three more Ellery Queen TV episodes

Over on my Cult TV Lounge blog I’ve posted some remarks on a further three episodes of the truly excellent 1975-76 Ellery Queen television series.

The episodes in question are The Adventure of the Blunt Instrument, The Adventure of the Lover's Leap and The Adventure of Veronica's Veils.

Here’s the link to the post.

three television Ellery Queens

The 1975-76 Ellery Queen series, which starred Jim Hutton as Ellery and David Wayne as his father Inspector Richard Queen, was for my money one of the best ever television series based on the works of the masters of the golden age of detective fiction.

I’ve recently rewatched a few episodes and my thoughts on these can be found on my Cult TV Lounge blog. Here’s the link to my reviews of three classic episodes.

Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery

The American Gun Mystery appeared in 1933 and was the sixth of the Ellery Queen mysteries. And it’s a rather controversial one among fans of golden age detective fiction.

This is a story about cowboys and cowgirls and six-shooters and horses and roping steers and all that sort of stuff, but it’s set in New York City. Wild Bill Grant’s rodeo and wild west show has come to town. The venue is the Colosseum, a gigantic sports arena operated by promotor Tony Mars. As a special extra added attraction the show will feature former cowboy movie star Buck Horne doing an exhibition of trick riding and sharpshooting.

On the opening night Inspector Richard Queen of the NYPD and his son Ellery just happen to be in the audience. The show takes an unexpected turn. Murder was not part of the program but murder does take place, in full view of 20,000 witnesses. And in spite of all those witnesses, and in spite of Inspector Queen’s decision to seal off the Colosseum so that not a single soul is able to leave until the mystery is cleared up, the mystery is not cleared up. The identity of the killer remains unknown, the details of the murder remain obscure and most exasperatingly the murder weapon cannot be found.

The victim was shot. Lots and lots of guns are found. But not one of these guns is the murder weapon. The various participants in the show were all carrying guns and during the course of the show they all fired their guns but since this is a Wild West Show their guns are all large-calibre revolvers. The fatal shot came from a .25 automatic.

This is not quite an impossible crime story but it does have tendencies in that direction.

The controversial element I alluded to earlier is the puzzle of the missing gun. When Ellery finally reveals the solution to that part of the puzzle many readers find themselves disappointed or even enraged. The objections to the solution are that it’s silly, it’s implausible or that it’s a cheat. It is certainly silly. It does stretch plausibility to the limit. As to its being a cheat, that’s a matter of opinion. There is a very definite clue that points to the solution but the solution itself is so outrageous that very few readers are going to grasp the significance of the clue. I’m personally inclined to feel that the solution to the missing gun puzzle is not very satisfying and is even just a tad irritating.

It must however be pointed out that the missing gun puzzle is only one minor part of the story. In fact it’s not important at all as far as the solution of the murder mystery is concerned. The finding of the gun only matters insofar as it will be difficult to get a conviction in a murder case without a murder weapon.

Another possible weakness is the motive which is not revealed until the final page, although admittedly there are clues that make the motive (mostly) plausible.

Then there’s Ellery himself. Many readers seem to dislike him intensely. He does have certain affectations, he does love showing off his erudition, he can be high-handed and he does have the habit of not letting people know how much of the puzzle he has already figured out. He’s like a younger and more callow version of Philo Vance. On the other hand he is a young man and it’s hard to dislike a young man for having the faults of youth. I like him but your mileage may vary.

So this book does have its flaws. It also has considerable strengths. Circuses and theatres provide wonderful settings for murder mysteries and a Wild West show works every bit as well. These are strange self-contained worlds filled with colourful eccentrics who have their own distinctive codes of behaviour and even honour. In this case the authors have enormous fun with the whole Wild West thing and they throw in elements of other equally bizarre sub-cultures. Among the assorted possible suspects are gambling joint owner Julian Hunter, prize-fighter Tommy Black and movie star Mara Gay while both Buck Horne and his daughter Kit are or were stars of Hollywood cowboy movies. There’s also a glimpse into the fascinating world of newsreels (which provides a valuable clue). And the fact that the Wild West world has been transported to the middle of New York City adds to the fun.

