Abigail Doorn was very rich, very charitable, very prominent in New York society - and very dead. The manner of her death was murder: she was lying on a stretcher, awaiting surgery for a ruptured gall bladder at the Dutch Memorial Hospital in New York City, when she was strangled. It seems that one of the doctors walking around the operating room that day wasn't a doctor at all, but a coldly calculating killer. And it was going to be up to Ellery Queen to figure out not only whodunit, but also why - and how. One thing was clear to Ellery: the answers he was searching for were likely to involve a pair of white canvas shoes. Full details will be found in The Dutch Shoe Mystery, by Ellery Queen and starring Ellery Queen. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Okay. Let's start with a few fun facts about Ellery Queen and try to provide what Wikipedia usually refers to as "disambiguation":
Ellery Queen. Author. The pen name used by two cousins, Fred Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote most of their books and stories using that name.
Ellery Queen. Character in most novels and stories written by Ellery Queen. He is the son of New York City police inspector Richard Queen and is called upon frequently by his father to help solve perplexing mysteries. He is the principal detective and the protagonist in those works of fiction.
For the purposes of this post, I'll refer to the real-life author(s) Ellery Queen as "Queen." I'll refer to the fictional detective Ellery Queen as "Ellery."
When you talk about the traditional, puzzle-oriented American mystery story, you will almost invariably wind up talking about Ellery Queen. Dannay and Lee were responsible for dozens of books. I know many readers who will tell you they prefer the ones written later in Queen’s career, as Ellery's character matured and became a lot more introspective, even noir-ish, but I’ve always had a preference for the earliest Queen novels. These were generally books with complex plots and contained well-hidden clues for readers who wanted to match their wits against the detective. As a general rule, the earliest books also featured a “Challenge to the Reader” late in the story: the reader would be advised that he or she now had all the clues needed to determine the killer, the motive and any other secondary mysteries in the book. The Dutch Shoe Mystery was the third Queen novel to feature Ellery, and it followed this same pattern. Will you accept that challenge? Whether you want to match wits with the detective or just sit back and let Ellery do the investigating, there’s a lot to enjoy in The Dutch Shoe Mystery. Give it a try – it’s available in a variety of formats including a new edition as part of Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics series and should be easily found.
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