing of a crooked financier, who is pulling the same swindle in both works, and both crimes' explanations have some features in common, as well as considerable differences in details. Both versions make terrific reading.
A pair of Impossible Disappearances of people are found in the radio play "The Adventure of the Haunted Cave" (1939) and in The Origin of Evil (1951). These are somewhat related to each other. But are different from most other EQ Impossible Disappearances.
Concealed Objects. These impossible disappearance stories intergrade with another EQ specialty, the exhaustive search for a missing or concealed object. For example, stories about searches for the disappearing will in The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), the vanishing gun in The American Gun Mystery (1933), the concealed fortune in "The Lamp of God" (1935), the stolen gems in "Trojan Horse" (1939), "The Treasure Hunt" (1935), "The Adventure of Napoleon's Razor" (1939) and "Diamonds in Paradise" (1954), secret information in "The Black Ledger" (1952; based on a 1943 radio play), and the hidden money in "The Gettysburg Bugle" (1951; based on a 1942 radio play), "The Circus Train" (1943), "The Lonely Bride" (1949), "Miser's Gold" (1950) and "Object Lesson" (1955). These tales are halfway between the Impossible Disappearance and the search tale. The disappearance of these missing objects does not at first look impossible, but as they elude the most intensive searches, their vanishing looks more and more like a sheer impossibility. EQ's searches tend to be fascinating reading. They are extraordinarily surrealistic. They clearly fascinated EQ himself: see his comments on the search in Émile Gaboriau's early tale, "A Disappearance", in Queen's Quorum.
The ancestor of these stories of search for a concealed object is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Poe was one of EQ's favorite writers. However, Queen's solutions to the concealed object problem are different from Poe's. In "The Purloined Letter", the missing letter is concealed in a conspicuous place, one that is so "obvious" that no one looks there.
EQ's approach is related, but different. SPOILER WARNING: WE WILL NOW DISCUSS SOLUTIONS OF THE CONCEALED OBJECT TALES: In EQ's tales, a public ritual of some sort is often taking place. There is a container at the center of this ritual, and the missing item is hidden inside the container. For example, in "Trojan Horse", there is a football game about to begin, and the missing gems are hidden in the football itself. The football is the central object around which the whole mechanism of the football game revolves. The game is an elaborate public ceremony, and all eyes will be fixed in the football at its center. And hidden inside the football are the missing gems, unknown to everyone watching ... The containers can seem like womb or egg symbols. Often they will be propelled or ejected outside the perimeter of the main search area. The propulsive device is often another object, one with phallic or male symbolism. In "Trojan Horse" these propulsive figures are the football players themselves. END OF SPOILER DISCUSSION.
"Miser's Gold" combines the Concealed Object tale, with clues analogous to the Dying Message story, another Queen specialty. EQ has fun with a multiplicity of possible "clues" near the end of the tale. Many are surreal. SPOILERS. The phallic "propulsive device" placing the container outside the search area is the shop sign "arm" sticking out in front of the shop. This doesn't actually move, unlike some propulsive devices in other EQ tales. The activity of "pawning objects in a pawnshop" is perhaps a "public ritual" for the tale.
"No Place to Live" (1956) is not an Impossible Disappearance tale. But money is stolen in the story, and the mechanisms of the mysterious theft recall the approach just discussed in the Concealed Object stories. This theft in turn intergrades with the murder mystery in complex ways, giving the "two levels deep of explanation in solution" much employed by EQ. The whole story, while short, is intricately plotted, and breaks paradigm with standard detective tales in some ways. The congested apartment setting of "No Place to Live" recalls a bit the boarding house of "The Invisible Lover" (1934), and both involve a shooting in which possession of the gun is key, but the two stories otherwise have no plot resemblances.
The mystery of the stolen baseball bat in the radio play "The World Series Crime" (1942) has links to the Concealed Object tales, without falling fully into their paradigm. Notable differences: there is no search; the container is not part of a public ritual. BIG SPOILERS. John Dickson Carr would use a similar explanation to EQ's idea of how the bat was stolen, in Carr's novel Till Death Do Us Part (1944). "The World Series Crime" also shows EQ's skill in bringing the crime home to a surprising culprit.
The Negative Clue. EQ also used searches for a different kind of puzzle plot, especially in some of his later works such as The King Is Dead (1952). Here EQ conducts an in depth search among a dead man's clothing, looking for some item that never shows up, but which should have been there. The reader has to try to figure out which item is missing from the long list of clothing. Francis M. Nevins calls this approach the "negative clue". It was also noticed as an EQ trait by John Dickson Carr in his essay "The Grandest Game in the World" (1946), and delightfully burlesqued there. EQ was not the only author to use this approach; it also shows up in Agatha Christie, for example in her novel Death in the Clouds (1935).
Other Writers. Although they did not specialize in impossible crimes, many members of the Van Dine school occasionally wrote about them, starting with Van Dine himself. Van Dine's The Dragon Murder Case (1933) is also about an Impossible Disappearance.
So are Stuart Palmer's "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933), "Green Ice" (1941), and several of the stories in Palmer and Craig Rice's People Vs. Withers and Malone, such as "Once Upon a Crime" (1950), "Rift in the Loot" (1955) and "Withers and Malone, Brain-Stormers" (1959). These Palmer stories are all about objects which disappear from view, and which cannot be found through extensive searches, like EQ's Concealed Object tales.
EQ was also familiar with Impossible Disappearance stories by early writers. L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "The Man Who Disappeared" (1901) was reprinted by him in EQMM, causing this hitherto uncollected story to be rescued from obscurity.
Some of Queen's short stories fall in this category, such as "Man Bites Dog" (1939) and "The Medical Finger" (1951; based on a 1939 radio play), as well as the radio play "The Scorpion's Thumb" (1939). "The Scorpion's Thumb" has a New Year's cocktail that's poisoned, like Calamity Town to come.
Another minimalist poisoning tale is the radio play, "The Adventure of the Bad Boy" (1939). This disturbing tale combines imagery from The Tragedy of Y, ideas on poisons from R. Austin Freeman's "Rex v. Burnaby", and a strange but well constructed minimalist plot about poisoning. The story shows the sense of dark tragedy that will soon be found in Calamity Town and The Murderer Is a Fox. Paradoxically, while the actual murder mystery can be called minimalist, the play is filled with so many aspects that the play as a whole is inventively detailed.
The radio play "The Adventure of the Lost Child" (1939) involves a child's kidnapping. So does "Child Missing!" (1951). Neither is a poisoning tale. But both have the sort of solution that will also emerge in the minimalist poisoning tales, in which the inner possibilities of an apparently tight plot are explored to find an alternate culprit. A family with parents and a child is central to these stories. Such a family is also the subject of The Murderer Is a Fox. Slightly more complex family situations also play roles in The Four of Hearts and Calamity Town.
Small Cities. "The Adventure of the Lost Child" takes place in a fictitious New York city, Hessian. This medium size city looks like a rough sketch of Wrightsville to come, three years later in Calamity Town (1942). The local newspaper publisher is a principal character; the town hotel is a major setting; various local landmarks such as the Three Oaks Memorial are mentioned, and the town even has a Lower Village, like the Low Village of Wrightsville. All of this anticipates Wrightsville, with its profusion of specific places, civic leaders and local institutions. Like Wrightsville, this locale is a full-fledged city, with all the issues and social problems that beset other sizable American metropolises.
Earlier, in "The Invisible Lover" (1934), Ellery had solved a mystery in a very small town, Corsica, in upstate New York. One can find traces of the Wrightsville approach to come here as well, although Wrightsville is a substantial city. Corsica also has a Lower Village. We meet town officials and leaders, and reference is made to institutions such as the Post Office, grocer's and jail. We get a brief look back at the hero's childhood, including his swimming, anticipating the more extensive Wrightsville boyhood and swimming episodes in The King Is Dead. (However, "The Invisible Lover" is not a minimalist mystery.)
A Suite of Ideas. There is an interlocking suite of ideas in these stories: poisonings, kidnappings, families and children, small cities, and minimalist solutions that maneuver to find hidden variations within apparently tight plots. All of these creative ideas seem to be linked in the creative imagination of EQ.
Is EQ'S Minimalism Good?. I confess that today I regret all of these changes in EQ's approach. I like the old EQ better, in general. I am impressed with the minimalism of EQ's 1940's novels; it is a one time tour de force, and somebody had to do it. But as a whole, my heart is more with complexity, and I would have preferred many more of the old style early EQ novels.
Influences on EQ. Such Anthony Berkeley short stories about poisoning as "The Avenging Chance" (1929) and "The Wrong Jar" (1940) contain plot twists that show up later, with further variations, in the "minimalist poisoning" stories Ellery Queen wrote in the 1940's, such as Calamity Town (1942) and The Murderer Is a Fox (1945).
