I suppose I started reading mysteries with Trixie Belden, and Sherlock Holmes, but my real passion for mysteries came with Ellery Queen.
The Ellery Queen TV show got me interested, and though the character in the TV show and the book were not quite the same, I soon devoured the whole series – haunting libraries all over the area to find lesser known titles.
But after that first passionate year or two of reading, I haven’t actually looked at any of the Ellery Queen books since. I had a vague memory of a very old-fashioned clue-based series, and maybe I was afraid that they wouldn’t stand up to my memory. But recently I decided to go back and read them again, so I picked up one of the first Ellery Queen’s I had ever read – The Chinese Orange Mystery.
I was not disappointed.
Sure, the style was a little old-fashioned, an it was a little slow to get moving, but it was fun, and I was drawn once again to the great relationshop between the effete, bookish Ellery and his no nonsense father, Inspector Queen. That relationship is the heart of this series and I have to say that Inspector Queen has a habit of stealing the show (especially when Ellery gets a little annoyingly coy about his conclusions.)
In The Chinese Orange Mystery, an strange little man no one can identify is murdered while waiting to see a wealthy publisher. Everything in the room, from the man’s clothing to the furniture, has been carefully turned backwards. Why? This story drags a little as Queen grasps at straws, trying to find connectins between backwards elements of any sort. Red Herrings pop up and go away, but soon Ellery and his father start to dig up all sorts of tangles in the relationships among the publisher’s friends and family.
If you are interested in classic mystery, this is the stellar example of the early Ellery Queen stories.
September 12th, 2009 - 6:39 am
I haven’t reread “The Chinese Orange Mystery” in a while, but I do enjoy the early Ellery Queen stories more than I do the later ones, where he went in for more brooding, psychology-based mysteries such as the Wrightsville books. I think my favorite among the early books is “The Siamese Twin Mystery,” but my all-time favorite Queen is one of the novellas – “The Lamp of God,” where the impossible (and fairly-clued) crime involves the complete disappearance of an entire house.
Les Blatt
http://www.classicmysteries.net
September 12th, 2009 - 12:31 pm
I did just re-read the Siamese Twin mystery too. There are things I love about that one, and with the many twists and turns of the clue from the dying man, it certainly is a great example of the EQ standard. I didn’t feel it stood the test of time quite so well partly because it was so naive about forest fires. (Still, the white knuckle driving through the smoking woods was a great opener!)
I haven’t read “Lamp of God”, unless it was in a collection of shorts and I just don’t remember the title. I will have to look it up next.
Thanks for commenting!
July 16th, 2010 - 6:41 am
‘Lamp of God” you can find in “The New Adventures of Ellery Queen” collection. That one also has one of the best of all the short stories, “Mind over Matter,” featuring a murder at a boxing event.
“Chinese Orange,” I feel, is a little thin in spots: Ellery spends a lot of time trying to turn up “backwards” or “Chinese” links among the suspects. It also dates because of a detail about men’s clothing that’s essential to the solution. But it is imaginative, the classic Queen setup of “What the heck was the murderer up to?”
“Siamese Twin” would make a fine film — imagine Alexis Denisof, Wesley from TV’s “Angel,” as Ellery, and John Mahoney, Frasier’s TV dad, as the Inspector. Though it would have to be a period piece, as today rescue helicopters could lift the trapped people off the mountaintop.