Halfway House - Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee)

A while back I read an Ellery Queen novel for the first time in many years and found that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected to. My review of that book met with considerable disagreement from EQ fans. That really made me want to read another one in the series because sometimes, to be honest, if I don’t like a book it’s more my fault than the book itself. In looking over the list of EQ novels, I made an interesting discovery: I’d read all of the early novels (the ones with a place name and an object in the title, starting with THE ROMAN HAT MYSTERY), and many of the later books from the late Fifties through the Sixties and Seventies, but almost none of the books from the middle period. The first one on the list that I was pretty sure I hadn’t read was HALFWAY HOUSE, from 1936, so I figured that’s the one I would try next and, if I enjoyed it, would continue on from there. (It was suggested in some of the discussion of the previous EQ review that some of the books are best read in order.)

HALFWAY HOUSE opens in Trenton, New Jersey, where Ellery has stopped over on his way back to New York. He runs into an old friend, attorney Bill Angell, who makes plans to travel to New York with Ellery after a brief meeting with his brother-in-law, a traveling salesman. This meeting is supposed to take place at an isolated house on the Delaware River. When Bill gets there, his brother-in-law is dead, stabbed in the heart. Naturally, Bill calls his old friend the great detective to help him find out what happened.

It's difficult to talk much about the plot in this novel without venturing too far into spoiler territory. Let’s just say that someone close to Bill is arrested for the murder, put on trial (in a lengthy sequence that takes up the whole middle section of the book), and convicted. But Bill and, of course, Ellery aren’t convinced that person is actually guilty, so Ellery continues his investigation and eventually uncovers the real killer—but not before pausing to interject a Challenge to the Reader, a regular feature of the EQ series in the early days.

I don’t know what sort of reputation this novel has among Ellery Queen fans, but man, I absolutely had a great time reading it. Ellery hasn’t quite shed all of his Philo Vance-like origins, but such instances are few and far between and not all that annoying. Mostly he’s a very likable protagonist. The story moves along briskly, the plot has plenty of twists and turns, the clues are planted fairly, and the writing is good enough that I was eagerly flipping the pages to find out what happened. And the Challenge to the Reader brought back a lot of good memories from when I was a regular reader of the series decades ago. (For the record, I actually did pick out the killer in this one, and it was mostly deduction, not guesswork.)

I really enjoyed HALFWAY HOUSE and am glad to see that I’m still an Ellery Queen fan. I’m going to continue with the series soon.

Cat of Many Tails - Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee)

The older I get, the more I seem to turn back to the authors and series I loved when I was a kid. I read a bunch of Ellery Queen novels in junior high and high school, and one occasionally since then, but I’ll bet it’s been thirty years or more since I last checked in with Ellery and Inspector Queen. Being in the mood to do that, I picked up one I’d never read back in the old days, 1948’s CAT OF MANY TAILS.

I’ve seen this book referred to as the first great American serial killer novel. It’s probably the earliest serial killer novel I’ve ever read, and it’s one of the rare occasions when a traditional mystery strayed into that subgenre. Set in a long, tense summer and fall in New York City, the plot revolves around a mysterious murderer dubbed The Cat by the sensationalistic press. At irregular intervals, The Cat strangles seemingly random victims who have no connection with each other, causing the police to believe he’s a psychopath. The city goes crazy with fear, leading to riots. Ellery Queen is recruited by the Mayor to take on the job of special investigator. This goes against Ellery’s better judgment, as he’s already haunted by a failure in a previous case that caused a man’s death. But he sets out to solve the case anyway and slowly begins to uncover a pattern in the killings.

The keyword in that last sentence is “slowly”, because man, this book goes on and on. The Ellery Queen novels were never what you’d consider thrill-a-minute affairs, but I don’t recall ever reading one that drags as much as this one. Yes, the basic plot is clever—I never read an Ellery Queen story where this wasn’t the case—and Dannay and Lee pull a late plot twist that’s effective, if a bit predictable. But many of the scenes along the way go on at great length and seem to serve no real purpose. The writing (most of which was done by Lee, I recall) is overly literary at times and slows things down even more.