The plotting is typical early Queen, extremely complex but with plentiful clues and apart from the disappearing gun it holds together well enough. This is a flawed Ellery Queen but while the flaws in The Spanish Cape Mystery proved fatal The American Gun Mystery is mostly successful if you overlook that pesky and annoying little .25 automatic. Generally enjoyable, although not as good as The French Powder Mystery, The Siamese Twin Mystery or The Greek Coffin Mystery. Recommended.

Ellery Queen's The Chinese Orange Mystery

The Chinese Orange Mystery appeared in 1934. It was the eighth of the Ellery Queen mysteries written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee (not counting the Drury Lane books published under the Barnaby Ross pseudonym). And it has a wonderful setup.

A fat little man is murdered on the twenty-second floor of the Hotel Chancellor in New York. Everything about the murder is backwards. The victim’s clothes are on back-to-front. Every item in the room has been turned back-to-front as well. As the case progresses more backwards items emerge. Even Ellery Queen has to confess to being puzzled.

The twenty-second floor is occupied by the wealthy Kirk family - the elderly curmudgeonly scholar Dr Kirk, his son Donald and daughter Marcella. The body was found in Donald Kirk’s office. In partnership with the rather snobbish Felix Berne Donald runs an up-market arty publishing business known as the Mandarin Press (one of the many links to China in this story).

Also present at the time of the murder were Donald’s friend Glenn MacGowan (engaged to Marcella), a young would-be writer named Jo Temple who was brought up in China, the glamorous and slightly mysterious beauty Irene Llewes, Dr Kirk’s nurse Miss Diversey and Donald Kirk’s private secretary Jimmy Osborne.

As well as everything about the murder being backwards there are also various connections to both China and stamp collecting. One particular stamp plays a vital role in the story and that stamp happens to be a great rarity - because it was printed backwards!

There’s another puzzle that has to be unravelled - the identity of the murder victim.

The setup is so clever and the idea of the backwards crime is so original that you can’t help worrying that the solution, when it’s finally revealed, will be a letdown. Fortunately though it doesn’t disappoint. It’s far-fetched certainly but it’s conceived with such skill that we have to admit that it really is plausible. The motive and identity aspects are also tied in with the murder method in an intricate and entirely satisfying way. There’s also some fine misdirection. I have to confess that I didn’t have the remotest idea of the identity of the murderer until Ellery revealed it. As a pure puzzle plot this is one of the very best of the Queens.

There’s also some fun stuff about stamp collecting, such as the fact that some collectors specialise entirely in “locals” - semi-official stamps issued before proper government-controlled postal systems were established. The rather curious obsession that stamp collectors have for flawed or misprinted stamps adds an amusing touch and becomes a plot point as well.

This is also very much a New York novel. By the mid-30s Dannay and Lee were starting to send Ellery off into the countryside but personally I think he’s most at home in New York.

The S.S. Van Dine influence is still evident in this tale and Ellery has his Philo Vance-ish moments. Personally that doesn’t bother me. I like Philo Vance, and I like the early incarnation of Ellery Queen. The affectionate antagonism between Ellery and his father, Inspector Richard Queen, adds more fun.

The Chinese Orange Mystery is for my money one of the most completely successful of the early Ellery Queen mysteries. Very highly recommended.

The book was filmed in 1936 as The Mandarin Mystery.

Ellery Queen's Calamity Town

Calamity Town marked a major change in direction for the Ellery Queen mysteries. Published in 1942 this was the first of the so-called Wrightsville mysteries which saw the authors (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee) moving away from the puzzle-plot mysteries that had brought them so much success and towards a more character-driven and self-consciously realist style. Unfortunately the result is a book that fails on every level.