A possible model for the minimalist poisoning stories of EQ is C. Daly King's Obelists Fly High (1935). The Four of Hearts (1938), the first of EQ's series, has an airplane background, just like King's book. (Please see my list of Airplanes in 1930's Mysteries.) EQ was an enormous King enthusiast: see Queen's Quorum. There are also elements of King's solution that recall EQ books, such as There Was an Old Woman (1943).
Ellery On His Own. When EQ went to Hollywood in The Devil to Pay, he became separated from Inspector Queen, the New York Police, and the whole investigative mechanism of amateur sleuth working with the police that EQ had inherited from S.S. Van Dine. EQ does much of his investigation under a pseudonym in this book, further changing his normal modus operandi, and eliminating any attempt to appeal to his reputation to get him entrée into the police investigation. This situation is made even more extreme in the Wrightsville novels starting with Calamity Town. Ellery also uses a pseudonym in Calamity Town.
"The Adventure of the Lost Child" also separates Ellery from working with the police as a whole, just as in the Wrightsville tales.
People You Know Little About. Jim Haight and Rosemary Haight are not from Wrightsville. They have moved there fairly recently. The other characters in fact do not know much about them, only a little they have observed. Such a mysterious person is used by R. Austin Freeman in his novel Felo De Se? (1937).
This plot only works in Calamity Town because Ellery is separated from police resources. In a typical New York-set EQ mystery, the New York police would find out all sorts of background information about the characters.
The Workers. Ellery meets some of the working class residents of Wrightsville (start of Chapter 4). Among them is someone named Jacquard. This recalls Joseph Marie Jacquard, whose invention of the programmable loom in 1804 was a key step towards the development of the computer.
The categories of the workers include machinists and toolmakers (start of Chapter 4). The newly reopened Wrightsville Machine Shop is prominently mentioned (end of Chapter 1). People are moving to Wrightsville just to work in the Machine Shop (start of Chapter 2). Making machinery is seen as a key part of Wrightsville's boom. Making machinery was also the key industry in the real-life city that inspired Wrightsville: Claremont, New Hampshire. See the Wikipedia. And see Arthur Vidro's informative article Claremont: The Real Wrightsville.
I use the word "city": Claremont had 12,000 inhabitants in 1940, and Wrightsville is described as having over 10,000. Wrightsville is NOT what most people would consider a "small town". It's an industrial city.
In the excellent later short story "The Robber of Wrightsville", a second factory appears. It makes farm machinery, and is contrasted by Ellery to the Machine Shop he first saw in Calamity Town. "The Robber of Wrightsville" actually takes us inside this second factory. This is a rarity in Ellery Queen, who almost never actually showed industrial locations.
If Ellery Queen preserved Claremont's real-life focus of machinery manufacturing in his Wrightsville tales, it was because he found it interesting and meaningful. He could have made the fictional Wrightsville manufacture anything from bird seed to pin cushions.
There is something reflexive about "machinery manufacturing". Just as the EQ books are mysteries about a man who writes mysteries, so are Wrightsville's factories mechanical places that make other machines.
In the next Wrightsville book The Murderer Is a Fox, the Fox family owns the factory "Bayard & Talbot Fox, Machinists' Tools".
Calamity Town has science fictional imagery, with Ellery referencing Outer Space (Chapter 3), and pumpkins compared to beings from Mars (start of Chapter 7). The machinery manufacturing in Wrightsville is on the cutting edge of advanced technology of the era.
The Intellectuals. Wrightsville includes some brainy people:
Aspects of the intellectuals recall "The Two-Headed Dog". Librarian Miss Aiken has studied Greek, like the innkeeper's daughter Jenny Hosey in "The Two-Headed Dog". Anderson quotes Shakespeare, like handyman Isaac in "The Two-Headed Dog". ("The Dauphin's Doll" opens with a briefly seen male professor of Greek, who quotes Byron's "where burning Sappho loved and sung", thus partially preserving this pattern.)
Jenny Hosey also resembles Pat Wright, in that both are intelligent young women who have gone to college: something that was still fairly rare in pre-1945 America.
Emmeline DuPré gives dancing and drama lessons, and Lola Wright gives piano lessons. Both are thus the "small businesspeople" who are frequent in EQ.
Race. The workers Pat Wright introduces to Ellery are "white and black and brown" (start of Chapter 4). In both Calamity Town and The Murderer Is a Fox, Wrightsville is a multi-racial city.
The World Series Crime. Features of Calamity Town reappear in EQ's radio drama "The World Series Crime" (1942):
Hard-Boiled Fiction. Ellery Queen shows he can write tough, hard-boiled fiction (second half of Chapter 10). It is as if he deliberately switched subgenres for this episode, into tough guy mode. This involves an archetypal hard-boiled setting, a gambling den. And that archetypal pulp fiction development, fisticuffs. It is followed by an encounter with the police.
Ellery rescuing and bringing home a drunken Jim, anticipates the way he will get Howard Van Horn after one of his spells in Ten Days' Wonder.
EQ does not forget plot in this section. Jim's drunken babblings are one of the key plot developments in Calamity Town.
Jim's collapse into drunkenness recalls the rejected young doctor's in the radio play "The Scorpion's Thumb".
Hard-boiled milieus appear in EQ's radio play "The Adventure of the Singing Rat" (1943). They are not as well-done there as in Calamity Town. Hard-boiled characters occasionally show up in other EQ works: likable hoodlum Mac McKee in "The Three Lame Men", sleazy illegal operator A. Burt Finner in Inspector Queen's Own Case.
The House. The house built for the young couple recalls the house in "The Lamp of God".
The book satirizes the 1940's craze for Early American decor. The house's owner proudly tells Ellery that the Early American furniture is brand-new (Chapter 3). The idea of brand-new antiques is a contradiction in terms.
Sweet Foods. EQ gets some brief, much-needed comedy relief, out of meals that have too-sweet foods. See Calamity Town (near the start of Chapter 4), The Murderer Is a Fox (Chapter 14). Both meals climax with what EQ clearly thought was an awful sounding dessert: pineapple mousse.
The settings for both meals are called by the diners intime, the polite French word for "intimate". This too has elements of satire.
However Ellery likes ice-cream parlors:
Rex Stout and the Romantic Triangle. The triangle between Ellery, Pat Wright and Carter Bradford recalls Too Many Cooks (1938) by Rex Stout:
Black waiters play a central role in Too Many Cooks. A Black butler (Chapter 4) and Black waiters (Chapter 6) are briefly mentioned in Calamity Town. The butler's son makes a dignified, non-stereotyped appearance in The Murderer Is a Fox (first part of Chapter 10).
Rinehart and The Great Mistake. Mary Roberts Rinehart is a writer not often associated with Ellery Queen. But her mystery novel The Great Mistake (1940) has features anticipating Ellery Queen's Calamity Town (1942):
Higginsville. The film Broadway Bill (Frank Capra, 1934) opens in the small city of Higginsville. It has features that anticipate Wrightsville:
Thomas Hardy. Nicholas Fuller has an important article on his blog "The Grandest Game in the World". Wrightsville and Wessex: Was Ellery Queen a Thomas Hardy fan? points out the influence of Thomas Hardy on Ellery Queen. Thomas Hardy was a realistic mainstream novelist of the 19th Century. Fuller concentrates on two kinds of influence:
Much of Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) takes place in the imaginary English city of Casterbridge. Parallels between The Mayor of Casterbridge and Calamity Town:
Our Town. In his book Perplexing Plots (2023) David Bordwell says that Calamity Town "evokes" the famous play Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder. He's got a good point. Our Town is set in a fictitious town in New Hampshire. And the real-life model for Wrightsville is Claremont, New Hampshire.
There are differences, however. Calamity Town is far more interested in businesses, industry and intellectuals than Our Town. And Our Town looks at farmers and farming much more than Calamity Town, which mainly just mentions them in passing.
Sociology. Our Town features a geographer character. Calamity Town has a sociologist: Pat Wright has a degree in sociology. And is interested in exploring working class Wrightsville. She shares her knowledge on this with Ellery (start of Chapter 4). Her presence as a sociologist (a scientist who studies Society) parallels the deep interest Calamity Town has in exploring Wrightsville as a society.
There are also formal, reflexive aspects. Calamity Town studies society - and included in the tale is a sociologist, someone who studies society.
Earlier in The French Powder Mystery (1930) (Chapter 22) the millionaire who heads New York's Anti-Vice Society, reads many books on sociology.
