OK, that just makes… no sense whatsoever.
Even if we grant that the identity of the victim was supposed to be some big secret (and if the murderer is relying on that, there are some serious flaws in his plan), why not just remove the offending articles of clothing and leave them off? That’d be a lot easier than reversing all of them.
– do we have to spoiler a story close to a hundred years old? well, maybe.
[spoiler]If the collar worn by priests was the same collar worn by other people and was just worn reversed, then the lack of a tie in removed clothing would have in itself caused comment (if it was a different collar, then the collar itself would have been a giveaway.)
The reversed clothing I expect was a sort of red herring: the killer expected people to be so distracted by wondering why the clothing was reversed that they didn’t go straight to ‘why is the tie missing’? They might have been less puzzled by removed clothing, I suppose, as it’s easier to think up explanations for that; especially if the body was found in a bedroom or where someone might have gone swimming.[/spoiler]
Having said that: explanations in Ellery Queen stories were often a bit, um, contrived. Fun reading, though; at least I used to think so. Haven’t read any in some time and not sure how well they’ve worn.
I’m not giving anything away, but I’ll put it in spoilers just in case.
For plot reasons, nothing could be taken from the room. Not finding the tie when a close search of the room was made would be a tip-off. Undressing the corpse would have merely postponed the discovery.
For what it’s worth, the only value of the solution is that it’s so far-fetched that it makes the mystery unguessable. I also think it’s a cheat because of the time and noise that would have been required, assuming that one person could have managed it at all. Kids, don’t try this at home!
Nah, he was sitting at his desk, reading a dossier.
I think I read Man with the Golden Gun when I was about 13, in 1974, and I STILL remember that scene and thinking it was fucked up.
The victim had lived his life as a missionary overseas and had just returned; no one but the killer knew him and he didn’t tell anyone his name or anything about him. He was never even named in the novel.
Ah yes, the great early “ethnic” Queen novels…Roman Hat, Chinese Orange, Egyptian Cross, French Powder, Polish Sausage, Russian Dressing…how intensely tedious they were. Only S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance mysteries could top them as perfect bedtime sedatives.
I read them all after the single season of Levinson & Link’s Ellery teevee series in…1975? Even with Sleepy Jim Hutton in the title role, those episodes were funny and lively and engaging. The Queen writing team didn’t hit their stride until the late ‘30s, and by the early ‘60s they were being ghostwritten by greater talents, like Avram Davidson.
Several posters in this thread have shown that this still happens; consider my ignorance fought. It does kind of surprise me, nevertheless.
Queen, who was the team of Fred Dannay, plotter, and Manfred Lee, writer, did peak in the 40s, true. The early novels are a matter of taste. I still enjoy them but I read a lot of vintage mysteries and Lee’s writing is just better than most and Dannay’s plotting mind-boggling. Their 40s period of greatness was unique. Unlike Christie or Carr or Stout, they did not write the same book in the same style over and over again. They experimented wildly. That sometimes got poor results and sometimes magic emerged.
Dannay and Lee, who were cousins, grew heartily sick of one another after a quarter century of collaboration. (They, with Anthony Boucher after 1945, wrote hundreds of episodes of their radio show, purely for money, which drained them of ideas.) They intended 1954’s The Finishing Stroke to be the last Queen novel. Unfortunately, Lee ran into money and health problems that led to a decade of writer’s block. They had to bring back Queen because that was his only source of income. So Avram Davidson ghosted two books and Theodore Sturgeon one and they also turned “Ellery Queen” into a house name for non-Queen paperback originals from a dozen ghosts. Lee did come back and write the last five, which are for completists only.
That Ellery Queen TV series - their fourth - was truly wonderful. And the tv writers Levinson and Link abandoned it after one season because it was too hard to come up with fair-play murder mysteries that needed two viable solutions - one false one for a secondary detective and a true one for Queen to reveal. Dual solutions were a hallmark of Queen’s and after a while even Dannay couldn’t come up with them reliably.
