Queen, Ellery - The Dutch Shoe Mystery

The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) is the third and last of Ellery Queen's apprentice works. The best part of the story is the initial ten chapters, which set up the central crime, and contain the main investigation. These chapters move with the speed and grace of Ellery's own Dusenberg. They include one of the better and more interesting floor plans in a Golden Age novel. However, nothing much especially interesting happens after Chapter 10, till the finale (Chapter 30), when the crime is explained, with some ingenuity. The mid sections of the book are mainly character studies of the suspects, looks at motives for the murder, etc. They include a well done portrait of a religious fanatic, which is countered and balanced by many sympathetic quotations from Ellery about religion. Religious imagery will go on to be present in many of EQ's late novels. All in all, this is a decent novella which has unfortunately been expanded to novel length. The book perhaps shows the influence of the Freeman school, with its medical setting, its background of a hospital, its timetable crime, deductions from physical evidence (the shoes of the title), and its solution through that Freeman--Crofts tradition, an alibi depending on "the breakdown of identity". However the story still has an intuitionist feel to it, not to mention one of the fullest imitations of S.S. Van Dine's mannerisms in the Queen canon. Unlike Freeman, medical knowledge plays no role in the mystery, although the hospital setting is deeply integrated into the plot. Most importantly, the logical precision with which the characters move through the floor plan seems very intuitionist indeed. It recalls Chesterton, and his rearrangement of characters and bodies in space and time.

The initial murder shows some of Ellery Queen's surrealistic flair, without reaching the flamboyant extremes of much of his later work. The book has a visionary quality, perhaps because it seems to be the product of something truly imagined, to borrow a phrase of Ursula K. LeGuin's. The book is organized around imagery of total whiteness, appropriate for a hospital of the 1920's. Together with the rectilinear architecture of the floor plan, it recalls the abstract art of its time, especially Malevich's Suprematism, and his painting "White on White". The effect of a "white-out", of a world turned totally white and disappearing into an haze of light, seems strong in this book.

A book like this shows much of the technique that would later dominate Ngaio Marsh's novels. There is the floor plan, and the wanderings of the characters through it. They are well defined and varied types, each with its own active interest in the outcome. The chapter titles are all schematic. I have wondered if Marsh is a Van Dinean; perhaps it would be more accurate to wonder if she were directly influenced by Ellery Queen.

Mike Grost