Two Sections. The Murderer Is a Fox can be seen as made up of two sections, each very different from the other:
The King Is Dead. The Murderer Is a Fox anticipates The King Is Dead (1952). Both are unusual in having boys, rather than adults, at the center of a Wrightsville story. In both a boy faces hatred and persecution by cruel members of Wrightsville.
Davy is persecuted by townspeople for what his father did. However, I wonder if in real life whether Davy's upper class family might have offered him some protection from this. So might his war hero status as an adult. The persecution of the lower class boy in The King Is Dead is more believable.
Rinehart Influence. Mary Roberts Rinehart influenced the first Wrightsville novel Calamity Town. She also likely influenced The Murderer Is a Fox. Rinehart's ideas on architecture, especially, find echoes in The Murderer Is a Fox.
Rinehart often featured paired houses in her work. Please see my list of paired houses in Rinehart. The Murderer Is a Fox also has a linked pair of houses: the two Fox family houses, side by side.
Rinehart often featured a line of sight: what can be seen (or not seen) from a certain place. Please see my list of "line of sight" in Rinehart. In The Murderer Is a Fox, witnesses Emily and Mr. and Mrs. Luck can see from Emily's garden right into the murder house and its living room through its open windows (last part of Chapter 11).
Rinehart often featured upper floors in her work. Please see my list of upper floors in Rinehart. The Murderer Is a Fox also has a scene in an upper floor: the attic in the Bayard Fox family house (Chapter 18). This is a storage area, like some of the upper floors in Rinehart.
War Stress. Everything about war was seen as stressful. But aerial warfare was seen as particularly harrowing. See the mainstream short story "Gunners' Passage" (1944) by Irwin Shaw, which appeared in the prestigious magazine The New Yorker. The airman in "Gunners' Passage" suffers a massive nervous collapse after sustained combat. So pilot Davy Fox's PTSD in The Murderer Is a Fox would have been seen as highly believable, by 1945 readers.
In mystery fiction, see:
Out of Prison. SPOILERS. Ellery and his father attempt to get a man out of prison. This recalls the final stages of The Tragedy of Z, which also have the good guy sleuths trying to get a man out of prison. Both prisoners are mild-mannered men accused of murder. The passages in both books are heartfelt and emotional.
The Scarlet Letters. The personal relationships in The Murderer Is a Fox get repeated, with subtle variations, at the start of The Scarlet Letters. SPOILERS. In both books:
Tea Roome. Miss Sally's Tea Roome is a comic restaurant. a satiric look at an ultra-refined place (Chapter 14). It recalls Horatio's cottage in There Was an Old Woman. Both are:
Anonymous Letters. In The Murderer Is a Fox (Chapter 2) Davy gets a vicious anonymous letter. He soon guesses who probably sent it. His guess later turns out to be correct.
The year before EQ wrote a radio play about anonymous letters, "The Mischief Maker" (1944). In "The Mischief Maker" the sender of the letters is not known. It is treated as the story's central mystery. Through investigation and deduction, Ellery figures out the identity of the letter-writer at the end of the tale.
Both "The Mischief Maker" and The Murderer Is a Fox emphasize the pain anonymous letters cause.
Calamity House is white with red trim and surrounded by green landscape in Calamity Town (start of Chapter 7). It is compared to a Christmas package. It is NOT designed by Ellery. But it does recall Ellery's love of making Christmas presents in "The Dauphin's Doll".
Color is frequently used to describe people: red or yellow complexion, blue eyes, etc.
The opening of The American Gun Mystery has a character-list where each suspect is symbolized by a different color. This anticipates "symbolic" character-lists in Michael Avallone. For example, Avallone's The Voodoo Murders (1957) links each person to their favorite dance.
Please see this list of my articles dealing with Color in the Arts.
The leader of the sinister militia groups in Cat of Many Tails (Chapter 8), is a veteran in a sharp GI uniform.
Related: Universities and their school colors:
Aside from some brief remarks in The Egyptian Cross Mystery (Chapter 17), we get little description of these troopers' uniforms.
Earlier in The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) (Chapter 2) we see the head of the West Virginia State Police testifying in court. Colonel Pickett is explicitly described as military in appearance and speech. This anticipates what the novel calls the "military" style uniforms in Drury Lane's Last Case (1933) (start of Chapter 3). One of Pickett's troopers also appears, obeying an order of Colonel Pickett. This expresses a Chain of Command. Both Pickett and his trooper are tall, suggesting that recruitment into their force is based more on appearance than talent.
The saluting and related "discipline" in the General's estate in "The Treasure Hunt", recalls the police saluting in The Roman Hat Mystery, Halfway House and Drury Lane's Last Case. These too invoke a Chain of Command. And see the uniformed guard in "E = Murder", who calls the U.S. Army General "sir".
Captain Rosewater of the State Troopers appears in "The Inner Circle" (1947; based on a 1942 radio play). He has a deep bass voice. It's a sympathetic portrayal. We also see another Trooper, likely one of his men, directing traffic at a crime scene. This too invokes a Chain of Command.
My discussion of State Police in Mystery Fiction suggests that many writers of that era saw State Police as something special. They were portrayed as brainy, resourceful and of special integrity. However, Ellery Queen takes a far more modest approach. He neither maligns State Police, nor admires them. In EQ, State Police are honest and mildly competent, but little more.
Like a Film. The events in Part 1 seem designed to be suitable for a movie. Some are directly compared to a Hollywood film (Chapter 4):
The opening courthouse encounter could easily be filmed.
These scenes don't just make There Was an Old Woman filmable. They show film conventions and film ideas taking over real life.
Advertising. Advertising also takes over life at the Potts mansion. The statue of the giant shoe, and its neon light, turn Advertising into sculpture. EQ and There Was an Old Woman do this over a decade before Pop Art in the 1950's.
The name Louella evokes Louella Parsons, a main founder of Hollywood Gossip as a profession. This too is a kind of ballyhoo.
Jive Music. A court case at the opening involves a company called "Jive Jottings, Inc." Jive music was enormously popular with young people in that era. Sergeant Velie soon calls this "that hot-trumpet case", which would also be a hip musical reference. In a film version, these musical aspects could be expanded.
This too shows a popular art - jive music - becoming the substance of a public space. Just like Hollywood films, and advertising.
EQ might be attempting to appeal to a youth audience, with such musical mentions. Jive Junction (1943) was one of the best films of the year. It was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.
Opening Locale: Public and Modern. The opening recalls early sections of Halfway House (1936):
Greek Mythology. The first three Potts children, and the Potts factory, happen after strong-willed Cornelia marries cobbler Bacchus Potts (Chapter 2). The events recall the Greek myth of Dionysus, Agave and Pentheus, used by Euripides in his play The Bacchae.
In The Bacchae, middle-aged woman Agave becomes devoted to the Greek god known as Dionysus or Bacchus. Inspired by Bacchus's call to frenzy, she kills her own son King Pentheus, symbol of rationality and good government.
Similarly Cornelia in There Was an Old Woman is an older woman and mother, like Agave in the myth. She marries Bacchus Potts in the novel's backstory (Chapter 2), the way Agave is devoted to Bacchus in the myth. Bacchus Potts enacts irrationality and frenzy, just like his mythological namesake: he likes to do wild, solitary dances in the woods at night. And Cornelia fully backs up the extremely eccentric behavior of her first three children, just as Agave supports irrationality and Frenzy in the myth.
Cornelia does not directly kill her son in There Was an Old Woman. But she does support the irrational behavior that leads to his death. The murdered son in There Was an Old Woman is an exponent of rationality and good business management, just as King Pentheus supports reason and good government in the myth.
Class. The opening (Chapter 1) has brief but interesting things to say about that perennial EQ topic, social class. SPOILERS:
Plastics. Louella is researching plastics in her laboratory (Chapter 4). Please see my list of Plastics in mysteries.
The Duel. The most dramatic of the opening scenes in the duel (Chapter 7). It too could be filmed. This is clearly the big set-piece of the book. Both the art by Pauline Jackson on the original book jacket, and Clark Hulings' painting on the Pocket Book paperback, feature this. Both show a well-built, broad-shouldered man from the back, in a great suit, firing away in the duel. This is a macho fantasy. It's a duel fought by modern men in sharp suits.
Velie. Sgt. Velie is skeptical about the duel, which is promoted by Ellery. It turns out that Velie is correct, and correct for the reasons he gives. And Ellery is wrong. Mad magazine used to have a series "You know you are trouble when". Well, Ellery is really in trouble when Velie is more intelligent that him.
For a discussion of the 1971 film version, please see my article on its director Claude Chabrol.
Premise. The initial premises of Ten Days' Wonder recall The Murderer Is a Fox:
Rinehart Influence. Mary Roberts Rinehart influenced the first Wrightsville novels Calamity Town and The Murderer Is a Fox. Rinehart's ideas on architecture, especially, find echoes in Ten Days' Wonder.