I have to admit that once things start moving at a faster clip in the second half of the book, it does generate a certain amount of suspense, and Danny and Lee do an admirable job of delving into the psychology of a serial killer. But there’s not much deduction involved—Ellery just stumbles over the two main clues that break the case open—and nothing approaching the famous Challenges to the Reader in the early books. No reader could have solved this one because the information simply isn’t there. Then, after that final twist, the book kind of just stops, which prompted me to say “Wait, that’s it?”

Well. When I started this book, I never anticipated panning it up one way and down the other. I love the Ellery Queen series; at least, I remember loving the books when I read them many years ago. But CAT OF MANY TAILS is a clear miss for me. However, in an odd way, it makes me want to read another one I never got around to back then, to see if my reaction to this one was just a fluke. Maybe I’ll find out soon.

Where Is Bianca? - Ellery Queen (Talmage Powell)

I wouldn’t be surprised if every one of you reading this knows that cousins Frederic Danny and Manfred B. Lee created the pseudonym and the character Ellery Queen. And most, if not all, of you are also aware that during the Sixties, Dannay and Lee contracted with several ghostwriters to turn out a number of novels published under the Ellery Queen name, mostly stand-alones but including a couple of series, one of them six books published by Popular Library featuring one-eyed New York City police detective Captain Tim Corrigan.

I owned all six of those paperbacks at one time or another, but I know you won’t be surprised to hear that I never got around to reading any of them. However, on a whim, I recently picked up the e-book edition of the first novel in the series, WHERE IS BIANCA?, and figured it was time I finally read a Tim Corrigan novel.

The eyepatch-wearing Corrigan lost his left eye while serving in the Korean War, then worked with the OSS, and then became a cop despite the patch not being regulation. His old army buddy Chuck Baer is a private detective in New York, and rather than being at odds with each other, as many fictional cops and private eyes are, they frequently work so closely together on cases that Baer almost might as well be a cop himself.

In WHERE IS BIANCA?, the body of a young woman is found in the sewers and is in such bad shape that identifying her is a challenge. Baer has been hired to locate wealthy Bianca Lessard, who owns a number of theaters around the country, including several in New York. She had a fight with her husband and walked out of their swanky apartment. When she never came back, her worried husband hired Baer to locate her. The corpse in the sewer is wearing a distinctive ring that belonged to Bianca Lessard, but then Corrigan and Baer turn up two more missing women who might be the victim, and that starts them on a hunt through a circle of Broadway actors, producers, and playwrights, all of whom seem to have shady pasts and/or secrets they want to keep hidden. It’s a classic setup for a murder mystery in which the identity of the victim is just as much a puzzle as that of the killer.

The ghostwriter behind the EQ byline on this novel is Talmage Powell, a well-regarded hardboiled mystery author under his own name. Years ago I read and enjoyed some of his novels featuring Florida private eye Ed Rivers. I’ve always found him to be a dependable author, but I thought WHERE IS BIANCA? was a bit of a disappointment. The plot is solid, but the characterization is pretty flat. We don’t really get to know much about anybody except Tim Corrigan, and to be honest, he’s just not that likable or interesting. The book is lacking in humor, and Powell tells the story in bland, “Just the facts, ma’am” prose that falls flat as well. It’s certainly not terrible—it read quickly and I was never tempted to not finish it—but I was expecting more.

The next two books in the series were ghosted by Richard Deming, who I generally consider a better writer than Powell although they’re certainly similar, so I’ll give them a try as well. If nothing else, the books are short and punchy and often that’s just what I want.

One more note: I don’t know who did the cover artwork on the Popular Library edition from 1966, which you can see at the top of this post, but when I looked at it I immediately thought of Nick Fury and Countess Valentina Allega de Fontaine. I don’t have any way of knowing if Jim Steranko ever saw the Tim Corrigan paperbacks, but that cover sure reminds me of Nick and Val hanging around Fury’s apartment in NICK FURY, AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D. #1, the classic story “Who Is Scorpio?” that appeared in 1968, two years after WHERE IS BIANCA? I’d like to think that paperback influenced one of my all-time favorite comic book stories, but who knows?