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

This book has some really interesting upstate NY backgrounds, and some informative information about the prison system of the time (including a really harrowing execution by electric chair, an important clue, by the way), and good stuff about crooked and hack politicians. It's also interesting that the first - person narrator is a woman (the Britney Spears of GAD detection) - not something EQ was into as a technique. What is wrong, then, that makes this only a 'second - rank' Ellery Queen? First of all, there is the interminable rigmarole of the 'left - handed/left - footed ' evidence. Like OJ and DNA samples. No wonder the jury didn't buy it! (But why they found that pathetic creature, the framee, guilty, twice, in this book says little for their intelligence or perception.) Second, ex - Inspector Thumm and his daughter (and Drury Lane) stay upstate for months, doing nothing. Thumm has a busy detective agency to run, so how can he do this? Still, a fine mystery, with a really good surprise at the end, best of which is the villain's motivation - real whack on the head to the reader. Lane's logical elimination of suspects at the climax is nearly classic, if it weren't so Talmudic (by that I mean the sort of logic that drops out all sorts of other arguments that would involve non - axiomatic premises).

Wyatt James

The Tragedy of Z (1933) is the most impressive of the Drury Lane novels. Its great glory is the finale, where the detective moves through great chains of evidence to deduce the killer. One would hope there would be more finales like this in detective fiction, where logical deduction reigns supreme; but unfortunately it has all too infrequently been taken as a model. Of all mystery writers, Ellery Queen is the one most interested in reason. Logical deduction is the very essence of the Queen universe.

Mike Grost