New York detective story writer Ellery Queen decides to move to a small town in New England. Presumably he is looking for inspiration for his next novel. He rents a house that has such a bad reputation that it has become known as Calamity House. The house had been built by the town’s most prominent citizen, John F. Wright, for his daughter and her new husband to live in. Just before the wedding the prospective bridegroom disappears. The house is left empty - the one person who rents it dies mysteriously as soon as he moves in.

Calamity House happens to be the only house in the town available for rent and Ellery is happy to sign a six-month lease. 

John F. Wright runs the local bank and the Wright family more or less runs the town. Ellery is drawn into the family’s dramas when he takes a shine to Wright’s daughter Pat. Pat has two sisters. Nora, the one whose intended husband Jim ran out on her, has clearly had some kind of breakdown and rarely leaves her room. No-one wants to talk about the third sister, Lola. She is not Respectable.

Three years after running out on her Jim returns and now the wedding between Nola and Jim can finally take place.

Everything now seems to be hunky dory, until Pat and Ellery make a discovery that suggests that murder may be afoot. Ellery, rather recklessly, adopts a wait-and-see approach confident that he can prevent any such crime from being committed. This turns out to be the first of his many mistakes in this case.

When the murder does take place it appears to be an open-and-shut case but Ellery has his doubts. What follows is a long drawn-out saga to establish the truth and it has to be said that Ellery does not distinguish himself, missing painfully obvious clues.

It’s quite common for writers of detective fiction (and genre fiction in general) to decide quite suddenly that they really don’t want to be mere writers of detective fiction. They want to be Serious Writers. This almost invariably turns out to be an error of judgment. Such is the case with the Ellery Queen authors. Wanting to write more character-driven books is all well and good but they don’t display much flair for it. The characterisation is not very convincing. 

They also decided they wanted to add some social commentary (almost always a bad idea) and the results are heavy-handed in the extreme. The idea seems to have been to make the town itself a character in its own right. This is Calamity Town and it’s the real villain.  Dannay and Lee were New Yorkers and like so may urban intellectuals they clearly did not like or approve of small town America. Their hostility is unfortunately all too obvious. The people of Wrightsville are portrayed as narrow-minded gossip-ridden hypocritical bigots. In fact it’s the authors who come across as the real bigots. Their snarkiness is rather off-putting.

Then there’s the plot. A child of five could have solved this one but unfortunately Ellery can’t find a child of five to help him out so he spends months(!) bumbling about missing every vital clue. Being charitable I assume the idea was to make Ellery more human by making him fallible. That’s fair enough but sadly he comes across as a complete buffoon.

And then there’s the courtroom scenes. If your name isn’t Erle Stanley Gardner you’re well advised to avoid lengthy courtroom scenes. They can be dull, and in this case they are. The two Surprise Moves in the legal case are illogical, silly, gimmicky, pointless and embarrassing. 

The plot limps along until finally Ellery sees the light, and then for no logical reason decides not to reveal the truth until even more months have passed, thus adding more unnecessary padding to a book that already has major pacing problems.

I love the very early Ellery Queens (I love them very much indeed) but to be honest even as early as The Spanish Cape Mystery in 1935 there were signs that the authors’ powers of invention were flagging in regard to plotting. That book has a serious structural flaw that makes the identity of the killer just a little too obvious. 

Calamity Town should have been called Calamity Novel because that’s what it is - a misguided poorly conceived disaster. Very very disappointing.

If you’ve never read Ellery Queen then seek out their novels from the early 1930s. Books like The Greek Coffin Mystery and The French Powder Mystery are among the finest of all golden age mysteries. But give Calamity Town a miss.

Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery

The Spanish Cape Mystery, which was published in 1935,  was the ninth and last of the Ellery Queen “nationality” mysteries. It was also the last to feature the famous Challenge to the Reader. After this the two cousins (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee ) who comprised the Ellery Queen writing team would begin to change the style of the novels.

Like the other “nationality” mysteries The Spanish Cape Mystery can be considered to be a fairly pure example of the puzzle-plot murder mystery. 

