Ellery Queen

a ReDiscovery website

The Tragedy of X

1932
Let the Unknown = X!! A crowded street car! A man is murdered! Everyone saw him die, but no one saw the killer! Many people (even his own partner) had good reason to hate Longstreet. Inspector Thumm's few clues all led up a blind alley. He finally sought the aid of Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor, who made a hobby of solving crimes. Seated amid the splendor of the vast medieval halls of his castle on the Hudson, Drury Lane hears the story from the Inspector. He knows who the murderer is, but refuses to reveal his identity until he has sufficient evidence for the police to arrest him. This story is crammed full of chilling thrills! Why was the streetcar conductor murdered? Why won't Longstreet's partner talk? The answers to these questions and others all lead to the solution of this puzzling mystery. Here is a mystery you MAY be able to solve! If Drury Lane knows the answer just from hearing the facts...well read it and see how clever YOU can be in solving this ‘who dunnit’.

The first of a short series revolving around the stone-deaf Drury Lane, retired stage actor and amateur sleuth. Like the contemporaneous EQ stories it is heavily devoted to logic, deduction, and fairly worked-out puzzles. It is rather easier going for the reader than the early EQ tales—extremely well-written, with dialogue that flows naturally, and indelible scene-painting. Its flaw is not in the logic, but in the surrealistically far-fetched resolution. Includes the first-ever EQ 'dying clue'. Like the succeeding three books in the series, originally published under the pseudonym 'Barnaby Ross'.

The Tragedy of Y

1932
The Mad Hatters of Washington Square were not only mad but vicious—'nasty people' as their neighbors were prone to whisper. So when the worst of the lot, old Emily Hatter, is found murdered, no one was particularly upset, except possibly Louisa Campion, her deaf, dumb, and blind daughter by a former marriage. In this tangled web, not one of the family was above suspicion. There were Barbara, the Delphic oracle of New York's intelligentsia, whose abnormality bordered on genius; Conrad, who loved liquor but couldn't hold it; Jackie, his son, with a wily brain and an inspired gift for inventing cruelties; and Jill, the eternal debutante, who experimented with life with a capital L. But when the clues began to point to Emily's husband, York, proved dead beyond a reason of a doubt, Inspector Thumm turned in desperation to his old friend Drury Lane, the famous actor, whose brilliant analysis and solution of the case proved the Tragedy of Y a tragedy indeed.

This is even better than X is most respects. Several EQ themes are introduced that play major roles in his later works, and the portrait of the 'mad' Hatters is vivid and more than a little creepy. Drury takes a couple of logical leaps in coming to his solution, but there is nothing as credulity-stretching as in X. But it too has a disappointing flaw: the identity of the killer, so well disguised through much of the story, is really let out of the bag too soon by an overly obvious clue, leaving the final chapters a bit of an anti-climax.

The Tragedy of Z

1933
Detection by rule of Thumm. Brooding over the quiet countryside of Tilden County in upstate New York stand the grim walls of Algonquin Prison. And on the very day that Senator Fawcett, a man with many enemies, is found stabbed to death in his study, a little man is released from that prison. Inspector Thumm and his daughter Patience, who have accepted a commission from Elihu Clay to look into the affairs of his 'silent partner', try to unravel the web of circumstantial evidence that has enmeshed an innocent man. But time grows short, and John Hume, the District Attorney and the Senator's political opponent, finds a quick conviction expedient. Patience refuses to be beaten by lack of evidence, and with the help of her father's old friend, Drury Lane, finally stops an execution and brings the true criminal to justice.

The series continues to improve and in just the third installment takes a daring new turn. The Inspector is off the force, working as a P.I., and his heretofore unmentioned daughter shows up to solve crimes with him—what's more, she is the narrator of the story. Say what you will, this change of personalities and perspectives brings a freshness to the proceedings; it doesn't hurt that Patience Thumm as written is a thoroughly delightful and attractive heroine. Here the plot doesn't have the complexity or staggering twists of the predecessors, but then again it is not as implausible or far-fetched. And, minus a small logical lapse here and there, it comes to a magnificent conclusion in one of the finest 'unmasking of the killer' soliloquies ever.

Drury Lane's Last Case

1933
Ellery Queen challenges you to solve these clues to death. A thin envelope—worth a man's life. A shattered display case—whose stolen contents a thief replaced with a strange manuscript. The murder symbol: 3HS wM-...the queer cipher found to be an old mark of death. These are but a few of the baffling signs Drury Lane follows down a path of deception and murder to one of the most startling climaxes in mystery fiction!

Startling it must have been! Reverting now to a third-person narrative, this has possibly the most intriguing and gripping plotline of the series, full of surprise twists, reverses, and inexplicable events. Structurally it is not all that sound—a key clue is dropped rather unsubtly but nobody in the story picks up on it until long after the reader catches on. There are loose ends and unexplained developments here and there that never do get dealt with. And the 'startling' identity of the murderer, in the back of the alert reader's mind from the first chapter, becomes less and less startling as the story proceeds, mainly for one reason that to delineate here would spoil the fun for the uninitiated. But hang it all, it's still our favorite of the series. Even if you think you know whodunnit, it's a tricky matter to come to it logically rather than through mere guesswork, and the clues are all there to be read. EQ's writing is here at a peak—the notion that characterization and emotion in his early work were shortchanged is neatly demolished by this tome.

The Glass Village

1955
Lynch him! The frail body of Fanny Adams was barely cold when the cry for blood raced through the town as a plague. Shinn Corners' sole celebrity had been slain, her skull split open by a poker, and now the good townspeople were thirsty for vengeance. So what if there were no fingerprints, no bloodstains, no witnesses to the crime! At least there was a suspect... an outsider with the strange name of Kowalczky... and for the hate-crazed mob that was all the proof anyone needed. Only two men didn't think so. Judge Lewis Shinn and his nephew Johnny smelled a colossal frame-up. To prove it, though, they had to stage one of the most preposterous trials in history, and hope they could find the real killer before the final yank of the executioner's rope!

Supposedly an allegory about McCarthyism. Well received critically but we've never gotten around to reading it.

Cop-Out

1968
Who are you, Malone? Just a little while ago you were a cop. That was before the two punks and their girl hit town. That was before they boosted a payroll and shot down a man and took your 9-year-old daughter as insurance to cover their getaway. Now you're just a man. Scared. Not for yourself—that would be easy. But for your child, the only thing in the world you love enough to make you play ball with the kind of scum you've hated all your life. Except that you're one of them now. You've crossed the line no cop can ever cross. And there's just one desperate way of getting back.

A hard-boiled crime story, not a mystery in any sense. Lee insisted it was not ghost-written, but I’ve long suspected this was one of their farmed-out paperback originals that they thought could make it as a hardcover, and had it published that way. However Manfred Lee’s son Rand says his dad counted this as one of his favorites, and had gone on ride-alongs with local police officers as part of his research.

True Crime

• Ellery Queen's International Casebook (1964)
• The Woman in the Case (1967)

True crime stories as related by 'Ellery Queen' from the pages of The American Weekly, in Dell paperbacks.

apocrypha

Faux Ellery Queen Novels

When the Columbia series of B-films came out, several scripts were revamped into novelizations and published. These are quickie productions, with no involvement by Dannay or Lee:

Faux Ellery Queen Jr Novels

These short novels for children are published as by ‘Ellery Queen Jr’. Ellery does make at least a cameo appearance in a few of them. Listings include the identities of the ghost-writers. Reportedly Mr Holding farmed out at least one of his assignments to a lower-tier ghost, infuriating Manfred Lee.