A Year with Ellery Queen: December 1951

It might not still be December, but I did manage to read my final Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM) last month, thus completing my personal reading challenge. I have another such challenge set up for this year, which you can read more about here.

Pleasingly this issue includes its review section: Detective Directory, which was edited by Robert P. Mills. Perhaps because it was the Christmas season, there were far fewer reviewers quoted from in this section. The five reviewers were: Anthony Boucher (The New York Times), Dorothy B. Hughes (The Los Angeles Daily News), Lenore Glen Offord (The San Francisco Chronicle), Kathleen Sproul (The Saturday Review of Literature) and Unsigned Review (The New York Herald Tribune). Nevertheless, eight mystery novels were still reviewed:

• The Way Some People Die by John Ross Macdonald
• Lament for the Bride by Helen Reilly
• The Black-Eyed Stranger by Charlotte Armstrong
• Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh
• An Ape in Velvet by Rae Foley
• Stairway to an Empty Room by Dolores Hitchens
• The Green Plaid Pants by Margaret Scherf
• Ladies Won’t Wait by Peter Cheyney

Lament for a Bride came in for some stiff criticism. Lenore Glen Offord gave it a ‘C plus’, whilst Kathleen Sproul wrote that it was ‘suspenseful and interesting … but the actual mystery confusing … Practised hand.’ Meanwhile, Boucher said it had ‘… emotions which have all the validity of a misunderstanding between tenor and soprano in an operetta.’ Being a fan of Charlotte Armstrong’s work, I was sad to hear that her book from this year was something of a dud. Dorothy B. Hughes said that ‘the story … is contrived; its climax dependent upon coincidence … shocking from a writer of Miss Armstrong’s caliber’, whilst Kathleen Sproul described the novel as ‘somewhat tedious’. In contrast Night at the Vulcan received four rave reviews with Lenore Glen Offord exclaiming that ‘…you’ve never read a more utterly enchanting stage novel.’

‘Goodbye Forever’ by Craig Rice

The introduction to this story talks about Rice’s involvement in the creation of the International Poll that EQMM ran. The aim of the poll was to ‘determine the ten best active mystery writers […]’. Rice was one of the writers who voted and five of her nominations made it into the ten final winners. Consistency was a key part in her nominating John Dickson Carr and Erle Stanley Gardner. She also nominated Mary Roberts Rinehart who Rice chose ‘for setting a standard which some of us, especially me, might do well to follow.’ These three authors were part of the final ten along with Margery Allingham, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen, Georges Simenon, and Rex Stout.

However, back to Rice’s short story, which opens with Betty Castle offering the lawyer John J. Malone a new client, an orchestra leader named Larry Lee. This meet and greet is made more entertaining by Betty requesting that Malone act drunk when he sees Larry – a request Malone thinks he might just be able to manage… “Don’t worry about a thing […] As a hobby I’ve taken up impersonating myself.” We eventually learnt that Larry is worried that his riffing on a particular musical refrain in a new song of his, might lead to someone’s death. The band are very superstitious and are unwilling to play it, so Larry had to work hard at burying it into his song. Malone goes along to the performance and unsurprisingly the key clarinet player drops dead after playing the four pertinent notes. The killer in this one is well hidden, and the means of murder is interesting, as the reader needs to keep a keen eye on the details (in a way which reminded me of a 1930s Christie mystery).

‘Eva? Caroline?’ (1949) by Allan Vaughan Elston

This story receives quite a lengthy introduction with Ellery Queen waxing lyrical about the author’s ranch childhood and how this influenced their characterisation. We are also told about how his career as an engineer shaped the plot of his story.

It all kicks off with an Inspector Whipple showing Roger Marsh in Baltimore, the photo of a woman. He is asked if it is his wife. But his wife died four years ago, as testified to by a close friend, himself, and her doctor. Yet the woman in the photo claims to be his wife, rather than a con artist that the police suspect of being involved in a murder five years ago. This is a nightmare situation and despite the strong testimony of these three witnesses, the woman has sufficient circumstantial proof of being Roger’s wife, which leads to other witnesses having doubts. Things come to a head when she is called to trial. But who is she really? The ending is ambiguous. I would say this tale has a great plot setup, but I felt the resolution came across as quite limp.

‘The Oversight’ by Freeman Wills Crofts

Joe Gresley needs to repay a loan in a hurry, so he decides to bump off his rich uncle. He thinks he has executed the perfect crime, but will Inspector French manage to catch him out? This is a short piece which hinges upon spotting one small detail.

‘His First Bow’ by J. W. wells

Wells was the penname for an episcopal minister, and he was ‘one of the seven “first stories” which won special awards in EQMM’s Sixth Annual Contest.’ Queen wrote that this story was ‘written by a true aficionado – a devotee of detective fiction in general and of Sherlock Holmes in particular.’ They further mention that ‘His First Bow’ ‘introduces Adam Lake, a bibliophilic blood hound […]’. Lieutenant Charles Ames visits Lake, who is the director of Courney Library, as the District Attorney wants his assistance on a case involving the murder of a bookshop owner who was going to exhibit a first edition of A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. The Holmes component felt extraneous to the plot and the solution hinges on one discrepancy in the details.

Q. B. I.: Queen’s Bureau of Investigation Lost and Found Department – ‘The Lonely Bride’ (1949) by Ellery Queen

This story was originally published under the title of ‘The Lady Couldn’t Explain’ in This Week magazine. A model called Shelley Brown has a whirlwind courtship and is soon married and enjoying her luxurious honeymoon. Her husband sets them up in an expensive suite and leaves her to do some business. Yet he never returns… It is only at this stage that Shelley realises how little she knows her husband. Queen soon figures out where her groom ought to be, but this reveals more problems. The mystery becomes something of a treasure hunt. I was bored by the descriptive detail of this story. It is something of a clever riddle, which did not overly appeal to me.