Rinehart often featured paired houses in her work. Please see my list of paired houses in Rinehart. Ten Days' Wonder also has a linked pair of houses: the Van Horn mansion and its guest house, side by side.
Mathematics. Howard's attacks of amnesia, their dates, lengths and times, are subject to some very simple mathematical analysis (Chapter 1).
The amnesia attacks form a series, like the murders to come in Cat of Many Tails.
Science Fiction Imagery. The amnesia attacks are described in terms of science fiction imagery (Chapter 1). The fourth dimension is referenced. In the mid 20th Century, the fourth dimension was often linked to strange ideas about time.
The amnesia attacks are also linked to "black holes". However the term "black hole" in astronomy was reportedly not invented till 1968. So this use of "black holes" in Ten Days' Wonder is apparently not science or science fiction.
EQ Books. A character has a complete collection of Ellery Queen's mystery books (Chapter 2). This echoes "The Three R's" (1946; based on a 1939 radio play), and another character's similar EQ collection. SPOILERS. In both works, this ultimately tells us something fairly similar about the character.
The little stories collected in Q.B.I. show EQ's storytelling ability. Some of them involve very clever puzzle plots by any standards, such as "My Queer Dean!" and "Snowball in July". But even in minor pieces like "Cold Money", the reading is surprisingly satisfying. In EQ, there is a situation, then some event occurs, and one is in a logical variation of that situation, and then another event takes place leading to a logical variation of the preceding, and so on. Even little pieces that are not triumphs of puzzle plotting can show this kind of unfolding in EQ. It is my best guess as to why many of EQ's short pieces are so much fun. EQ's radio play "The Adventure of the Mark of Cain" is a good example of this. Its use of a kind of logical analysis of a situation through progressive plotting is especially striking.
The stories in Q.B.I. deal more with the underworld than is typical of EQ. The stories move very fast and are quite compressed. Often this is done by humorously invoking clichés of underworld stories, films, and news accounts. The invocation is often done with wit and clever phrasing. Events are often more synopsized than dramatized, usually considered a second rate approach, but one that works beautifully here, partly due to EQ's skill with le mot juste. This allows tremendously complex stories to be told in a small space. Even the detection often gets ingeniously summarized. The stories in Q.B.I. have a cumulative effect that outweighs the impact of any single story. It is probable that they should be read as a group.
Many of the tales focus not on murder, but on crimes such as robbery or impersonation. Three stories of 1951, "Driver's Seat", "Double Your Money", and "The Gambler's Club", all deal with ingenious swindles.
"Double Your Money", and "Money Talks" (1950) portray poor, ethnic, working people in New York City, whereas "The Robber of Wrightsville" (1953; based on a 1940 radio play) shows class conflict in the "typical" American town of Wrightsville. This is one of the most left wing of EQ's tales. Most of Q.B.I. strives for relative sociological realism. There is little overt surrealism, although the disappearances in "Double Your Money" (1951) and "Snowball in July" have their moments of magical strangeness. This realism might not have been entirely a matter of EQ's personal preference. By the 1950's, when these tales were published, Golden Age flamboyance was considered old-fashioned by most mystery critics. Realism was regarded as the most important trait of a detective story, and EQ obliged here.
William MacHarg. The Q.B.I. series perhaps was modeled on William MacHarg's The Affairs of O'Malley (collected 1940). This is a similar series of brief tales set against authentic New York City backgrounds, with "ordinary people" as characters. Some of MacHarg's tales, such as "Broadway Murder" and "Murder Makes it Worse", include swindles as well as murder, although EQ's approach to swindles is far more mathematical than MacHarg's.
Snowball in July. "Snowball in July" (1952) mainly concerns trains. This recalls The Tragedy of X. The perfectly straight tracks eventually suggest parallel lines: another EQ tale based in a geometric landscape.
The tale has a long prologue. It is full of comedy. And a feminist subtext. The feminism persists throughout the tale.
The plot premise of trying to escort a woman witness by train to testify against a crook trying to kill her, perhaps derives from the film The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer), which was shot mid-1950, but not released till May 2, 1952. "Snowball in July" was published in This Week, August 31, 1952.
SPOILERS. Action at the finale recalls another classic train thriller: The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938).
GI Story. "GI Story" (1954) is set in Wrightsville. Like such previous Wrightsville works as Calamity Town, Ten Days' Wonder and "The Robber of Wrightsville", it deals with conflicts between parents and grown children. For such a brief story, the characters of the stepfather and his three stepsons come across with remarkable vividness.
The solution to the dying message is two levels deep. SPOILERS. First Ellery has to make a deduction about the heroes' names. Then he can actually solve the dying message. This double structure is creative.
BIG SPOILERS. The solution to the dying message, is a variant on an idea EQ had used in The Scarlet Letters.
"GI Story" has an interesting meta-structure, with Dakin asking Ellery to solve a mystery Dakin has already solved. This is not a game: Dakin has sound legal reasons for asking Ellery to do this. But it adds a game-like level to the story. The two men symbolize two approaches to crime solving: policeman Dakin has an eye witness and physical evidence found in the trash; Ellery uses reasoning such as deduction and meanings of dying messages.
Although one of the characters is a GI in uniform, and another is series character Police Chief Dakin, "GI Story" completely avoids the militaristic fantasy about glamorous uniforms prevalent in Drury Lane's Last Case and The King Is Dead. In fact we learn that the soldier's uniform is "rumpled": the exact opposite of the sharp uniforms in the other books. (Similarly, Army Lieutenant Dick Fiske in "The Treasure Hunt" has "his uniform unusually disordered" by the stress of the events in the tale. As in "GI Story" there is no attempt to glamorize uniforms. Both "GI Story" and "The Treasure Hunt" feature real soldiers in real US Army uniforms, unlike the fantasy uniforms in Drury Lane's Last Case and The King Is Dead.)
There is almost none of EQ's color imagery in this tale. Instead we have transparent gin and martinis, a transparent glass medicine bottle, and presumably white ice and snow. The winter setting perhaps underscores the colorlessness.
Sociological Vignettes, in the opening chapters. EQ seems to have first used the Q.B.I. approach - brief, synopsized tales about realistic New York City residents - in the opening chapters (1 - 4) of his Cat of Many Tails (1949). They stress realistic accounts of the lives of all classes of New Yorkers, people who are "typical" of some segment of life in the city, and little eccentricity. EQ could have learned this from William MacHarg's O'Malley stories, which use a similar approach. This approach is realistic, non-flamboyant, serious, without being actually hard-boiled. Characters are not typically "tough" either. Instead, they form vignettes of daily life. Much emphasis is put in Queen's tales of the difficulties of hard working people trying to earn money to support a family. O'Reilly in Cat is a good example. There are so many brief vignettes in the opening chapters of Cat, that the book can seem more like a story sequence than a novel. The same year as Cat was published, 1949, EQ began his series of brief tales for This Week magazine, many of which would wind up being collected as Q.B.I. Ellery will coin the phrase "QBI" to describe his detective auxiliary force in Cat, in fact.
There is also coverage of Civil Rights issues in these early chapters (1-4). A reporter for a Black newspaper in Harlem makes some pointed pro-Civil Rights comments. These sections (Chapter 3) are consistent with EQ's introduction of non-stereotyped Black characters in his 1930's works. There are also some brief but pointed remarks on anti-Semitism. Please see my list of Civil Rights in Mystery Fiction.
The vignette technique in EQ, also recalls Clifford Odets' play Waiting for Lefty (1935), which EQ praises in Halfway House (1936). Odets' play is full of brief but detailed vignettes, showing the struggling lives of poor people in New York City. One wonders if Queen modeled his approach on Odets. (One might note that Odets was not the first left wing playwright to use such a vignette approach: variants can be seen in Elmer Rice's play Street Scene (1929).) Waiting for Lefty is also full of fierce condemnations of Anti-Semitism, making it even more a potential model for the opening of Cat of Many Tails.
Cat of Many Tails (start of Chapter 2) contrasts a list of poor neighborhoods of New York that contain tenements, with a series of upper crust neighborhoods (staring with Washington Square). This immediately expresses the perennial EQ theme of social class.
Some of the satirical dialogue about Monica and her well to do father reminds one of such Calendar of Crime stories as "The Inner Circle".
