"You have all the clues, but do you know which ones point to the killer?"- Ellery Queen (The Adventure of the Disappearing Dagger, 1976)
Jon L. Breen is what Ellery Queen perhaps
would've described as a cat of many tales, who writes novels, short stories,
pastiches, editing anthologies and held court in "The Jury Box" of Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine as the resident reviewer for three decades –
following in the footsteps of John Dickson Carr, Anthony Boucher and Allen J. Hubin. In 2011, Breen handed the judicial hammer over to Steve Steinbock in
order to devote more time to writing fiction and editing collections.
 |
| The (Original) Justice League: Carr, Hubin, Boucher and Breen |
"The Jacket Blurbs Puzzle" was featured
in the double-sized March/April 2013 issue of EQMM and is set at Worden
University's Conference on Bestselling Fiction, where two of the five
participants in the bestseller conference are feuding faculty members. Cosmo
McDougall from the English Department wrote a handful of political suspense
novels and a dash of light verses, which are sprinkled through out the story.
And not without a reason. In the other corner we have a physics professor, Amos
Bosworth, who has a technically accurate techno-thriller from the Tom Clancy
knock-off line to his writing credits. Bosworth has requested a cover blurb for
his novel from McDougall, who hates doing them and had hidden a cutesy, if
unflattering, message in the quote.
McDougall wrote a cover blurb for each of
the panelists, which were reproduced in the story, because they've all got a
message hidden in them and this time they're subtler. But not subtle enough,
apparently, when someone knifes McDougall. It takes a while to actually get to
this point, but what this story is really about is decoding the hidden subtext
in the blurbs – one of which contains a motive for murder. The blurbs do
require you to look at it and think for a bit, but it's a solvable puzzle
gracefully sidestepping the trap of resembling a maddening cipher from the
Zodiac Killer.
"The Parson's Nose" is Breen’s
contribution to the latest double-sized issue of EQMM and makes Ellery
Queen’s favored trope, that of the "Dying Message," the bone of contention in a
murder trial. The Rev. Henry Anstruther of the State Street Church is seen at
the opening participating in embezzling church funds, but was this the motive
for the stabbing of his secretary, Ms. Bancroft, who confided before her death
that she was on to something. However, did Ms. Bancroft accuse Anstruther when
she drove a letter opener in the picture of the reverend – smack in the middle
of his nose, to be precise.
Gordon Moon represents the defense and
argues against the interpretation of these last acts, even distancing himself from
the trope and fiction itself, "I've seen it many times myself, but always on
the pages of fiction." And "Why do you think Ms. Bancroft didn't just
write down the name of the killer rather than go this esoteric route?" Quite
a bit of lampshading, huh? But hey, even Perry Mason would've disowned Erle Stanley Gardner, if that got a client off the hook.
Moon points out a number of
possibilities, but the solution is suggested in the final lines, which keeps a
lingering sense of mystery even after the story had ended. But the implication treads
dangerously close to the mask-clock-teaspoon puzzle, described Henri Bencolin in
The Four False Weapons (1937), where all the enigmatic clues are
rendered pointless when the murder is solved by finding the killer's
fingerprint on the victim's collar and I expected something more from the
letter opener-picture clue – even if Moon placed the story outside of fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment