A, B, C, D, E, F, G...

Ten years have elapsed since the events chronicled in The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y. Drury Lane has gotten much older, and is frail and sickly these days. As for Inspector Thumm, he has retired and opened a detective agency, which is doing rather well. More surprisingly than that, we discover that Inspector Thumm has a daughter, Patience, who is the narrator of our story.

It all begins innocuously enough. Elihu Clay, an honest businessman (keep your smart-aleck comments to yourself), comes to ex-Inspector Thumm’s door for help. It seems his business is doing very well… indeed, almost too well. He has a silent partner, Dr. Ira Fawcett, brother of Senator Joe Fawcett, and he suspects the doctor is using his business to pull some financial hanky-panky on behalf of the Fawcett clan. Inspector Thumm accepts the case, but with little hope of success – although it’s widely known that Senator Fawcett is crooked, no one has been able to prove so in a court of law.

Thumm’s daughter Patience comes along for the ride, because even though she has no role in the investigation she’s a Liberated Woman. She hits it off with Drury Lane, making a couple of clever deductions about how the detective is spending his spare time. So when murder comes a-knocking and Senator Fawcett is bumped off, with the police eagerly seizing on the most obvious suspect, Patience consults the Great Detective and brings him onboard to solve The Tragedy of Z.

Not-so-funny funny books

Comic books are destroying the youth of America! Consider the evidence: they promote and glorify violence as a way of life. They actively promote racism and intolerance. Some comic books, such as the tales of Batwing and his young ward Sparrow, promote some of the ghastliest sexual perversions. And how do we know all this? Simple. Dr. Werner Frederick says so.

As a result, the comic book industry is in a tough place. Congress is getting set to examine the problem of comic-books and how they defile the moral fabric of America’s youth. Angry parenting groups are burning comic books and the industry is losing money. Enter Jack Starr, the Starr syndicate’s troubleshooter. Whenever trouble rears its ugly head, Jack has to go and take care of it, and Dr. Frederick’s passionate anti-comic-books crusade certainly qualifies… This forms the plot of Max Allan Collins’ Seduction of the Innocent.

Mr. Queen on the Essence of Boredom

The Spanish Cape is located somewhere on the Atlantic coast, and it is the scene of a violent death when notorious philanderer John Marco is found bludgeoned to death. This comes right on the heels of a botched kidnapping effort also directed at Marco. Apparently, someone wasn’t fond of the man… but why on earth would anyone have removed the dead man’s clothes???

Yes, Marco is naked as the day he was born, but luckily Ellery Queen is on hand to investigate the business. There’s a lot of nasty secrets hidden, and blackmail is tied into Marco’s death as well. Which of the people on the Spanish Cape have stained their hands with blood? You can find out in Ellery Queen’s The Spanish Cape Mystery…

All aboard the S. S. Van Dine!

I’m afraid that readers of this blog will begin to think that I’m simply stealing my reading list off of other blogs. Once again, today’s book was inspired by a previous review—and yet again, it was Bill from Traditional Mysteries who inspired it. The book is Murder in Pastiche by Marion Mainwaring, and after the enticing review Bill wrote in January, the book flew near the top of my to-be-read pile… and now that it’s April, I figured it was about time to give it a read. (Yeah, I’m not sure how to explain the physics behind that… Apparently, the last few months on this blog have been a massive game of Jenga with my to-be-read pile, and nobody was aware of it.)

But I digress. We find ourselves on board the R. M. S. Florabunda as it sails from Liverpool to New York. And, by an astonishing coincidence, nine prominent detectives have all come on board the same ship! These sleuths are parodies of some of the most famous detectives of all-time: M. Atlas Poireau (Hercule Poirot), Sir Jon. Nappleby (Sir John Appleby), Jerry Pason (Perry Mason), Broderick Tourneur (Roderick Alleyn), Trajan Beare (Nero Wolfe), Miss Fan Sliver (Miss Silver), Spike Bludgeon (Mike Hammer), Mallory King (Ellery Queen), and Lord Simon Quinsey (Lord Peter Wimsey). With any one of these detectives on board, a mystery is bound to explode— but with nine? That’s just tempting fate.