Violence and the Media. In Chapter 1, EQ rails against pundits who claim that radio crime fiction programs are causing juvenile delinquency. EQ had such a radio program himself, so this was a personal issue. Clearly, long before violence on TV was a national concern, violence on radio preoccupied people too. Violent comic books were also a national obsession - in 1948 there was a mass comic book burning in Birmingham, New York by the community leaders, for example. The surviving examples of the Ellery Queen radio program I have read are distinctly non-lurid. They are well crafted mystery puzzles in good taste. It is hard to imagine them promoting crime or juvenile delinquency. Cat instead goes after sensational news coverage of real crime by both newspapers and radio, suggesting that such non-fiction sources were more often to blame than mystery fiction.
The Detective Plot. The first four chapters of Cat offer a well done mix of detection and social portrayal of New York City. This section culminates in Ellery discovering patterns in the series of crimes.
However, after this point, the book becomes much more suspense oriented, and much less like a true detective story.
The mystery plot of the book resumes later (Chapters: second half of 8, 9). These chapters explain the patterns Ellery discovers in the earlier part of the story (last part of Chapter 4).
The mystery plot involves key EQ traditions. BIG SPOILERS.:
The identity of the chief suspect only emerges in this later section (second half of Chapter 8). The identity emerges through sound detective work by the sleuths. But there are NOT clues that would have allowed the reader to deduce this identity before this. In other words, the identity mystery is NOT "fair play". This is unusual for EQ stories, which tend to have strong clues that allow the reader to deuce the guilty party before the solution.
Serial Killers, and a City in Fear. Cat is not the first novel about serial killing. In fact, we can cite John Rhode's The Murders in Praed Street (1928), Philip MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931) and The Mystery of the Dead Police (1933), Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931), EQ's own The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) and Agatha Christie's The A.B.C. Murders (1936). Of all of these works, Cat is especially close in format to Christie's novel. There is the same emphasis on an intellectual search for common factors behind the series of crimes. As in Christie's book, the victims' relatives get involved, and take part in the investigation as an auxiliary. In Chapter 5, Ellery even brings in what he calls the "ABC theory of multiple murder", which seems to derive from Christie's novel.
Jerome and Harold Prince published their first detective short story, "The Man in the Velvet Hat" (1944) in EQMM. It benefited considerably from editorial suggestions by Ellery Queen, according to the authors' later introduction in the anthology Maiden Murders (1952). The story has features that anticipate EQ's later Cat of Many Tails (1949). In both stories:
Behind many of these writers stands Fritz Lang's motion picture M (1931). In Lang's film, a whole city is terrorized by a serial killer, and the whole city becomes a protagonist in the story, with many small vignettes showing life in the city. A government minister and the police chief are characters in the story, directing the man hunt; we see the Mayor and police head in EQ performing the same role.
Riots. I believe that the stampede (Chapter 7) is a realistic possibility - stampedes are all too possible in crowds. But I don't think the subsequent riots are believable (Chapters: 7, first half of 8). Real riots in the USA are caused by very serious issues: racial discrimination, the Vietnam War. They are not a response to serial killers.
I also think the novel's riots defame New York City, a great place. New York City is better than it is depicted in these scenes.
Earlier, in The French Powder Mystery (1930) (start of Chapter 4), a crowd stampedes after a body is discovered.
Frankburner. We don't learn much about the background of the militias leader. His last name Frankburner seems to be made up by EQ - internet searches do not return anyone by that name ever having lived in real life. Frankburner looks like a mechanic, recalling the garage owner in The Egyptian Cross Mystery.
Introducing the Victims. The first five victims are systematically introduced, one by one (Chapter 2). This recalls the systematic introduction of the characters at the starts of The Chinese Orange Mystery and The Devil to Pay.
The Young Lovers. It was popular for Golden Age mysteries to have a pair of sympathetic young lovers. Cat of Many Tails (Chapter 3) introduces its young couple Celeste Phillips and Jimmy McKell. Jimmy McKell is immediately compared by the heroine to Hollywood leading men Jimmy Stewart and Gregory Peck, recalling the way Beau Rummell in The Dragon's Teeth was compared by women to star Robert Taylor.
Jimmy McKell has a breezy, lively way of talking, full of clever turns of phrase. This is entertaining, and helps build his characterization. It also allows author EQ to create verbal virtuosity.
The Knots. The knots the killer ties in the cords, are compared to bows put on wrapped packages (Chapter 2). This recalls a humorous touch in in "The Dauphin's Doll": Ellery likes to wrap Christmas presents, and he puts fancy ribbons on them.
How Good is this book?. Cat of Many Tails is often cited as Ellery Queen's best book. I have to disagree, although I think it has much merit. I usually judge mysteries by:
By these standards, Cat of Many Tails is a good, but not great, work of mystery fiction. The puzzle plot is genuinely clever. But it is not as complex or as imaginative as the very best work of Ellery Queen, or other top Golden Age mystery writers. Admittedly, this is judging the book by very high standards, indeed. Similarly, the storytelling is rich in the opening chapters showing life in New York City, but less well developed in later sections of the novel.
I've tried to like Double, Double, but just can't. It has two kinds of problems:
Opening: The Articles. Double, Double begins with a series of newspaper articles summarizing some events in Wrightsville. Similarly:
Opening: Tom Anderson. The articles are followed by a longer, but also summarized account, of Tom Anderson's life. Structurally this anticipates the biography of Amy Upham in the Wrightsville tale "The Wrightsville Heirs".
Some of the facts of Anderson's life in Double, Double, were previously established in Calamity Town (Chapter 29). SPOILERS. The facts include that Anderson had been a poet. And that he received a remittance, that he spent on booze.
Woman Newspaper Owner. Double, Double is yet another Queen mystery with a woman journalist.
Business. The woman newspaper publisher is grossly caricatured. But her plan for expanding her newspaper and its circulation seems practical and sound. It is typical of EQ's interest in business in the Wrightsville books.
The "old cotton mill" is mentioned in Calamity Town. We learn in Double, Double that it is now a profitable site of dye manufacture. Like the Machine Shop factory making machines in other Wrightsville books, a dye factory has a recursive or reflexive quality. Like machines, such dyes can be used by other factories, to manufacture products.
Links to The King Is Dead. Imagery and subject matter from Double, Double will reappear in The King Is Dead (1952). In all cases, the material will be more intense and more serious in tone in The King Is Dead. These subjects include:
Asimov and Science Fiction. Double, Double (1950) uses the phrase "the end of eternity" to describe Ellery and Rima's seemingly endless walk to the swimming area. Isaac Asimov would soon publish a science fiction novel The End of Eternity (1955).
Ellery Queen sometimes included science fiction imagery and metaphors in his books. His phrase "the end of eternity" might be an example of this.
Rima Anderson in Double, Double is inspired by the bird-woman heroine Rima in the novel Green Mansions (1904) by W.H. Hudson. Green Mansions is a science fiction novel, although it is often described as a fantasy.
Mystery Plot. The Origin of Evil has an abundance of mystery plot. There are many separate mystery puzzle ideas:
The Finishing Stroke (1958) will also be an EQ novel with a major mystery in the Ten Days' Wonder "find the pattern in a series" mode, and an "impossible disappearance of a person" subplot. The impossible disappearance will play a larger role in The Finishing Stroke than in The Origin of Evil, however.
Amateur Detectives. Some of the characters turn amateur detective in the middle of the book, recalling the amateur sleuths who assist Ellery in Cat of Many Tails. These sections involve some decent detective work, tracking down the origins of objects used in the attacks on the house (Chapters 6,8).
Themes. The book expresses pessimism over the arms race, and describes Yugoslavia and Iran and Korea as possible places where war could break out: 50 years later this seems frighteningly prophetic. (See Chapter 4.) The Origin of Evil shows the start of the Korean War on the US home-front, just as Calamity Town did for the beginning of World War II. One suspects that EQ chose the Los Angeles setting, largely for these aspects of the novel.
In addition to the arms race, there are two depictions of high tech environments in The Origin of Evil.
Oedipal Conflicts. The Origin of Evil is blunt in its depiction of sexuality, like some other later EQ novels. Mickey Spillane was dominating the best seller lists at this time, and EQ was clearly writing in tune with the zeitgeist.
The Origin of Evil, like Ten Days' Wonder, has a younger man in love with the beautiful wife of a powerful paternal figure of a man. In The Origin of Evil, the young man in love with the wife is Ellery himself. In both novels, the romantic triangle has undertones of an Oedipal conflict. These books, along with Cat of Many Tails, are the main products of EQ's Freudian psychoanalytic period (1948-1951). One suspects that such Oedipal symbolism was consciously intended by the author. I confess I don't believe in Freudian psychology at all, and don't see the artistic value of such imagery in the novels.
Characters. I did like the young hero. His name, Crowe Macgowan, seems to be inspired by Cro-Magnon Man, suggesting he is an evolutionary throwback. Crowe Macgowan is one of the eccentric, non-conformist characters, that often make Golden Age mystery fiction so interesting. Such characters have almost disappeared from most contemporary English-language crime novels, which instead glorify conformity.
