Challenging the Reader

One of my favorite anthologies of early (Golden Age and earlier) mystery stories has been out of print for a long time. In 1938, Ellery Queen - certainly one of the most influential editors involved in 20th century mystery publishing - edited a marvelous collection called "Challenge to the Reader." It contains 25 mystery stories, featuring popular authors, such as Conan Doyle, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, and their detective characters - some largely forgotten today, others still quite famous. But that's not what made this collection unique.

What Ellery Queen did was to present the stories without identifying either the author or the detective until the reader had reached the end of the story. Instead, the stories were presented with the name of the detective and other recurring characters changed. The reader was challenged to recognize and identify the detective while reading the story.

How? To some degree, by externals: where is the story set? What is the time period? But even more so by identifying the detective's manner of detection, as well as by verbal phrases which a given detective might have used as a regular "tag line" in many stories. In addition, Ellery Queen picked stories were were generally not the most famous or most often republished stories featuring these characters, just to make it a bit more challenging.

It's great fun and adds to my enjoyment of the fine stories in this book. As I said, it's out of print, but there are plenty of used copies floating around. The link in the first paragraph above goes to a page in Amazon.com which links to a great many second-hand book resellers who may have copies of "Challenge to the Reader" available - some at quite reasonable prices. If you enjoy the kind of classic mystery stories we discuss here, I think you'd really like these stories, enjoying the challenge of recognizing the detective by his/her behavior, mannerisms and attitude.