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The Tragedy of X

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 2 months ago

Queen, Ellery (as Barnaby Ross) - The Tragedy of X

 

This is one of the best Ellery Queens under whatever name. It has several flaws, but it does rank very highly. The settings are especially good and really rooted in the period, both New York City around 1930 and Drury Lane's wonderful 'retirement community'. And the dual plot is excellently set up and rendered. But I'm not convinced that the murder method (in the first murder) is feasible and would do any more than just make one feel nauseated. A lot of GAD writers come up with interesting poisons but don't necessarily do their research properly. [Cyanide, for example, was often misused. One does not 'drop dead' after a gasp in two seconds after imbibing this potation - it takes anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes to kill.] The solution is a variation on Chesterton's invisible man theme and is absolutely brilliant.

 

Wyatt James


EQ created a new detective in retired Shakespearean actor Drury Lane, starring him in four novels of 1932 - 1933. Like Ellery Queen, Drury Lane is an amateur detective of genius who works closely with the police, in the Van Dine school tradition. His first appearance is in The Tragedy of X (1932). The best parts of that book concern the character of Drury Lane himself, his associates, and his gift for disguise. His estate on the Hudson shows EQ's interest in design, just like the references to Art Deco in The French Powder Mystery. The mystery in this book is elaborate, involving three complex murders, and the finale is deductive, as in all of the early EQ books, but the solution is far fetched, and the mystery plot is not especially imaginative. The first crime shows some of EQ's gift for surrealistic mise-en-scène.

 

The third contains the first "dying message" in Queen's books. It is not known which mystery writer was the first to use this device; Conan Doyle included it in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891) in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It is found in Isabel Ostrander's The Clue in the Air (1917), the delirious woman's words in Donald McGibeny's 32 Caliber (1920), Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and Christie's Ostrander spoof "Finessing the King" in Partners in Crime (1924), the second section of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1927), and in Earl Derr Biggers' Behind That Curtain (1928), for instance. Aside from Doyle and Christie, all of these writers are American, and it seems to be an American tradition. Biggers' work is especially close to Queen's in that it involves a non-verbal clue. The dying message is found in the works of several later authors, all American, most of whom were probably directly influenced by Ellery Queen. These include several of Anthony Boucher's tales, Robert Leslie Bellem's "Death's Passport" (1940), Rex Stout's "The Zero Clue" (1953), Patricia McGerr's "The Bloody Mustache" (1981), William L. DeAndrea's Killed on the Ice (1984), Jon L. Breen's Triple Crown (1985) (see the fourth section) and "Starstruck" (1987), James Yaffe's Mom Meets Her Maker (1990), Edward D. Hoch's "Waiting for Mrs. Ryder" (1994) and "The Trail of the Bells" (1985). There is also a British thriller tradition, in which the dying person gasps out, not the identity of the killer, but some information about the thriller plot, often fairly cryptic. This is a fundamentally different kind of story. Examples include Valentine Williams' dismal The Orange Divan (1923), Alfred Hitchcock's film version of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), and Agatha Christie's spy novel They Came to Baghdad (1951). Christie's book shows the greatest ingenuity among these thriller examples. Among EQ's works, "The Adventure of the Last Man Club" (1939) has this second sort of dying message.

 

The least interesting dying message tales in EQ are the pure ones, in which Ellery investigates the possible meanings of a message, and little else: such tales as "The Adventure of the March of Death" (1939) or "Mum Is the Word" (1966). The dying messages become more ingenious when the message concept is mixed in with more complex variations. These tend to be structural variants on the whole concept of the dying message. Trying to discuss such tales, or even name them, risks giving away that such stories are in fact variants on the dying message gimmick: something that is often not obvious at first in the tales themselves.

 

Mike Grost

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