Always disappointing to reread a book you liked and find it’s pretty lousy.
That happened for me with two different Ellery Queen (i.e., cousins and co-authors Frederic Dannay and Manny Lee) books I recently reread,
The Four of Hearts (1938) and
The Origin of Evil (1951).
Both books are “
Period II” EQ, which I consider (or used to consider) his best, blending the baroque plots of Period I and the at least decent writing of Period III.
The Four of Hearts used to be my favorite: a comical Hollywoodland book, feels a bit like a Thin Man (just more extravagantly plotted and weakly characterized). Problem is, it’s clunky; as Nick Fuller has written, the Queen cousins weren’t natural storytellers (unlike, say, fellow mystery-writer John Dickson Carr), and the characterization stinks. The Stuart and Royle families simply don’t come off as a real people, but as moviegoers’ view of Hollywood people.
I remembered the big twist, which
is honestly a real shocker—but unfortunately that twist isn’t
directly related to the identity of the murderer, which is disappointing. In order to misdirect the reader’s attention, the authors keep the killer offstage for most of the book (something that always feels like cheating) and only allude to this person’s motive once, early on.
Compare that to Carr, Agatha Christie, or G.K. Chesterton, who nearly always parade all the clues in front of your eyes the whole time—and still misdirect you from their real significance (and are better writers).
And a similarly disappointing plotting problem:
You go the whole book thinking there’s one brilliant killer plotting all this, but there are three different conspirators in the murder plot. It comes across as too big of a conspiracy: To paraphrase Carr, the point of a detective story is for one person to fool a hundred people, not for a hundred people to fool one person.
The Origin of Evil is even worse.
That, even though it’s better written and the characters better than
Four of Hearts. Delia Priam is one of the best characters the Queen cousins ever wrote. Weird, mysterious figures like Crowe Macgowan (who lives in a tree, a Carrollesque touch) and his insane, inane grandfather aren’t great character-portraits but are amusing and compelling.
As Mike Grost points out, the central plot conceit—“household under siege from avenger from the past”—is borrowed from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Cf. Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips,” “The
Gloria Scott,” “The Dancing Men,” “Wisteria Lodge,”
The Sign of the Four. Of course, Queen puts a twist on the conceit, but it’s always interesting to see the Holmes influences (Frederic Dannay was a big fan).
Anyway, the book moves at a rapid pace, with some solid twists and turns and good, continual sleuthing throughout (from private detective Ellery Queen, police detective Lt. Keats, and two amateurs).
And then it shoots itself to blazes.
Ellery’s supposed to be madly infatuated with Delia Priam, gorgeous wife of the old paraplegic taskmaster at the center of the book—until he finds out she’s having an affair with her husband’s secretary Alfred Wallace, and he suddenly turns on her and lambastes her, and after that she basically gets written out of the book. Wha? Ellery, the supposedly openminded and super-liberal sleuth?
It’s an enormously disappointing and mean-spirited choice the cousins made for their best character, who’s far from flawless but for that likable and interesting. I’d prefer to read about Delia than Ellery, no kiddin’.
Then it gets worse.
Ellery comes up with a surprising but flawed solution to the mystery—and then, in an exciting climax, gives us an even better solution that explains everything.
Unfortunately,
that second solution is based on a tiny, minor clue, mentioned early on and then never referenced again. A whole novel and the solution is based on one clue?
So, then Queen twists that solution, too—and gives us a third solution that’s horrible, wrecking that second solution, which is underclued but clever and surprising. It’s a huge disappointment, and
then we get the Ellery character making a stupid and nonsensical decision.
The Queen cousins’ view on their characters is fascinating but kind of awful: They sideline their best character, have Ellery disparage her, and then have him praise a wicked character. It makes Ellery the character look like a jerk.
All in all, both are woefully disappointing both as mysteries and as novels. I’ve always known the cousins did their best work on short stories, where characterization is less important, but I’d never before realized these novels were this bad. Hoping that on reread
Ten Days’ Wonder and
Cat of Nine Tails will live up to how I remember them, but kind of worried they won’t.