"Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest."- Cicero
Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee
garnered their fame under a joint pseudonym, "Ellery
Queen," which became a franchise that spawned radio plays, TV-series,
movies, comic books, board games, jigsaw puzzles and the illustrious Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine. All of that sprang from a bibliography as
labyrinthine as one of their plots.
After The Finishing
Stroke (1958), Lee was plagued by writer's block and the tandem decided
to summon a flurry of ghostwriters to flesh-out Dannay's skeletal manuscripts,
which was kept under wraps at the time, but the list of writers who operated as
Ellery Queen included some interesting names – such as Avram Davidson and Edward
D. Hoch. You can easily confuse one ghostwriter for the other, but I wasted
a good fifteen minutes searching (angrily) for the hired hand behind The
Glass Village (1954). It turned out there was none!
The Glass Village is a non-series novel and therefore I presumed, erroneously, it had
to be ghostwritten, but I eventually stumbled to the fact that it was an Ellery
Queen original. One of the few Dannay and Lee wrote without Ellery or Richard
Queen.
It's an unusual, character-driven
courtroom drama/legal thriller set in a sparsely populated, dying backwater,
called Shinn Corners, tucked away in the New England countryside.
Shinn Corners lies in a valley, "looking
like a cluster of boils on an old man’s neck," with stretches of "untidy
land," the dried-up remains of what had "once been a prosperous river"
and "the huddle of once white buildings" – giving a home to a dwindling
community that has been "reduced to a total population of thirty-six."
Over the past hundred years, the towns surrounding the valley had slowly lured
away a lot of the working force of the tiny hamlet. The scattered "ruins of
houses and barns and mills" and the remnants of a factory building are
tangible reminders of a period when the village prospered, which now, in spite
of its constant struggle for existence, keeps getting poorer every year. But at
least it's a peaceful place.
Judge Lewis Shinn explains to a visiting
relative from New York, Johnny Shinn, a veteran of World War II and the Korean
War, how the grim specter of murder has graced the village only three times in "two hundred and fifty some years" – which occurred between 1739 and
fifteen years before the events described in the book. A local boy was killed
in an act of self-defense by a hired farm hand from outside of the community, "a
furriner," who was acquitted by a court in a neighboring town and that left
the villagers feeling deprived of justice. It will have some far-reaching
consequences when murder returns to Shinn Corners about a century ahead of
schedule.
Ninety-one year old Aunt Fanny, described
as "a fabulous old lady," was born in Shinn Corners and became a minor
celebrity in her eighties when she began to paint. She made "a fortune out
of her Christmas cards, wallpaper and textile designs" and her paintings
can fetch up to fifteen hundred dollars. A brief conversation she had with
Johnny Shinn revealed her as one of the more kinder, understanding people of
the village, but, of course, that was not to last – as someone obliterated her
skull with a fire-poker in her paint room.
The brutal murder of Aunt Fanny coincides
with the arrival in the village of a Polish tramp, named Josef Kowalczyk, who
had been admitted to the United States in 1947, but the villagers, naturally
suspicious of outsiders, want swift justice against the foreign element they
hold responsible for the death of one of their own. They have evidence backing
them: a hundred and twenty-four dollars was missing from a cinnamon jar from
Aunt Fanny's home and that amount was discovered "in a dirty knotted
handkerchief tied to a rope slung around Kowalczyk's naked waist," which
clinches it for the angry villagers.
They refuse to hand over Kowalczyk to
outside authorities, remembering what happened fifteen years previously, which
lead to an armed standoff with a dozen state troopers. In order to prevent a
blood bath, Judge Shinn convinces those outside authorities, including the
governor, to stage a show trail in the village. It's a ruse "to allow
tempers to cool down so the prisoner can be got safely away" and "tried
in the regular way in a court of proper jurisdiction." The trial has to be
purposely botched so it can be overturned at a later date.
Judge Shinn describes himself as "an
unmitigated scoundrel" where "defending constitutional democracy and due
process is concerned," which is forgivable, but his personal motivation seems
a bit snooty and self-aggrandizing – stating that “even in a democracy”
people "can't always be trusted" and basically have to be protected from
themselves by "individuals here and there." Individuals such as himself.
The inhabitants of Shinn Corners are portrayed throughout the book as bone-headed
bigots, but the judge is really no different, except that his bigotry appears respectable,
by "critically" gazing inwards instead of focusing on outsiders.
You've got to cut the people of Shinn Corner some slack,
because here you have a small, dwindling and largely isolated community of
hardworking, but very poor, people confronted with a stranger in
possession of money that was stolen from one of their own who had just been
murdered. It does not excuse the formation of a lynch mob, but I expected at
least a small amount of understanding and sympathy for the villagers. There
was, however, not a drop of that to be found.
Anyhow, the trial takes up the second
part of the book and this is the point where the detective-element of the plot
finally begins to manifest itself, which had previously been wrapped up in
character-introductions, a tour of the village, a man-hunt and snippets of
social commentary about justice, communism, war and McCarthyism. Everyone's
whereabouts at the time of the murder are subtly checked, the final painting of
Aunt Fanny receives a closer examination and there's the all-important clue of
the missing pile of chopped firewood. All of this reveals the real killer in
time to prevent a second attempt at lynching the hapless tramp.
The heart of the plot, clues and
alibi-trick might have been better suited for a short story or novella, but, on
a whole, I found The Glass Village a fascinating read and surprised it
was never adapted as a TV-movie or mini-series. It would lend itself perfect
for that and today's audience would probably enjoy the morally ambiguous cast
of characters. Anyway, it was a very interesting, unusual and surprisingly
successful attempt on Ellery Queen's part at writing a more serious crime
novel. Because they made similar attempts before and some of them were outright
disastrous (e.g. Calamity
Town, 1942). It's also the reason why I could not bring myself to title
this blog-post The Polish Tramp Mystery.
I read this decades ago in Italian, so I really must pick it up in English - it is easy to get? I never imagines, ever, that Queen would be ab author who largely fall out of print in his (their) native land - madness!
ReplyDeleteSorry for the late response, but I was rather distracted the last couple of days. Anyhow, it's insane that such an important name, attached to an even more important magazine, fell out-of-print, but most of them are readily available on the secondhand market. They appear to be being reprinted at the moment as ebooks.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's incomprehensible how Ellery Queen seems to have had a better, longer and continues print run outside of the U.S. and the English speaking world in general. In the past few years, I saw covers of brand new editions from Japan, Russia and Denmark. I remember there were even some Dutch reprints in the mid-2000s.