Queen, Ellery - The American Gun Mystery

The American Gun Mystery (1933) has a solution that is far fetched even by the standards of the Golden Age. I hesitate to recommend this book at all: many people reading it will feel that the solution is a cheat, violating Golden Age standards of fair play, as I did on first reading. And yet, the final chapters, however goofy, have a grandeur of conception. However "unfair", they show the wild imagination at work in the Golden Age detective novel. They also show the surrealism that EQ brought to his work. There is also a good deal of interesting logic and deduction in Queen's finale; the whole thing hangs together as a unified and internally logical plot, however implausible. The book also suffers from the fact that the storytelling leading up to the finale is stiff and uninspired. This is a common problem in EQ; many of the early novels have much better solutions than the narrative between the crime and its solution. The business of the disappearing gun is well done by any standards. Later, John Dickson Carr will introduce a similar disappearing gun mystery into Till Death Do Us Part (1944), but come up with a completely different solution for it.

The solution to this book is also unusual in that it involves a whole complex, public enterprise behind the crime, one involving both the rodeo and other aspects of show biz. So many Golden Age novels involve one solitary criminal dashing around the bushes of some country house, that it is interesting to see its exact opposite here.

I have always thought it was some sort of political commentary, that when it came time to add an "American" book to EQ's series of country titles, he choose The American Gun. Perhaps this reflects America's gun enthusiasm. The book takes place at a rodeo visiting New York City; a similar rodeo is featured in Stuart Palmer's Murder on Wheels (1932). I don't know much about the history of rodeos, but one must have visited New York in that era, and made a tremendous impression. The rodeos are clearly very similar productions in the two books, and probably share a common real life ancestor.

Mike Grost