The setting of the story is Spanish Cape, a rocky peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. It is connected to the mainland by a narrow neck of land. Since the whole of Spanish Cape is private property, belonging to millionaire Walter Godfrey, the setting has the effect of confining the possible suspects to the Godfrey family and their motley collection of house guests.

The story opens with a bungled kidnapping (by a giant one-eyed hoodlum known as Captain Kidd!) and soon thereafter the body of John Marco is found.

Ellery Queen and his old friend Judge Macklin have taken a cottage for the summer. The cottage just happens to be right next door to the Godfrey estate. When they discover one of the kidnap victims in their cottage it’s inevitable that Ellery and the judge will become intimately involved in the case. In fact they are soon invited to take up residence in the Godfrey mansion on Spanish Cape.

There is one curious thing about the corpse. It is stark naked. There is no possible reason why John Marco would have been sitting on the terrace overlooking the small beach at the far end of the cape stark naked. Therefore the killer must have removed his clothes. But why would a murderer waste time doing something so eccentric. Inspector Moley of the local police insists it’s just a smokescreen but Ellery is convinced that the corpse’s nakedness is the key to the mystery.

John Marco was a man of very evil reputation. When Walter Godfrey opines that his murderer has done the world a great service no-one is inclined to disagree. Murder however is still murder and Ellery is determined to solve the mystery.

The identity of the killer is in fact fairly obvious. Unravelling the means by which the murder was accomplished is the real challenge. It’s not exactly an impossible crime but there are some very strange circumstances which are likely to baffle even the most astute reader. Ellery himself is baffled and remains so until almost the end of the book.

Ellery likes to think of himself as as detective who regards crime-solving as a fascinating intellectual exercise into which human feelings do not enter but in this case he finds it increasingly difficult to ignore the human dimension.

The novel takes its title from the setting but there is also another cape, a rather theatrical item of clothing belonging to John Marco, which plays a crucial role in the story.

This is almost a maritime mystery - the sea and the peculiar local tides will play important parts in the solving of the mystery.

The early Ellery Queen mysteries are usually regarded as being somewhat in the S.S. Van Dine style so it’s amusing to find Ellery making reference to Philo Vance at one point. There are those who find the Ellery Queen of these early books to be a slightly irritating character. I’m a bit mystified by his. I find him to be quite likeable. But then I find Philo Vance to be likeable as well, so what do I know? In this book Ellery does reveal a more compassionate side to his nature and admits that he is even tempted to let the murderer go free.

The Spanish Cape Mystery has an amazingly complex plot but it is resolved in an eminently satisfactory fashion. The process by which Ellery eliminates all possible suspects except the actual murderer, and eliminates all possible explanations for the murder method except the correct one, provide exactly the kind of enjoyment that fans of golden age detective fiction crave. 

Highly recommended.

Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery

The Siamese Twin Mystery was the seventh of the Ellery Queen novels and was published in 1933. Like The Egyptian Cross Mystery (the fifth in the series) a year earlier it shows signs of moving not only into more fantastic territory but even into the realms of the grotesque.

It certainly features one of the most extreme examples of the popular mystery novel mechanism of having a group of suspects isolated geographically and cut off from contact with the outside world. In this case the suspects, along with Ellery Queen and his father Inspector Richard Queen, are trapped in a mountain-top house by a raging forest fire. Needless to say the fire cuts the telephone lines. The fire not only isolates this small group of people, it threatens to annihilate them! There are occasions when a fictional detective finds himself in a race against time, with some disastrous consequence likely to follow if he does not solve the mystery within a specified time frame. This novel takes that a step further - Ellery has to solve the mystery before he and everybody else in the house become nothing but charred cinders! 

Of course we don’t really expect this fate to eventuate (given that we know that Ellery went on to be the hero of several dozen further novels) but Ellery certainly believes that death is imminent. Dr Johnson once remarked, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” In this instance knowing he is likely to be burnt to a crisp in the next day or so doesn’t initially seem to have had the desired effect on Ellery’s mind. He makes several serious errors during the course of his investigation. On the other hand as death seems to be becoming more and more imminent  he does seem to be finally inspired to find the correct solution.