Alfred Wallace is also an unusual character, who seems odder and odder as the novel progresses, and we learn more of his back-story.
Suspect Mr. Collier wanders through The Origin of Evil, making recurring appearances, and sometimes philosophizing about life. Anderson the town drunk in Calamity Town also has a bit of a recurring commentator role. A similar recurring character is the young Black writer Dion Proctor in The Tragedy of Errors, although Proctor is mainly a silent observer, rather than a commentator.
The book is radically different from many of today's crime novels, which stick to an old-fashioned novel, soap opera-ish approach throughout their length. One implication of this difference: While today's writers often resort to endless padding to fill up their 300 required pages, each section of The King Is Dead is compactly written, trying to set forth its own mountain of material in concise fashion.
Impossible Crime. The Impossible Crime (Chapters 10, 11) has an unusual double structure. First, it is presented as a locked room mystery, of an archetypally classical and traditional type. In fact, EQ underlines this view, loading the room with locks, guards and high tech features, trying to create the "ultimate locked room."
But then Inspector Queen offers a partial solution to the problem (middle of Chapter 11). He can explain the locked room. But as Ellery immediately points out, that turns the mystery into a second kind of puzzle: the Impossible Disappearance of an object. Such Impossible Disappearances are an EQ specialty, running through many of his books and short stories.
The two different views of the mystery, the Locked Room and Impossible Disappearance, are in a strong logical relationship. In fact, their logical links recall pure mathematics. In proving a theorem in mathematics, an attempt to prove one theorem is often shown to be possible if one can solve a second problem. The first theorem is shown to be "equivalent" to the second. Mathematicians also often speak of "reducing" the first theorem, to solving the second problem. That is exactly what is happening in The King Is Dead.
The analogy to mathematics can be pushed a little deeper. In mathematics, the second problem often looks simpler or smaller than the first theorem - at least at first. The same is true in The King Is Dead. The Locked Room looks grandiose as a puzzle, the locked room to end all locked rooms. Whereas the Impossible Disappearance seems simple and tiny: all the sleuths have to do is find the missing object, and they have a complete explanation of the case. But as Ellery and the Inspector search, it gradually becomes apparent that finding this small object is...seemingly impossible. Such is often the case in mathematics too: that simple looking second problem can be very hard to solve, even if it looks much smaller and less pretentious or sweeping than the first theorem.
After this initial investigation of the Locked Room and Impossible Disappearance, Ellery and the Inspector are in an inconclusive logical state. They don't really know if an Impossible Disappearance actually took place, or is the real, if partial, explanation of the Locked Room. Maybe the Locked Room was caused by an entirely different criminal scheme, one having nothing to do with an Impossible Disappearance. Or, maybe the Impossible Disappearance is the right answer - and all they have to do to prove it is find that elusive missing object. This ambiguous situation is common in mathematics too, with mathematicians being unsure whether the second problem is ultimately going to be solved, or whether the first theorem will eventually be proved by some reasoning having nothing to do with the second problem.
Ellery eventually solves all. But not until the end of the book.
Mystery Subplots. The King Is Dead also has two mystery-puzzle subplots, that have nothing to do with the main Locked Room problem.
The subplot about the business, recalls a little bit the final switch in The Origin of Evil.
A second subplot involves an incident in the characters' past.
Links to Chesterton. The King Is Dead (1952) has elements that recall G.K. Chesterton's "The Arrow of Heaven" (1925):
Links to H.C. Bailey. The King Is Dead has elements that recall the mystery novel Garstons (1930) by H. C. Bailey:
Links to Jack Williamson. The King Is Dead is a book with a strange setting. It takes place on an isolated island, where a billionaire has his own private country. Such imaginary worlds recall science fiction. In fact, The King Is Dead has elements that recall Jack Williamson's science fiction novella, "The Prince of Space" (1931):
Links to Edgar Wallace. Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men (1905) is an early story in which messages threaten a crime at a certain time. This gambit has been used by many books, films and comic books. The writing in The King Is Dead about this deadline is skillful.
Getting In. In his early Hollywood books, The Devil to Pay and The Four of Hearts, Ellery keeps trying to get into see the studio boss who employs him. Accessing this big-shot is difficult. This comic gambit returns in The King Is Dead, with Ellery demanding to see the King (Chapter 6). This is played more seriously, and unexpectedly, more violently, in The King Is Dead.
Hollywood in the early novels is portrayed as a major center of male power. It is also full of crooked businessmen in The Devil to Pay. Both aspects are pushed to the extreme in The King Is Dead. The King Is Dead is obsessed with maleness: almost all of the employees we see on the island are male.
Major characters in The Devil to Pay include the father, a handsome wealthy amateur sportsman who excels at a profusion of sports, and his devoted trainer and sports expert Pink, a muscular working class stiff. Variations on these two men recur in The King Is Dead, with the sports-excelling King, and his working class bodyguard and sparring partner Max'l. However, the characters in The King Is Dead are meaner, with a nasty, violent edge. If the father in The Devil to Pay is handsome, the King pushes this to extremes, being the ultimate in male good looks and sartorial splendor.
The Opening. The opening takes place at the Queens' apartment building. Events are grounded in the architecture of the apartment.
The Island. Early on, we get a detailed look at the island as a high-tech environment (Chapter 2).
Most of the buildings sit in a valley in the center of the island, just as Shinn Corners will be an isolated town hidden in a valley in the hills in The Glass Village.
Mystery: the Subplot Puzzles. The Glass Village also has a subplot about a disappearing object. While not impossible, it has strong links in technique to the Impossible Disappearances of objects that run through other Ellery Queen. That is, while there is no public ritual taking place during the disappearance, there is a container holding the missing object, and there is a propulsive device taking it outside the main search area.
This disappearance subplot also has some alibi aspects, which are different from the alibis in almost all other detective fiction. The whole subplot is far more original than the main "whodunit, killer's alibi plot".
Linked to this is a subplot about a painting. Such a subplot resembles in general terms those of some other writers, which are about photographs rather than paintings. See Freeman Wills Crofts' Fatal Venture (1939), and John Dickson Carr's "The Clue of the Red Wig" (1940). Queen's specific ideas are original.
Trial. The trial scenes recall the execution finale of The Tragedy of Z. The defendant in both is a figure of pathos. In both sequences, the mystery is figured out right in the trial area.
Links to Christie. The Glass Village recalls Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage (1930):
Christie's novel has some genteel people who live off of inherited money, including sleuth Miss Marple. By contrast, everyone in The Glass Village works for a living, and are mainly doing badly at it, economically speaking.
Intelligentsia. Painter Aunt Fanny Adams is an example of the intelligentsia that runs through the Van Dine School authors, including Ellery Queen. Such artist characters reflect the Van Dine School's deep commitment to culture. Although Aunt Fanny is the victim, she is a major presence throughout the novel. Related to her is a pretty good portrait of an art critic, in Roger Casavant. Casavant's testimony also highlights Aunt Fanny's work and character.
Judge Shinn is a conduit, transmitting American political ideas to a new generation. He too is thus a member of the intelligentsia: his ideas are social and political rather than artistic.
Even in this tiny village, there is a place to buy paperbacks and comic books.
Architecture. The town buildings and map form an instance of the Golden Age fascination with architecture. So to a lesser degree does Aunt Fanny's house. Most of the most interesting settings in the town are in the town's North quarter, which includes Aunt Fanny's house and the church. This might be described as the town's "cultural district".
Twin processions set out from Aunt Fanny's house: one happy (near the end of Chapter 1), one sad (end of Chapter 3). These are another example of the surrealist echoes of plot that run through Ellery Queen.
Economics and Manufacturing. Times are horrible in the small town. This reflects a general economic decline in parts of New England. It also reflects the US Recession that started in July 1953, and bottomed out in May 1954.
Especially creepy is the way the town has de-industrialized: it used to have a factory, that is now closed and in ruins. The former factory in The Glass Village made cashmere: cloth manufacturing was an important industry in New England. EQ's Wrightsville is an industrial city in New England: Queen was especially interested in industrial communities.
Politics. The Glass Village is an attack on McCarthyism; its cultural background is discussed in the article on Charlotte Armstrong. Queen is not afraid to name McCarthyism directly, right in the first chapter. The judge's speech centers on a denunciation of McCarthyism. It also contains a stand in favor of racial equality, also a burning issue of the era.
