Queen, Ellery - And on the Eighth Day (1964)

What do you do when you have spent forty years of your life making the classic detective story jump through ever-more-elaborate hoops? If you're Dannay and Lee, you set yourselves a new challenge: have your detective solve a murder in an isolated religious community, where crime is unknown and detection is unheard-of.

What will they need for this? Some distance in time, to start with: readers of 1964 might find it just a little difficult to believe in an undiscovered settlement somewhere in the western USA, so let's back-pedal a little to 1943, before the days of spy satellites and regular passenger flights. Let's give it a plausible history, not unlike that of the Mormons many years earlier, and a convincing cast of characters, nameless but carefully observed.

How to get the detective there? Let's have Ellery helping the war effort, exhausted and brain-sick from overwork, nursing the ageing Duesenberg back across to New York and taking a wrong turning at the isolated End-Of-The-World store. Here is where he first encounters the Teacher, leader of the little community, and the Storicai, or Storesman, the only two members to make any contact with the outside world.

How to get Ellery into the picture, then, after his accidental detour? Have him recognised as a saviour - or Solver? - whose coming is predicted, who has privileged access to the heart of the community; give him a few minor mysteries to solve; and send him away while the unprecedented murder is committed, so that only his deductive skills and detection kit can solve the mystery.

Dannay and Lee knew that the best detectives are those who fail sometimes, like Sherlock Holmes. Ellery fails here, not to solve the crime, but to avert its consequences. The illusory vision of idyllic bliss is built on deception; like all governments, large and small, before and since, the community will lie to protect itself. One man's force of will is too much for Ellery to overcome. But the book ends on a note of hope.

Is And on the Eighth Day a success? This is one of those rare novels where the question doesn't seem to matter. Like The Hollow Man, and Night of the Jabberwock, it is a fantastic creation by authors at the height of their powers, playing with big ideas. Whether it comes off or not for you may depend on something as trivial as what you had for breakfast; whatever the verdict, it doesn't detract from the dazzling virtuosity of the work itself. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is still a tower.

Jon.

See also: http://traditionalmysteries.blogspot.com/2011/10/and-on-eighth-day-by-ellery-queen.html