Ellery’s mistakes may indicate that the authors were becoming bored with the notion of infallible amateur detectives, although Inspector Queen makes some even more serious errors (one of them very unfortunate indeed).

The murder victim in The Siamese Twin Mystery is brilliant surgeon Dr John Xavier who is engaged in some medical research of a rather grotesque nature. In fact from the moment that he and his father are forced to take shelter from the fire in Dr Xavier’s house Ellery has an uneasy feeling about the strange household dwelling on the mountain-top.

You may be wondering if the title is to be taken literally. This story does in fact involve actual siamese twins. While siamese twins have featured as characters in various horror stories this is to my knowledge the only occasion on which they feature in a detective story. 

The Siamese Twin Mystery is plotted with the skill one expects from the authors and it includes one particularly clever twist that serves to lead us astray, as it leads Ellery astray. It also features a very elaborate variation on the theme of dying messages left by murder victims. 

Oddly enough this novel apparently originally included the famous Challenge to the Reader that was such a feature of the early Ellery Queen mysteries but for some reason it appears that it was deleted from most of the paperback editions.

The Siamese Twin Mystery has everything that a fan of the golden age puzzle-plot detective story could possibly ask for. Highly recommended.

The Egyptian Cross Mystery

Ellery Queen’s 1932 novel The Egyptian Cross Mystery is something of an oddity as far as golden age detective stories go, by virtue of its sheer gruesomeness if nothing else. Both the gore and the plot make it in some ways an early predecessor of the awful serial killer novels that have been infesting the shelves of bookstores for the past few decades.

To me it doesn’t quite feel like an Ellery Queen novel. It’s almost as if the authors were experimenting with a change of style. It also has a lot of the elements one normally associates with the thrillers of its era. The story culminates in an extended cross-country chase by both car and aircraft!

The novel opens with a grisly murder in West Virginia. A local schoolteacher has been beheaded and crucified. The whole crime scene seems to indicate some kind of obsession with the letter T, or more likely with T as a symbol of a cross of some kind. Perhaps an Egyptian cross of some variety?

This bizarre crime remains unsolved for many months and Ellery has almost forgotten it when another equally gory murder is committed. The method seems to indicate plainly enough that the two murders are connected but there seems no possible connection between the two victims.

As if all this isn’t strange enough, a nudist colony also plays a key role in the plot. Not just nudists, but Egyptian god-worshipping nudists. And the Egyptian god they worship is right among them, in the flesh so to speak.

Ellery’s father Inspector Richard Queen plays a very minor role in this story, and the hunt for the murderer takes Ellery a long way from his more familiar New York haunts.

Despite the thriller elements there’s a puzzle here as well, of course. Personally I don’t think it’s one of the better Ellery Queen puzzles. When I can guess the identity of the murderer something has gone very wrong somewhere, because I’m generally hopeless at that sort of thing.

I’ve been reading the early Ellery Queens in sequence, and enjoying them very much, but this is the first one that has disappointed me just a little. I’m hoping that this book was just an aberration and that the next one will return to the much more successful formula of the earlier books.

The French Powder Mystery

The French Powder Mystery was the second of the Ellery Queen mysteries by Manfred Bennington Lee (Manford Lepofsky) and Frederic Dannay (Daniel Nathan). It appeared in 1930.

The book certainly gets off to a stylish start. French’s Department Store in New York has a window exhibition of modernist furniture. Every day at the same time an employee of the store stages a demonstration of the features of this furniture, including in this case a foldaway bed. On this particular day when the employee presses the button to unfold the bed a corpse is revealed. It belongs to the wife of the owner of the store.