The Glass Village portrays right-wingers as loving to inflict violence and torture on racial others. Such ideas were directly reflected in the Civil Rights era, with bigots attacking Black protestors. The Glass Village is also eerily prophetic of the George W. Bush era, in which a huge war was waged by right-wingers killing vast numbers of Arabs, all over alleged "weapons of mass destruction" that never existed. The torture scenes in Chapter 2 anticipate the use of torture as government policy by the Bush Administration. Just as the Iraq War was caused by right-wing Bush Administration lies about Arabs, so is the violence and torture in The Glass Village caused by false allegations of guilt about an ethnic "other".
The previous Labe Hemus killing that caused all the trouble, is linked to the villagers' right-wing ideas of "women as property of men". Queen had previously explored the ugly side of this in The Scarlet Letters.
The Glass Village denounces Communism: first in the Judge's speech (end of Chapter 1), then in a talk by Johnny (Chapter 2). It also suggests that the right-wing actions of the villagers are actually similar to the depredations of Communist regimes, such as Mao's China. Similarly, The King Is Dead points out the related behavior of its right-wing billionaire villain, and those of Communist regimes, both of which it condemns (Chapter 9).
The Glass Village refers back to the Salem Witch Trials. It is likely that this was inspired by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which debuted on Broadway in January 1953 - The Glass Village was published in August 1954. The Crucible uses the Salem Witch Trials as a metaphor for an attack on McCarthyism. By the time of the publication of The Glass Village, the televised attacks on McCarthy by Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welch had also taken place, although the book was perhaps written simultaneously with them, or even earlier.
The teenage boys in the town are mainly unpleasant. This portrait perhaps reflects concerns about juvenile delinquency: teenage males in this era were sometimes portrayed as a source of violence, conformity and social decay. Even the most sympathetic, Drakeley Scott, never breaks out of his shell or becomes a genuine good guy. Drakeley says something sympathetic about the presence of religion in the Soviet Union (Chapter 2), and is promptly ridiculed for it by the other boys.
Nurse Detectives. Instead, the crime is solved by his father Inspector Richard Queen, and a new character, nurse Jessie Sherwood. By 1935, long before this novel, nurses who get involved in detective work had a long tradition, especially those of such Had I But Known writers as:
Problems. Inspector Queen's Own Case has problems that make it an unpleasant reading experience, despite some decent-enough mystery plotting. The story is repellent, filled with sick, nightmarish events and suspects. The book cannot be recommended.
Also, the way Inspector Queen starts concealing evidence and lying about events to the police, is wrong-headed. His motive - so that he can solve the case himself as an amateur detective - does not justify such obstruction of justice. This also seems unlike Inspector Queen in other novels, who is always presented as a professional's professional, one whose identity and skill as a homicide cop is deeply engrained in his personality.
All of this is unfortunate, because there is some good writing in Inspector Queen's Own Case. The long opening chapter shows Queen's skill with storytelling, social commentary and setting.
Mystery Plot: The Disappearance. There is a "disappearance of an object" subplot. It involves an extensive search - but it is not presented as a impossible crime. Its solution is fair, but also somewhat simpler than those of EQ's more creative Impossible Disappearances in other stories.
Mystery Plot: Who Done It?. The whodunit main-plot aspects are quite "minimal", with a paucity of suspects. This minimalism is likely a deliberate strategy of Queen's, and is keeping with the minimalist plotting that runs through some of the later novels. However, the killings do not involve poisoning, and the book is fundamentally different from such "minimalist poisoning" works as Calamity Town and The Murderer Is a Fox. Unlike those novels, which seem to have only a single solution that permits no alternatives, the crime in Inspector Queen's Own Case is a murder that could seemingly be committed by anyone on Earth.
SPOILERS. Aspects of the choice of killer, and the detective steps used to reach the truth about whodunit, echo ideas used earlier in Cat of Many Tails.
BIG SPOILERS. Repeated statements of responsibility are made by the killer. These are ignored by the detectives, until the end of the book, when the sleuth finally recognizes their significance. A similar gambit appears in "The Siamese Twin Mystery".
Mystery Plot: The Baby's Origin. The book's third main mystery puzzle, the antecedents of the baby, is fairly clever. SPOILERS. In general terms, they involve ideas used before in Calamity Town: hidden relationships between characters who introduce themselves into the plot as strangers.
Landscape. The opening chapter presents Nair Island, a millionaire's retreat that recalls the setting of The Spanish Cape Mystery in its layout. Such areas embody the Golden Age interest in creative landscapes (and often architecture). However, Nair Island and its geography wind up playing little role in the puzzle plots of the tale. And the Nair Island setting tends to recede to the background in the rest of the book.
The millionaire family has their own gas pump in their yacht basin, for their boat. In The Spanish Cape Mystery, there was instead a gas station for cars, near the entrance to the landscape.
Social Commentary. Inspector Queen's Own Case is less political than some other EQ novels of the early 1950's. But it does keep up the focus on New England and its traditions, found in so many EQ works.
Mrs. Humffrey refers to "people of our class" (Chapter 1). Class consciousness is widely found in Ellery Queen.
An ancestor of the chief suspects the Humffreys came over on the Mayflower, and the couple represent everything about the WASP old money elite. It is a very negative portrayal, This is left-wing social commentary.
One of the Humffreys's ultra-wealthy neighbors is "a powerful United States Senator who had gone into politics from high society to protect the American way of life." This man combines an upper class origin with right-wing politics. Like all the neighbors, this man is seen negatively.
Jews and Race. The treatment of race is one of the most admirable features of Inspector Queen's Own Case.
Inspector Queen is staying with friends, policeman Abe Pearl and his wife Beck. Their names are likely short for Abraham and Rebecca. From their names, these are likely Jews. (Later, in "Mystery at the Library of Congress" (1960; based on a 1944 radio play), we meet Inspector Terence Fineberg, who used to share a beat with Inspector Queen in their early days. Fineberg also is a common Jewish name.)
Ellery (who is talked about but not "on stage") is looking into taking a trip to Israel. Both Ellery and Inspector Queen are seen as pro-Jewish.
By contrast, the upper class Humfrreys and their rich neighbors are interested in "exclusion". Such terms were code-words in the era for discrimination against Jews and other minorities.
Chillingly, when the Humfrreys adopt a baby, they ensure that it is of, in Mr. Humfrrey's words, "of good Anglo-Saxon stock". Their racism extends to little babies.
Servants. The Humffrey estate has many servants, and we duly learn where they are during the time of the crimes. But the servants are largely kept off-stage, talked about rather than seen, and we never really get to know them as people or characters. This has the effect of eliminating them as serious suspects. It cuts down on the number of suspects in the story, aiding the tale's minimalism.
The chauffeur Henry Cullum gets a low-key treatment. He's an older man, and far from the "virile chauffeur with unbridled sexuality" of many mysteries. Please see my discussion of Chauffeurs in Pulp Fiction.
Town. Like The Glass Village, it is set in a small New England town. As in the Wrightsville books, we see some key institutions and businesses of the locale.
Serial Killer. Its depiction of a serial killer at work, and the panic it creates, recalls Cat of Many Tails. But the two stories are very different. Cat of Many Tails is about a deranged killer, whose irrational mind is responsible for an a series of killings based on a maniacal obsession. SPOILERS. By contrast, "Terror Town" ultimately comes up with a completely rational explanation for its events, including the serial nature of the crimes. In this, it seems quite different from most serial killer works before and since.
Similarities to the Animal Stories. The structure of "Terror Town", with seemingly irrational, hard-to-explain events finally given logical explanation at the end, recalls the basic paradigm of "The Seven Black Cats" (1934) and "The Two-Headed Dog" (1934), which also focus on explaining similarly absurd and meaningless happenings.
The solution in "Terror Town" is thus less a matter of deduction from evidence at a crime scene, but rather involves coming up with a new idea that can explain the overall structure and pattern of the crimes.
Other similarities:
A Clue. The way a seasonal change of landscape reveals a buried clue recalls an incident in "The Robber of Wrightsville" (1953).
Incomplete Solution. The solution to the mystery in "Terror Town" is unusual, in that it leaves a major part of the crimes unsolved. This is atypical of EQ's work, and of mystery fiction in general.
Leaving minor details unsolved at the end, is common in mysteries. The detective will intone at the finale "We will never know John Smith's motive for the crimes. Hate? Jealousy? Greed?" Or "We will never know where John Smith got the poison. It could be from any of a dozen sources." But what is left unanswered in "Terror Town" is far bigger and more major.
"Terror Town" makes good storytelling out of this. The unanswered question has a beautiful symmetry. It also has a tragic quality.
The authors' desire to leave part of the mystery unsolved, might be one reason why this case is NOT a tale with sleuth Ellery Queen. Ellery the detective is usually all-powerful at elucidating mysteries. He would have come up with a way to solve this part of the mystery too.
