Classic Mysteries

Looking Back: Ellery Queen

If you enjoyed the Philo Vance novel, "The Canary Murder Case," discussed on the Classic Mysteries podcast this week, you might also enjoy Ellery Queen's "The Tragedy of Errors," a collection of outlines, stories and articles about Ellery Queen. You can listen to a full audio review here.

The Philo Vance novels of S. S. Van Dine are generally seen as precursors of the early Ellery Queen novels, and certainly Queen - the detective character - is clearly modeled after Vance. Personally, I prefer Queen, although both authors specialized in fair play puzzles, providing readers with the clues which should - if properly interpreted - lead them to the criminal.

"The Tragedy of Errors" is an interesting example of how the "Ellery Queen" collaboration really worked: of the two cousins who made up "Ellery Queen," Frederick Dannay generally came up with the plot outline, complete with the various clues, twists and turns. His cousin, Manfred Lee, then "fleshed out" the bare bones of the outline, writing the actual novel itself.

In "The Tragedy of Errors," we see how that worked, because we are given the full Dannay-written outline of a never-completed novel. Dannay had completed the synopsis, but Lee died before he could turn it into a novel. The book also contains a half-dozen short stories, not collected into books before, and a number of essays about Ellery Queen. These articles, by family members, other mystery authors and scholars, provide a great deal of insight into Ellery Queen and the art of mystery writing in general.

It is a pity that this appears to be the only book by Ellery Queen currently in print in the United States. I'm grateful to the Crippen & Landru Press for publishing it, and I do heartily recommend it.

"The Dream Detective"

"Moris Klaw! Moris Klaw! The devil's come for you!"

Visitors to Moris Klaw's shop in a dismal district of London were announced in this manner by his parrot. Moris Klaw is the central figure of "The Dream Detective," by Sax Rohmer. What is a "dream detective"? One who solves crimes through the aid of his own dreams.

Silly? A bit, perhaps. But in the early years of the 20th century, many fictional detectives had some peculiarity, something to make them stand out in the readers' minds. In the case of Moris Klaw, it was his reliance on his "scientific" theory and use of dreams. Author Sax Rohmer is far better known for his "Fu Manchu" thrillers, but the stories about Moris Klaw are quite memorable. You'll find a review of "The Dream Detective" on this week's Classic Mysteries podcast.

Now an apology: when I originally picked this book and recorded the podcast, it appeared that there was a version of the book in print, available through Amazon. That has since disappeared from the listing. If your favorite mystery bookstore has difficulty finding "The Dream Detective," check the link above - a number of Amazon's dealers appear to have copies available, and some of them are quite reasonable. Moris Klaw is a most unusual character, and he's worth knowing.

"The Asey Mayo Trio"

A murder committed inside a Cape Cod house being moved to a new lot. A new teacher at a local girls' school is found dead when she arrives at her new job. And an astronomer turns up murdered inside his observatory. Three cases for the "Codfish Sherlock," in "The Asey Mayo Trio: Three Cape Cod Mysteries," a collection of short novels or long short stories by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, and the subject of today's book review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which may be heard here.

If you're not familiar with Asey Mayo, these stories from the early 1940s will be a good introduction. A man of all trades, he knows Cape Cod - and its residents - very well, and, as critic Marilyn Stasio is quoted as saying, he's "a local handyman who knows something about police work and everything about everybody's business." It's funny and also insightful and makes fine reading on a cold (or warm?) winter's night.

"The Battles of Jericho"

John Jericho is a red-headed giant of a man, with a quick temper, powerful fists, a sense of both social justice and individual responsibility - and a tendency to get involved on behalf of his friends, even when others would abandon them. The creation of author Hugh Pentecost, he stars in 15 marvelous stories in "The Battles of Jericho." It's the subject of today's podcast, which you can hear here.

These short stories, dating from the 1960s and 70s,  are powerfully written - Pentecost was a prolific and very popular mystery author until his death in 1989. In his introduction to this Crippen & Landru anthology, S. T. Karnick calls Pentecost "an exemplary mystery writer and one whose stories and novels are still well worth reading." That's an understatement.

"Detection by Gaslight"

This week's podcast is a review of the anthology "Detection by Gaslight," edited by Douglas G. Greene. Subtitled "14 Victorian Detective Stories," it's an anthology of short stories, featuring both well-known detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and The Man in the Corner and far more obscure ones.

For me, the real joy here is in the obscure stories. Even the more popular authors are represented by lesser-known stories; the Sherlock Holmes story, for example, is "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," which I believe is anthologized far less often than some of the more popular stories. There's a rather curious R. Austin Freeman story called "The Dead Hand," which is one of his inverted detective stories - we see the crime committed and the story itself revolves around the way in which detectives are able to find evidence against the criminal. There's a story by Rudyard Kipling, which is more supernatural than pure detective story. And so forth. It's an interesting - and very inexpensive - anthology; if you're not very familiar with some of Doyle's contemporaries and followers, this might be a very good book for your library.

Short Shrift

This week and next week, the podcast features anthologies of classic mystery short stories, both edited by Douglas G. Greene. I've done a few other shows with short stories edited by other authors such as Nick Rennison and Otto Penzler, not to mention stories about Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown.

I see that the publishing house of Crippen and Landru - marvelous name! - has a series of collections in their "Lost Classics" series. C&L specializes in short stories, and the Lost Classics series looks as if it could be a rich source of volumes for our discussions.

Short stories, of course, follow different rules from those which guide the full-scale mystery novel. Most authors will tell you it can be much harder to write a short story, because the writing must be so much tighter, the various elements more strictly controlled. And many of the great authors have written memorable short stories about their characters.

So I'm open to suggestion: shall I be on the lookout for more of these collections? Or do listeners/readers prefer me to concentrate on novels?

"Classic Mystery Stories"

Our review this week on the podcast is of the 1999 anthology called "Classic Mystery Stories," edited by Douglas G. Greene. It's a Baker's Dozen of stories, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and coming up (down?) through H. C. Bailey in 1920.

Some of the authors will be very familiar to the mystery reader - Poe, obviously, and Wilkie Collins and Baroness Orczy. But there are others as well, such as Charles Dickens and Jack London, whom we may forget when we list mystery authors. It's a a good collection of highly enjoyable stories. You can listen to the podcast here.