Queen, Ellery - The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934)

The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) has one of EQ's most baroque and inventive puzzles. It is none too realistic, and the storytelling sags badly between the murder and its solution, but its finale shows the tremendous imagination of the Golden Age mystery tale. It is similar to The Dutch Shoe Mystery in that it depends on a floor plan, but is even better as a complex plot. In some ways, it is the fulfillment of the promise of that early novel, one that blossoms out into full fledged surrealism and splendor. Both books seem Chestertonian. I have always thought of this as the most John Dickson Carr like of Queen's novels, and regarded it as an experiment by its author in writing a "John Dickson Carr book". However, a comparison of the dates suggests that it was written before Carr became "himself", and if there were influence here it would be in the other direction. It is possible that it influenced the complexity of such Carr novels that followed, as Death Watch (1935), The Arabian Nights Mystery (1936), and above all, Carr's masterpiece The Three Coffins  (1935). The technique of the book is closely related to the "impossible crime", although EQ does not actually use it to create an impossible crime situation in the novel.

Despite this, many historians of the locked room story seem to (falsely) remember it as a "locked room" book; it appeared on the poll of the top ten impossible crime books, for example, conducted by Edward D. Hoch for the Mystery Writers of America (see the introduction to Hoch's anthology, All But Impossible.) This false memory is a remarkable case of collective amnesia. On a deeper level, the mystery writers who told Hoch that it was one of their favorite locked room stories were essentially right: it does come straight out of the impossible crime tradition.

See also http://apenguinaweek.blogspot.com/2011/03/penguin-no-1150-chinese-orange-mystery.html

See also http://onlydetect.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/ellery-queen-the-chinese-orange-mystery-1934

Mike Grost