Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

The glory days of radio mystery extended from the 1930s through ’50s, but some are determined to keep the lost (or maybe just misplaced) art of dramatic radio alive through recordings of old shows — that admirable outfit Radio Spirits (radiospirits.com), for example, offers tapes of Dragnet, Richard Diamond, Suspense, The Whistler, and many other mystery series — or through new programs in the traditional style.

Jim French Productions (jimfrenchproductions.com) offers an array of fully professional programs, of which the flagship is The Adventures of Harry Nile, which debuted on Seattle radio in 1976 and now totals more than 150 episodes. Chronologically based between the late ’30s and early ’50s, eleven volumes of shows, usually six to a CD, are available at $15.95 each. Sampling volume 11, I found the programs unremarkable in plotting but rich in old-radio ambience, most reminiscent of the Sam Spade program, though less insistently facetious. Also on offer are fine Raffles adaptations, new Sherlock Holmes adventures, and an enjoyable paranormal investigative series, Kincaid The Strange-Seeker.

Only a few episodes of The Adventures of Ellery Queen, one of the best of the 1940s mystery series, have been available on tape. Some scripts were published in EQMM or in Queen anthologies, but most of those in a new collection of 14 have been unavailable in any form since their initial broadcast.

**** Ellery Queen: The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries, Crippen & Landru, $45 hardcover with additional short play in pamphlet form, $20 trade paper. The volume begins superbly with “The Adventure of the Last Man Club,” broadcast on June 25, 1939, and finishes with the especially ingenious title story, broadcast on May 9, 1945. The early one-hour scripts, represented by the first nine, are often more complex in plot and fully-fleshed in characters. Apart from dying messages, impossible crimes, and fairly presented clues, the scripts display the Queenian knack for varied backgrounds and telling period details. (Along with Marvin Lachman and Ted Hertel, Jr., I read some of the scripts and made selection recommendations to publisher Douglas G. Greene.)

*** Max Allan Collins: The War of the Worlds Murder, Berkley, $7.50. The radio medium’s most notorious prank, the H.G. Wells adaptation that caused a national panic in 1938, is the latest subject in a fine historical series, featuring an excellent depiction of Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre cohorts. The mystery is slighter than usual but appropriate to the subject matter. Collins’s reminiscences of the 1975 Chicago Bouchercon (including a skewering of the pseudonymous guest of honor) lead into the fictional plot with Shadow creator Walter B. Gibson as amateur sleuth.

*** Rupert Holmes: Swing, Random, $24.95. In his second novel, a multitalented double Edgar winner in the Best Play category takes us back to 1940 and the Golden Gate Exposition, where Ray Sherwood, a jazz-band saxophonist haunted by family tragedy, agrees to arrange a student musical composition and becomes involved in murder and intrigue. Musicians especially should appreciate the clever use of the orchestration process as key to a mystery plot. The novel is accompanied by a half-hour CD of excellent original music in period style, with music and lyrics (and in some cases vocal performance) by author Holmes. (One rare anachronism: Today in the San Francisco Bay Area, and certainly in 1940, the University of California campus is known simply as Cal, not Cal Berkeley.)

*** Lyn Hamilton: The Moai Murders, Berkley, $22.95. Toronto antique dealer Lara McClintoch travels to Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island) and be-comes involved with the various attendees at a conference on the mysterious statues of the title. In an example of the travelogue mystery at its best, geographical and historical de-tails are perfectly balanced with the surprising and fairly clued whodunit plot.

*** Deborah Donnelly: Death Takes a Honeymoon, Dell, $5.99. Seattle wedding planner Carnegie Kincaid goes to Idaho’s Sun Valley for the wedding of an old college friend turned TV star and winds up working in both her professional and amateur sleuthing capacities. Was her firefighter cousin’s death in a smoke-jumping accident actually murder? Though this one lacks the fair-play cluing of Died to Match (2002) and I hated the cliffhanger ending, Carnegie remains one of my favorite current amateur detectives thanks to the nice handling of the disparate plot elements, the effective action-suspense climax, and the customary verbal and situational humor.

*** Kathy Lynn Emerson: Face Down Below the Banqueting House, Perseverance, $13.95. In 1573, a pernicious advance man for Queen Elizabeth I who is planning a not-entirely-welcome visit to the estate of the happily widowed herbalist sleuth Susanna, Lady Appleton, causes no end of trouble. A remarkable store of vivid historical detail adds to the interest of an intriguing plot.

** Alex Flinn: Fade to Black, HarperTempest, $16.99. This young adult “problem” novel, concerning an attack on an HIV-positive Florida high school student and the classmate who becomes the obvious suspect, is sensitively written and should enthrall its target readership, but it works better as tolerance lesson than mystery. The novel seeks to explode myths about HIV, but the way the student was infected, though possible, is among the least likely modes of transmission.

** J.A. Konrath: Bloody Mary, Hyperion, $22.95. The second case for Chicago police detective Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels moves from the hunt for a serial killer who leaves behind dismembered body parts to a get-the-scumbag legal novel. The most interesting sequences involve the killer’s methods of beating the polygraph and his other efforts to get off on an insanity plea. Like so many in the current market, the novel has too much emphasis on the main character’s romantic and family life. Also used as pad-ding are “humanizing” cop conversations that hark back to Dragnet.

** Stephen Spignesi: Dialogues, Bantam, $23. Why did Tory Troy, an animal-shelter euthanasia technician, murder six of her colleagues in the shelter gas chamber, and is she competent to stand trial? This ambitious first novel, told almost entirely in dialogue, starts beautifully and grips the reader for most of its length, but loses credibility with some unconvincing courtroom action. The conclusion is a variation on an old chestnut that sometimes works but this time doesn’t.