As you expect in an Ellery Queen novel there are plenty of suspects and plenty of clues. But which clues are the ones that matter? The murder could have been committed by almost any member of the French household as Mr French has private apartments on the top floor. There are seven keys to this private apartment, and those keys will assume considerable importance. The murder could also have been committed by any one of several employees of the store, including all the members of the board of directors (a meeting of the board took place in Mr French’s private rooms on the morning of the murder).

The murder might also be linked to a drug ring - the murdered woman’s daughter is a drug addict.

Inspector Richard Queen is frankly baffled, but his son Ellery (an enthusiastic amateur sleuth) is not dismayed by this puzzling case.

As with most of the early Ellery Queens this book contains their famous challenge to the reader - towards the end of the book the reader is informed that he now has possession of all the facts necessary to solve the case for himself, and (as was usual in the Ellery Queen mysteries) the plot is so ingenious that the murderer turns out to be the only person who could possibly have committed the crime.

There’s certainly no disputing the authors’ ability to construct a plot that is like a piece of precision machinery, with each part fitting together so as to produce one and only one solution.

Ellery Queen himself is not the most colourful of fictional detectives but he’s likeable enough. The father-and-son crime-solving team, with the father a professional detective who employs all the conventional methods of a good police officer while the son is a gifted amateur who relies more on pure reasoning, is an effective combination.

The French Powder Mystery is unlikely to disappoint fans of the golden age detective story.

Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery

The Greek Coffin Mystery marks my long overdue introduction to Ellery Queen. Published in 1932, this really is the apotheosis of the golden age detective story. The starting point for the story is the death of a New York art dealer of Greek ancestry. After the funeral it is discovered that his will has disappeared. This sets off a chain of events involving murder and art, a chain of events that almost manages to baffle the great detective himself.

Ingenious is an inadequate word to describe the immense complexity of the plot. And it has to be admitted that when the author issues his “Challenge to the Reader” (which was apparently a feature of all the early Ellery Queen novels) claiming that the reader now possesses all the clues needed to solve the mystery, and that there is only one possible solution that fits exactly, he really isn’t kidding. All the clues really are there, and it really is impossible for anyone else to have committed the crime. The skill with which the trail of clues is laid is breath-taking.

It’s not just the twists and turns of the plot that makes this such a marvellously pure embodiment of golden age crime fiction. It takes the lack of interest in psychology and characterisation that distinguishes this form to an extreme that I don’t think has ever been surpassed. The characters exist, and act, solely to serve the demands of the plot. This can be seen as a flaw, but in reality it’s part of the charm of this type of detective tale. It takes the reader into a world governed entirely by the rule of reason, a world in which any puzzle can be solved by the exercise of logic and the rules of deduction.

If you accept it on its own terms it works brilliantly. And it’s great fun

The Dutch Shoe Mystery, by Ellery Queen

The Dutch Shoe Mystery is one of the very early Ellery Queen mysteries, dating from 1931.

Ellery Queen has gone to the Dutch Memorial Hospital in New York to consult the medical director, an old pal of his, about a murder investigation he’s working on and he soon find himself slap bang in the middle of one of the biggest cases of his career. The founder and patron of the hospital, Abigail Doorn, is wheeled into the operating theatre for urgent surgery and is discovered to be dead. But not of natural causes. She has been strangled.

She is one of America’s wealthiest and most powerful women and her murder sends shock waves through the financial markets as well as the highest strata of society. There are quite a few potential suspects but the only worthwhile clue is a pair of white oxford shoes. Elleey and his father, Inspector Richard Queen, confess themselves to be completely baffled unto, a second murder unexpectedly presents the key to solving the puzzle.

The plot has all the intricacies you expect in a golden age detective tale, and then some. These early books included the famous “challenge to the reader” towards the end, where the reader is informed that all the clues necessary to the solving of the case have now been presented, and there is only one possible solution. It has to be admitted that (once the murderer is revealed) there really could only be one possible culprit. In fact the solution turns out to be annoyingly simple but it’s a measure of the skill of the two authors (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee co-authored the books) that they are able to keep us guessing.

A highly enjoyable read for those who like the elaborate puzzle variety of mystery novel.