‘The Parrot’ (1928) by Walter Duranty

Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1932 and in 1928 he ‘won first prize for the best short story of the year – “The Parrot”. The award was made by the O. Henry Memorial Committee […]’. Queen said of the story that it is ‘a fascinating tale of a boy detective in Russia – twelve-year-old Sergey McTavish, orphan son of a Scottish soldier of fortune and a German farmer’s daughter […]’ The story begins with Sergey being literally thrown out of a train and the Red Army for stealing and black-market profiteering. He finds shelter with a young woman, her father and her grandfather who seem to be part of some kind of prison system. The young woman’s American lover, also a prisoner, is in danger as Baba Papagai is coming to the area and she is President of a “Flying Tribunal” which judges counter revolutionaries. She gets every defendant to stick their finger into her parrot’s cage and if the parrot bites, then she decides the prisoner is guilty and they are killed. Yet the parrot always bites, so such trials are foregone conclusions. The American due to his nationality is decided by the community to be the sacrifice to appease Baba’s blood lust. Sergey is called upon to find a way of thwarting the parrot. This story is hard to categorise, and it is something of a prisoner thriller adventure story. It didn’t really feel like much of a mystery.

‘The Newtonian Egg’ by Peter Godfrey

The introduction to this story mentions that ‘for the life of him, the author doesn’t know how to classify his own story. It cannot be fully described as a whodunit, or a whydunit, or a howdunit – for the simple reason that the tale has in it solid elements of all three ‘tec types. It is also an impossible-crime story, or to put it another way, a miracle problem. Similarly, it can be designated as a sealed-room story – in this instance, a sealed-egg; and from a completely different point of view it can be labelled a broken-alibi story. It even has, the author contends attributes of the inverted detective story.’ Godfrey by the sounds of it knows how to cover all of the bases.

There are three men in this story confined to a hospital ward. All three are dying of intestinal TB. Yet one of these men is going to be married later that day, Hal Brooke. Brooke pontificates, alluding to The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr and Jacques Futrelle’s Thinking Machine, on the possibility of things. He even mentions how poison could be put into his hardboiled egg. This is only a hypothetical example, yet it happens to him for real moments later. How did it occur? Rolf le Roux, a friend of Brooke’s, arrives later that day, as he was planning on attending the wedding. Roux is Godfrey’s investigative character. I don’t know how convinced I am by the solution and how Roux came to it though.

‘The Open Door’ (1935) by Rafael Sabatini

If you have been following my EQMM posts, you will know how much I have not got on with Sabatini’s work. He has been described by Queen as ‘one of the most eminent historical novelists of the Twentieth Century’ and they comment that he was ‘known to have done exhaustive research for all his stories.’ However, they note that he ‘never visited the scene of one of his tales until after he had finished the writing’ because he was ‘afraid […] that the modern appearance of his story-locales might blur […] the old, authentic background which research had built up in his mind.’ I would be interested to know what other writers make of this viewpoint.

Sabatini’s story is centred on Florimond Souverain de la Galette, who is an inept fencing master. He unintentionally ends up creating a duel with a vulgar rich man in the local inn. The wealthy man is from out of town, and he does not know how bad Florimond is at fencing, so he decides to buy him off. It is at this moment that Florimond discovers he has a better way of making money. Will he get his comeuppance though? This story does not contain Sabatini’s series character Alessandro’s Cagliostro, who I do not like, so in that sense ‘The Open Door’ was a more bearable story to read. Nevertheless, this story does not really involve crime, mystery, or detection.

‘A Simple Matter of Deduction’ by Lord Dunsany

This tale features Lord Dunsany’s series detective, Mr Linley, of ‘The Two Bottles of Relish’ fame. Like Sherlock Holmes, who is able to unfurl a volley of facts about a person or object after a period of examination, Mr Linley performs a similar feat with a crossword, narrowing down the field of suspects in a murder case down to one. The murder case involves a man lured to an empty house before being killed. The murderer left an incomplete crossword behind and it is this which Mr Linley uses to track them down. This is an interesting story if not an exciting one.

‘The Red Silk Scarf’ (1913) by Maurice le Blanc

The introduction to this story explains why Arsene Lupin was originally called Lopin. A man bearing the name threatened to sue le Blanc so his famous anti-hero became Lupin. The tale opens with Chief Inspector Ganimard being tricked into entering a building so Arsene can hold a private meeting with him. Ganimard is informed that last night a boatman had dragged an object out of the water. Part of the haul contained a red scarf and through various deductions Arsene connects it to a murder which has recently occurred. Lupin exhorts Ganimard to find the killer using his evidence and that in three weeks’ time he should meet up with Lupin once more bringing the other half of the scarf. The ending is rather predictable, except to Ganimard who really doesn’t see it coming.

‘You Only Live Once’ (1939) by Michael Arlen

One evening the world of famous amateur golfer Johnnie Winterset is brought crashing down. His marriage seems to have fallen apart because his life is dominated by golf and when he realises this it all seems too little too late. Has his wife found a lover? What further troubles await him? I enjoyed the writing style of this book and how the plot is not easy to anticipate. However, it is only tangentially crime-related, and the choice of ending weakens the overall effect.

Rating: 3.5/5