Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

©1999 by Jon L. Breen

Since this issue commemorates the seventieth anniversary of Ellery Queen’s appearance on the mystery scene, every item in this column will have an Ellery Queen connection. Given the range of the Queen team’s authorial and editorial activities, making the connections is no strain at all.

For example, what did the Queen team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee have in common with Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar), the subject of Tom Nolan’s outstanding biography Ross Macdonald: A Life (Scribner, $32)? To put it simply, a determination to explore serious themes through the medium of detective fiction without ever deserting the kind of intricate puzzle-spinning and fair-play clueing that makes it a distinctive genre. Macdonald, husband of novelist Margaret Millar, was an unusual person: prodigiously intelligent, shy, athletic, generous, haunted by demons from the past. Nolan’s account explores events of his subject’s personal life never before related in much detail, especially the tragic teenage years and death at age 31 of the Millars’ only daughter Linda, and Macdonald’s gradual deterioration due to Alzheimer’s disease. Ultimately, for all his quirkiness, the subject comes across as a thoroughly admirable human being as well as a serious and gifted writer.

**** Lynne Barrett: The Secret Names of Women, Carnegie Mellon University Press, distributed by Cornell University Press Services, P.O. Box 6525, Ithaca, NY 14850; $15.95. One of editor Queen’s priorities was to obliterate the arbitrary line between “literary” and “genre” fiction, and certainly that demarcation is less sharply drawn than it once was. Only one of the eight stories in this terrific collection, the Edgar-winning “Elvis Lives” (EQMM, September 1990), qualifies as crime fiction, but Barrett shows her attachment to the genre by no less than three Erle Stanley Gardner/Perry Mason references. Of the non-criminous tales, “Hush Money” is a great speculation about the source of one of Marilyn Monroe’s key attributes, while “Meet the Impersonators” is a darkly funny and affecting 1986 story about a small-time rock band.

**** Doug Allyn: All Creatures Dark and Dangerous, Crippen & Landru, P.O. Box 9315, Norfolk, VA 23505; $40 signed limited; $16 trade paperback. Seven stories about Michigan veterinarian and amateur detective Dr. Westbrook, all from EQMM and two Readers Award winners, are gathered in this first collection by Edgar-winner Allyn. Though Westbrook has the traditional local police contact, his constantly surprising and agreeably told cases follow anything but conventional lines. Bibliographer Queen might have found a place for this book in that checklist of important volumes of short mystery fiction, Queen’s Quorum.

*** Paula L. Woods: Inner City Blues, Norton, $23.95. In the July 1948 EQMM, editor Queen presented Hughes Allison’s “Corollary,” a landmark story in its realistic depiction of a Negro police detective. Editor Paula L. Woods included it in her great scholarly anthology of black mystery fiction Spooks Spies, and Private Eyes (Doubleday, 1995) and now has added her own police detective to the growing ranks of African-American sleuths. L.A. Homicide detective Charlotte Justice’s first book-length case takes place during the 1992 Rodney King riots, allowing for a vivid depiction of a city and a police department in chaos as well as the subtle social levels of the black community. The only drawback, a small one in such an involving novel, is occasionally clumsy exposition through dialogue. (An even smaller complaint: Shouldn’t someone in the editorial process have noted it should be “just deserts” on page 44 and not “just desserts” — or has a pun transmogrified into standard usage?)

*** Akimitsu Takagi: The Informer, translated from the Japanese by Sadako Mizuguchi, Soho, $22. In the seventies, editor Queen gave a boost to Japanese detective fiction in translation with the anthology Ellery Queens Japanese Golden Dozen. Though not a contributor to that volume, Takagi (1920–1995) shared with author Queen an interest in specialized backgrounds (in this case, the financial world and industrial espionage) and intricate, surprising puzzle plots. This is (I believe) only the third Takagi novel to appear in English.

*** Robert J. Randisi and Christine Matthews: Murder is the Deal of the Day, St. Martin’s, $22.95. The two cousins who were Ellery Queen formed the most famous collaborative byline in detective fiction history. Other notable ones included such husband-and-wife teams as Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, Kelley Roos, A.E. Maxwell, Frances and Richard Lockridge, and the Gordons. Now a married writing team introduces a promising new married sleuthing team, St. Louis book dealer Gil Hunt and TV shopping show emcee Claire Hunt, in an enjoyably low-key novel about the search for a serial killer of home shoppers.

** Della Borton: Fade to Black, Fawcett Gold Medal, $5.99. One of the Queens’ favorite devices was the dying message, and this novel of a movie-crazed Ohio family recycles one of the most famous dying messages of them all. As 82-year-old matriarch and former movie star Mae Liberty dies, her last word is “Rosebud.” There’s some nice writing and detail of the business of running a movie theatre, but the huge cast is hard to keep track of and the solution is less than Queenian in its impact.

Historical mystery fiction, now holding a considerable market share, was virtually unheard of in the early decades of EQMM when editor Queen encouraged Lilian de la Torre (with Dr. Sam: Johnson), Breni James (with Socrates), and Theodore Mathieson (with several famous onetime sleuths) to pioneer the celebrity detective story. Now whole volumes are devoted to them, such as editor Mike Ashley’s latest, Royal Whodunnits (Carroll & Graf, $11.95), with 25 original stories chronologically arranged from 1929 to 1949. In Stephen Baxter’s “The Modem Cyrano,” hitherto unknown passages from the diary of Queen Victoria show her a creditable amateur sleuth, while Richard A. Lupoff’s “News from New Providence” puts a somewhat unsympathetic Duke of Windsor in the same role. The royalty depicted are not all British: Edward D. Hoch’s typically fine “The Day the Dogs Died” concerns Napoleon, though not as detective, while Morgan Llewelyn’s “Woman in a Wheelchair” (clever even if you anticipate the main secret) takes a fresh look at the mystery of Princess Anastasia.

A fine series from Oxford University Press is keeping the Ellery Queen-Dorothy L. Sayers-Hugh Greene tradition of scholarly anthologies alive. Twelve Mystery Stories and Twelve Tales of Murder ($9.95 each) emphasize 19th and 20th century tales respectively, most the work of British authors, with fascinating introductions and author notes by learned and entertaining editor Jack Adrian. Rosemary Herbert has edited Twelve American Crime Stories ($9.95), which does the same for American writers, all 20th century save Poe and ranging from early humorist Ellis Parker Butler to contemporaries Edward D. Hoch and Tony Hillerman. Also available is Hoch’s earlier gathering of Twelve American Detective Stories ($9.95), a well-chosen selection ranging from Poe to Woolrich, including Futrelle, Queen, Rinehart and Chandler. (In Hoch’s informative author notes, he says the most notable Queen novels were Calamity Town [1942] and Cat of Many Tails [1949].)