Queen, Ellery - The Egyptian Cross Mystery

The best part of The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) is the surrealist storytelling in its first third (Chapters 1 - 11). This section covers the first two murders. The plotting is surrealist to the max. It is apparently the first EQ book to invoke Alice in Wonderland, to describe the events of the story; this will become common in later EQ books, not to mention the Alice inspired crimes in "The Mad Tea Party" (1934). Alice is also evoked in The Tragedy of Y (1932); it is not clear which novel was written first. There is some good deduction in Chapter 24, but otherwise the detective work and solution are fairly simple compared to other early EQ books. Its simplicity, and effect of working within a tight plot with little room to maneuver, does anticipate the minimalist works of the 1940's, such as Calamity Town.

The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) contains ideas and techniques that will resurface in EQ's books starting in the late 1940's. Much of the imagery involves religion, a subject that will return in many post 1945 Queen novels, such as Ten Days Wonder (1948), Cat of Many Tails (1949), The Player on the Other Side (1963), and And on the Eighth Day (1964). Also noteworthy is that it is one of the first stories in which Ellery finds a hidden pattern in a series of phrases or names (Chapter 5). This will become a prominent part of the EQ saga in such stories as "The Inner Circle" (1947), and "Payoff" (1964), and is related to plot ideas in Ten Days Wonder, Double, Double (1950) and The Finishing Stroke (1958). The early scenes showing the effect that a killing has on a rural community, anticipate the more elaborate portrait of a killer's effect on New York City in Cat of Many Tails.

Mike Grost

The Egyptian Cross Mystery, the fifth Ellery Queen novel, contains vendettas, decapitations, crucificions and plenty of travel by trains, planes and automobiles. The plot revolves around the murders of seemingly unconnected individuals by similar methods. Queen’s logic is at times spot on, other times quite suspect. Plenty of red herrings are tossed about, especially in the slow moving middle section set on the Long Island estate of one of the victims. The murderer’s motive for the killings seems much too weak to account for all the intricate planning, effort, violence and gore that follow. Also, the assumptions the murderer makes about the behaviors of certain characters after each of the murders (although true enough in the story) strain belief in real life. Any deviations in the predicted behaviors would have ruined the murderer’s plans. Finally, the “prisoner/captive” bit near the end is even more unbelievable than all the other unbelievable events that preceded it.

After all that criticism, I still enjoyed the ride Queen sent me on---but this is not Queen’s best work.

Bob Schneider

See also: http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2011/05/book-you-have-to-read-egyptian-cross.html