TV Version. I thought the TV adaptation "Terror at Northfield" (1963) on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was terrible. The storytelling was stilted and laborious.
However, a recent re-reading makes clear that the book is a rich source of Queen ideas and plotting. It develops mystery themes in Queen's previous tales in new and interesting directions.
The Subplot. The subplot echoes earlier ideas in The Tragedy of X, Drury Lane's Last Case, The American Gun Mystery, The Siamese Twin Mystery, "The Teakwood Case", "The Seven Black Cats", "The Two-Headed Dog", "The Mad Tea-Party". It is one of the most fully developed treatments of this theme in Queen, with many different plot ideas and situations spun off it. It also extends these into the realm of the impossible crime, including Queen's specialty of the Impossible Disappearance.
Main Mystery Plot. The main plot echoes "The Mad Tea-Party", with a series of mysterious presents in an isolated house party in a country home. The whole idea of "series" that need to be interpreted also invokes such later Queen novels as Ten Days' Wonder, Cat of Many Tails, and Double, Double. However, the solution, while formally ingenious, is less meaningful than the solutions of those novels, which deal with more resonant and significant material. This makes the book seem more abstract, more purely formal, than these earlier works.
However, the solution also has its own interest. The series approach is merged with others here. The cards and doodles, while not Dying Messages, also require interpretation by the detective in a way that formally resembles the Dying Message kind of mystery story. The doodles are the sort of non-verbal message running through many of Queen's works, such as The Tragedy of X and The Scarlet Letters.
And at the end there are three clues to their creator, embedded in the cards and doodles. These are aspects of the text, that reflect the peculiar, individual background of their creator. Finding such clues is a mystery tradition, which I've dubbed "Textual Analysis". Please see my list of Textual Analysis in mysteries. EQ's "Money Talks" has some simple "Textual Analysis".
EQ Subjects. There are other echoes in the novel of Queen traditions:
Historical Fiction. The Finishing Stroke is one of EQ's few attempts to write historical fiction, along with the brief opening flashback to 1940 Paris in Ten Days' Wonder, and investigations into characters' past, such as the long section in The King Is Dead.
Most of the book takes place in 1929. It is a detective novel in the Golden Age style, and EQ has set it in the era of Golden Age fiction, the 1920's. This gambit was unique and original when EQ published the book, but since has become widely imitated, with contemporary authors frequently setting their Golden Age pastiches in the 1920's.
EQ's method of evoking history is mainly to make a rich survey of the arts, letters and politics of 1929, all of which are mentioned and discussed throughout the novel. Since EQ books in general are full of historical cultural background on their events, the feel of the book is actually not that different from Queen's contemporary works. A story like "The Dauphin's Doll", for example, while set in the present, opens with a historical account of dolls and dollmaking.
Links to "Money Talks". The Finishing Stroke has links to the little (and not very good) story "Money Talks". Both have:
Please keep reading the next section, which deals with Classical Music in The Finishing Stroke.
There are classical musicians in in EQ:
Manfred B. Lee, the writing half of Ellery Queen, played the violin, and worked in a band in his early days.
Please see my personal picks: Links to over 500 Classical Music works, on video.
The Death of Don Juan. The mystery plot of the novella "The Death of Don Juan" (1962) shows sound detection. It is made up of two mystery components. SPOILERS.:
"The Death of Don Juan" brings us to Wrightsville again. At long last, Modernism comes to Wrightsville, with a Little Theater performing Ionesco. The newspaper editorial also suggests contemporary social problems are invading the city. Despite this, this is one of the most optimistic Wrightsville stories.
The deserted mansion where the couple hides, recalls the shut-up house in The Murderer Is a Fox.
The young hero is a chemical engineer, who starts a chemistry factory. This is in the central Wrightsville business tradition of manufacturing.
The 1950 map of Wrightsville shows J.C. Pettigrew's real estate office on the other side of Lower Main Street from the Bijou Theater. This is consistent with Calamity Town.. "The Death of Don Juan" has the unnamed chairman of the Wrightsville Realty Board with an office across the street from the Bijou on Lower Main. Are these facts connected? Is the chairman J.C. Pettigrew? Or does the chairman work in what used to be Pettigrew's office?
In real life Christopher Morley ran a theater where old-time melodramas were spoofed. EQ refers to this in The Finishing Stroke (Chapter 14). The obnoxious stage star is doing something similar in "The Death of Don Juan". A difference: in Morley's theater, everyone was involved in the spoof; in "The Death of Don Juan", only the rotten stage star is ridiculing the play.
E = Murder. "E = Murder" (1960) is a brief but rich tale.
"E = Murder" anticipates the 1960's zeitgeist, in being a spy story. Espionage makes a good setting for Ellery Queen. The tale has a full-fledged mystery plot, in addition to its spy background.
Also positive: the way the government research background sets the tale near Washington, D.C.. It's good to see EQ exploring new territory.
The setting, Bethesda University, was a fictitious place in 1960. But according to the Wikipedia, a real-life Bethesda University was founded years later in 1978 - likely just a coincidence.
"Mystery at the Library of Congress" (1960; based on a 1944 radio play) is also a spy tale of sorts, going after an international smuggling ring. It is set directly in Washington, D.C.. Perhaps EQ briefly thought in 1960 of a new career for Ellery as a counterintelligence expert.
SPOILERS. The culprit in "E = Murder" is a variant on men in similar roles in earlier EQ works.
The Wrightsville Heirs. "The Wrightsville Heirs" (1956) is a medium-length short story.
"The Wrightsville Heirs" has a single clue. This clue indicates a "hidden criminal scheme". This scheme in turns shows who did the crime: only one person had the opportunity to commit the scheme. All of this is sound, and would be impressive in a lesser writer. But it is not at EQ's best level.
The detective reasoning has little to do with the actual murder, or other attacks. It instead focuses on the "hidden criminal scheme".
Aside from this mystery puzzle, the tale is derivative:
The contrast between the three heirs and hard-working Amy Upham, is an example of the class conflict often found in Ellery Queen.
Diamonds in Paradise. "Diamonds in Paradise" (1954) has a decent mystery plot, that combines a "dying message" and a "concealed object" mystery. However, these are embedded in a story that's just so-so.
The Case Against Carroll. "The Case Against Carroll" (1958) is a novella.
"The Case Against Carroll" is not so much a detective story, as an anti-detective-story. It's a tale that dismantles the conventional machinery and approach of the standard detective tale. I don't like this anti-detective approach. And this makes "The Case Against Carroll" one of my least favorite EQ tales.
SPOILERS. "The Case Against Carroll" shares ideas with "The Ides of Michael Magoon" (1947), another EQ tale I don't like. Both:
THE END? It's now standard for commentators to suggest that The Finishing Stroke (1958) was originally planned as the final EQ book. If so, where does this leave "The Case Against Carroll"? A chronology:
Of course, it is possible that "The Case Against Carroll" was written first, but had its publication delayed.
All of these authors' stories, and many others, owe their existence to Dannay and his EQMM. It played a major role in American culture.
The Sound of Detection: Ellery Queen's Adventures in Radio (2002), by Nevins and Martin Grams, Jr., is a detailed history of the Ellery Queen radio program, with a complete listing of all the shows. It also contains biographical information on the Queen cousins. Nevins' introduction to The Best of Ellery Queen (1985), edited by Nevins and Martin H. Greenberg, contains much useful biographical information.
Francis M. Nevins' book Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection (2013) sums up his ideas and research on Ellery Queen.
All of the dates for EQ works in this article are taken directly from the above scholarly writings by Nevins and his colleagues, something I wish to acknowledge with gratitude.
Group tributes. The second half of The Tragedy of Errors (1999) contains reminiscences of the Queen cousins by people who knew them, along with highly informed overviews of their work. This book is available from its publisher, Crippen & Landru.
During each month of 2005, the Centenary of the birth of Ellery Queen in 1905, EQMM ran articles on the Queen cousins, and different aspects of their work. These are valuable, both critically and biographically.
A Silver Anniversary Tribute to Ellery Queen from Authors, Critics, Editors and Famous Fans (1954) was a booklet published to celebrate the 25th anniversary of EQ's first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). One hopes that it can be reprinted, along with the recent EQMM articles, in a way that would make it currently available to all. It contains praise of EQ from virtually everyone in the mystery community, in a series of brief quotations. The booklet reveals the central importance EQ had in mystery writing and editing. The contributions are surprisingly substantial, if brief, and offer much food for thought about mystery fiction, its significance, and its historical state and status in 1954. Hugh Pentecost wrote in part: "The mystery writer in our generation has had a hard struggle to keep dignity and quality alive in a mass production period. If there is one personality in the field who has done more than any other to maintain these qualities for all of us it is Ellery Queen."