Cat Among the Pigeons

Welcome once more, good readers, to a special edition of At the Scene of the Crime!

In this ongoing series of crossovers, I have managed to convince my fellow mystery bloggers, somehow or another, to join me in discussing a book/author/etc. Today’s victim is Steve, better known as The Puzzle Doctor. This rogue mathematician blogs at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, and has appeared on this blog before, in a crossover review of Paul Doherty’s An Ancient Evil that celebrated my reaching 100 posts.

So when we decided to team up again for another review, the first question to pop up was: what should we review? An initial suggestion was The Poison Maiden by Paul Doherty, seeing that our reaction to The Cup of Ghosts was so different. But this idea was scrapped due to the book’s length and my having midterm exams at around this time of year.

But suddenly, an idea galloped onto the scene, when I recalled that Steve here had a very—unorthodox, shall we say?— reaction to Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails. It’s a book that I consider a personal favourite, and which many believe is the finest work penned by the EQ writing team. And wouldn’t you know it—one of Steve’s on-going projects is to read all of Ellery Queen’s output and review it!

So the elements were set in place for a potentially controversial review. Would I enjoy Cat of Many Tails upon a re-read? Just as (and arguably more) important, would the Doc’s opinion stay the same? There were at least three ways to find out, but the most feasible one was to simply read the book. So here we are today!

Steve, thanks so much for joining me today!

***

The Mad Hatter Strikes Again!

Somewhere in the early 1930s, Manfred B. Lee and Frederick Dannay (who together wrote under the name Ellery Queen) created a new persona: Barnaby Ross. I recall reading somewhere that they even staged debates in public, with one cousin posing as Ellery Queen and the other being Barnaby Ross. The Ross novels involve retired Shakespearean actor, Drury Lane, who was forced into premature retirement due to deafness.

I had read one Drury Lane novel before: The Tragedy of X. It was an interesting read: the plot was interesting, and Queen actually bothered to explain why someone would bother leaving a dying message, reminiscent of Carr’s locked-room lecture in The Hollow Man. However, I highly disliked the character of Drury Lane. He has an unhealthy obsession for Shakespeare, building a shrine to Shakespeare called The Hamlet. For no apparent reason, he convinces people like his makeup man, Quacey, to move in with him and become his servants. (Quacey’s makeup skills are unparalleled, for instance, but he devotes himself to working for Lane instead of helping in the theatrical world.) Add to that dialogue that he seems to have stolen from Norman Bates, and you have a character that frankly struck me as a psycho in the making.

Reactivated Agent's Hem

When I read Doug Greene’s brilliant biography of John Dickson Carr, The Man Who Explained Miracles (my library seriously runs the risk of not getting its copy back one of these days), I also looked in the appendices, which included a comprehensive list of works authored by Carr. In this list, Greene also devoted a section to parodies of Carr, and one title caught my eye: Hocus Pocus at Drumis Tree by Norma Schier. I was intrigued by the idea of parodying Carr while making the names anagrams—“Drumis Tree”, for instance, is a clever anagram of “Murder Site”.

However, for quite some time, I was unable to find a copy of the story to read. I finally decided to buy a copy of The Anagram Detectives, an excellent collection of stories written by Schier. In this collection, she takes cracks at everyone from Agatha Christie to Ellery Queen to Michael Innes, and she manages to create clever mysteries as well! (Sometimes, after all, the joke in a parody is how ridiculous the solution is, or how the solution is never told, but endlessly delayed. Well, not to worry- that isn’t the case here.)

Top 10 Plot Ideas

Hello, and welcome back to the scene of the crime!

You may be wondering, as an experienced mystery reader, just what kind of mysteries do I like? Do I have any particular favourites or recommendations to fellow mystery fans? Well, to answer your questions, here are my top 10 mystery plot ideas. These are not strictly in “worst-to-best” order, because they’re all fine ideas—I just get more and more enthusiastic as I approach my #1 selection. So, without further ado, let’s get started…