Queen’s peak relied on this. In Ten Days Wonder, Queen solves the mystery - to giant acclaim and national attention. Then he finds out he was wrong and has to confront the real murderer. It breaks him. He vows never to interfere in another case. The next book is Cat of Many Tails, easily the best early description of what it’s like living in a city where a serial murderer is striking at random. He’s forced to come back - his father is the Inspector in charge of New York Homicide after all - and again solves the case to even bigger national acclaim. And is wrong again. He finally has to see a psychiatrist to recover. No other classic mystery author ever came close to treating their famous detective this way. It is the absolute peak of the whodunit murder mystery. Of course they went downhill after that. But who else can boast that peak?
Fine piece of exposition. For the record, the first Queen novel I ever read was the last one, 1971’s A Fine and Private Place (it was NEW!), and I enjoyed it enough to tackle the whole series going back to 1929. I agree the early books were intellectually intriguing, but remain a serious plod. No breathless excitement about starting the next chapter. More poisoned stilettos and mysterious Chinamen would have helped, maybe.
I notice you didn’t take any time to champion Van Dine.
I feel about Van Dine the way you feel about early Queen. But Van Dine never had a second act.
I’m a Queen fanatic and completist. But I acknowledge the faults.
I’m not sure this counts as an “attitude”, but it is something puzzling I’ve noticed in older works:
Before commercial television began it had been anticipated as science fiction for a couple of decades. But for some reason people almost universally envisioned television as two-way- despite the fact that they had the example of radio and knew perfectly well it didn’t transmit their voices back. Examples include Chaplin’s Modern Times and of course Orwell’s telescreens.
Television preceded science fiction by several decades. As soon as the telephone was invented, people envisioned phones with screens in ways that were hard to distinguish from two-way televisions.
*Punch *predicted Edison’s telephonoscope to appear in the following year, 1879, and lots of others followed.
So the idea of television preceded the idea of radio. As soon as the idea of the telephone became known, people began to speculate about sending out pictures, even moving pictures, over telephone lines. It was only when radio stations sending out one-way transmissions appeared that they began to think about television stations sending out one-way transmissions.
Not just speculate: the first fax transmission (depending on how primitive a device you think counts) was in 1865.
Exapno, I’m curious when you’re placing the dawn of science fiction. I have a hard time justifying any point for the invention of the television before 1925, by which point H. G. Wells had dozens of novels, Jules Verne had been dead for two decades, and Frankenstein was over a century old.
I think he meant the concept of television.
Science fiction as a genre is generally placed with the start of Amazing Stories in 1926. It was founded by Hugo Gernsback, who had found that readers of his popular science magazines liked that sort of thing. Those magazines had been talking about television for at least a decade. For many years Gernsback was even credited with the coinage of the word television until earlier uses were found.
It took several years after the first Amazing Stories before the term “science fiction” was applied to the kind of stories he ran. Before then it was called all sorts of things. Pining the term on Wells and Verne and Shelley is a retcon. People in the 19th century simply accepted speculation about technology as a basic variant of mainstream literature. Technology was progressing incredibly quickly by the last quarter of the century and many new things would certainly be around in the next year or a few years after that. Nobody appeared to think that this was any different from other fictional speculations and extrapolations. There were stories about airplanes and robots and satellites in mainstream magazines before 1900 and they were treated exactly like every other story.
Humorists especially loved predicting what the future would look like. Check out some of the pages on my Flying Cars and Food Pills website.
I’m not sure the actual label “science fiction” is as important as the concept of speculative fiction. It seems like a faulty definition that would exclude Verne and Wells and Shelley.
Astronomers working with ground-based telescopes of all varieties are REALLY unhappy about this, too.
Wasn’t the actual label “science fiction” coined by Donald Wollheim? I occasionally hang out with his daughter here in NYC, but she may be lying to me.