The Chinese Orange Mystery

Foreword

I am naturally prejudiced in favor of my friend Mr. Ellery Queen. Friendship aborts the critical faculties; especially friendship which has been invited to partake of fame. And yet, ever since those ancient days when I was first persuading Ellery to whip his notes into fiction form — through all the exciting novels that followed that first adventure — I cannot recall being more genuinely impressed than I was as I read the manuscript of The Chinese Orange Mystery.

It might well have been subtitled: The Crime That Was Backwards. With a further addendum: The Most Remarkable Murder-Case of Modern Times. But, as I say, I am prejudiced and perhaps that is a modest overstatement. The point is that if the crime itself was extraordinary, the mentality that went to work upon it was gigantic. Even now, knowing the answer, I sometimes disbelieve. And yet it was all so simple, indeed so inevitable... The trouble is, as Ellery likes to point out, that all puzzles are irritatingly cryptic until you know the answer, and then you wonder why you were baffled so long. But I cannot quite subscribe to that; it took genius to solve the crime that was backwards, and I will stick to that opinion tho’ Hell freeze over and I lose my friend — which is a potent possibility.

Sometimes, too, I feel secretly glad that I had nothing to do with that case. Ellery, who is in many ways a thinking machine, is no respecter of friendships when logic points an accusing finger. And it might very well have been that had I been in some way involved — if even as, let us say, Donald Kirk’s attorney — Ellery might have caused good Sergeant Velie to clap the cuffs on my poor wrists. For it is remarkable that when I was at college I achieved a definitely fleeting fame in two athletic fields: I was my class backstroke swimming champion, and I rowed stroke-oar on the crew.

How these innocent facts would have made me a potential — no, no, a very active — suspect in the murder with which these pages are concerned I shall leave you to discover — unquestionably with pleasure — for yourself.

J. J. McC.

NEW YORK

“The detection — or rather the solution — of crime calls for a combination of scientist and seer in the completest development of the detective. The genius for prophesying from events is a very special endowment of Nature and has been granted in its highest form only to a favored few...

“I might paraphrase that interesting observation in Schlegel’s Athenæum which goes:

‘Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet?’

by pointing out that: ‘The detective is a prophet looking backwards.’ Or Carlyle’s more subtle observation about history by agreeing that: The process of detection (as opposed to History) is ‘a distillation of rumor.’”

— Excerpt from an Anonymous Article in Esoterica Americana, Attributed by Some to Matsoyuma Tahuki, the Noted Japanese Authority on the Occident.