Queen, Ellery - The Finishing Stroke

The Finishing Stroke (1958) is an uneven but quite inventive book. On first reading years ago, it disappointed me. This was perhaps due to problems of design, and proportion. The book has a subplot, introduced early, about Santa Claus, and much else. Then it has a main plot, dealing with the presents, and the murder. The subplot is more creative than the main murder plot. This makes the finale, when all is revealed about the murder, seem anticlimactic to earlier events dealing with the subplot. Also, the killer's motive, and the way the main plot is tied to the killer's identity, seem thin.

However, a recent re-reading makes clear that the book is a rich source of Queen ideas and plotting. It develops mystery themes in Queen's previous tales in new and interesting directions. The subplot echoes earlier ideas in The Tragedy of X, The American Gun Mystery, The Siamese Twin Mystery. It is one of the most fully developed treatments of this theme in Queen, with many different plot ideas and situations spun off it. It also extends these into the realm of the impossible crime, including Queen's specialty of the Impossible Disappearance.

The main plot echoes "The Mad Tea Party", with a series of mysterious presents in an isolated house party in a country home. The whole idea of "series" also invokes such later Queen novels as Ten Days Wonder, Cat of Many Tails, and Double, Double. However, the solution, while formally ingenious, is less meaningful than the solutions of those novels, which deal with more resonant and significant material. This makes the book seem more abstract, more purely formal, than these earlier works. However, the solution also has its own interest. The series approach is merged with others here. The cards and doodles, while not Dying Messages, also require interpretation by the detective in a way that formally resembles the Dying Message kind of mystery story. The doodles are the sort of non-verbal message running through many of Queen's works, such as The Tragedy of X and The Scarlet Letters.

There are other echoes in the novel of Queen traditions. The way the story takes place on holidays reflects Calamity Town and The Calendar of Crime. The scene with the clothes (Chapter 7) recalls the search through the main character's vast wardrobe in The King is Dead, the most memorable episode in that book.

The Finishing Stroke is one of EQ's few attempts to write historical fiction. Most of the book takes place in 1929. It is a detective novel in the Golden Age style, and EQ has set it in the era of Golden Age fiction, the 1920's. This gambit was unique and original when EQ published the book, but since has become widely imitated, with contemporary authors frequently setting their Golden Age pastiches in the 1920's. EQ's method of evoking history is mainly to make a rich survey of the arts, letters and politics of 1929, all of which are mentioned and discussed throughout the novel. Since EQ books in general are full of historical cultural background on their events, the feel of the book is actually not that different from Queen's contemporary works. A story like "The Dauphin's Doll", for example, while set in the present, opens with a historical account of dolls and dollmaking.

Mike Grost