The Finishing Stroke (1958) by Ellery Queen

The mystery writing cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, better known by their shared penname of "Ellery Queen," likely intended The Finishing Stroke (1958) to be their last Ellery Queen novel and designed a plot befitting a farewell performance to the American detective – an ambitious plot covering a period of fifty-two years. Fittingly, for this time of year, the story is written around a parody of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." So why not give it a second look now that nearly all memories of the story have faded from my memory. 

The Finishing Stroke begins on January, 1905, when publisher John Sebastian and his pregnant wife, Claire, were driving from New York to Rye in "a blizzard and smashed their car up near Mount Kidron." Fortunately, they crashed near a little house where Dr. Cornelius Hall lives, but, as a result of the accident, Claire went into premature labor and gave birth to twins. She survived delivering the first baby, but not the second. A wounded and shocked John denounced his second son on the spot ("the little monster killed my wife"), which is rather fortunate for Dr. Hall and his wife. They never had a child and that has remained a source of unhappiness to them.

John Sebastian agreed and promises to setup a trust fund, but dies of an untreated head injury less than a week later. He only acknowledged one son, John Sebastian Jr, who's to inherit his entire, multi-million dollar estate on his twenty-fifth birthday and is under the guardianship of his father business partner and friend, Arthur B. Craig. So nobody, except the Halls, knew there were two sons and they had a reason to keep quiet. This was also the year Ellery Queen was born.

Twenty-five years later, Ellery took his first, tentative steps as one of those meddlesome amateur detectives when helped his father navigate "the labyrinth of the Monte Field case" and wrote down the case in a bestselling novel, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) – reviews were, on a whole, nourishing. Only taking offense to the being called "a philovancish bookworm" and accused of being merely competent. But, on a whole, things were looking bright for the young author and sleuth. So he was going up in the world when he accepted an invitation to attend a Christmas and New Years house party in Alderwood, New York, culminating in a birthday bash.

Young John Sebastian is now "a dilettante poet of great charm" and an acquaintance of Ellery whose engaged to a fashionably textile designer, Rusty Brown, whose creations "were beginning to be mentioned in The New Yorker's 'The Talk of the Town''and sought out by Park Avenue." In two weeks time, John turns twenty-five and comes into his full inheritance as well as seeing his first book of verse published. So things are looking very bright for everyone and the reason why he's invited a dozen guests to the home of his guardian to celebrate the season. John promises a huge surprise at the end of the twelve-day holiday.

Arthur Craig is the host of the party and not only had he to be a father-figure to the young poet, but also to his orphaned niece, Ellen Craig, who's like a sister to John. Mrs. Olivette Brown is John's future mother-in-law who's a devotee of astrology and an amateur medium. Valentina Warren is a theatrical actress whose "great crusade" is to get to Hollywood to became a famous movie star. Marius Carlo is a composer with an "adoring clique of Greenwich Village poets, artists and musicians who had attached themselves to him like a fungus," but earned a living playing in Walter Damrosch's symphony orchestra "heard coast-to-coast each Saturday night at nine over NBC." Dr. Sam Dark has been the family doctor ever since he came to Alderwood and Roland Payn. Dan Z. Freeman, of The House of Freeman, is Ellery and John's publisher. Lastly, Reverend Mr. Andrew Gardiner, recently retired from his Episcopal rectorate in New York, who's a friend of the Browns. And, of course, Ellery Queen.

So an interesting cast of characters to put together for a fortnight in a large, rambling country house during the holidays and mysterious, inexplicable things begin to happen almost immediately.

On a snowy, Christmas morning, the house awakens to discover the packages under the Christmas tree missing, but, mere moments later, a Santa Claus appears in the hallway with the presents and begins "distributing the gay little packages with wordless gusto" – before vanishing without a trace. The spotless, unmarked snow anywhere near the house proved nobody could have left the place, but a search didn't turn up a thirteenth house guest. Surprisingly, the story is full with these quasi-impossible situations and near locked room situations. More interestingly, the nature of presents reveals to Ellery that all twelve of them were born under different signs of the zodiac. So here we have "twelve people in the party, twelve days and nights of Christmas, and now a vanishing Santa Claus who distributes twelve signs of the zodiac," but things get much stranger and more incomprehensible.

During those twelve days, on each of those twelve days, a neatly wrapped package addressed to John Sebastian is found in the house. Every package has a card attached to it with a parody on the carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and some have weird doodles on the back, which serve as a kind of dying message. But the content of the packages would continue to puzzle Ellery for more than a quarter of a century. And, to complete the mystery, the body of an elderly man turns up on the library rug with a dagger in his back. Nobody knows who the man is or how he got into the house and there are no identifying marks. So the police officially confines the party to the house pending the investigation.

So an intriguing, intricately-presented problem, but, before getting to the plot, it should be mentioned The Finishing Stroke can be counted as an early example of the historical mystery with the majority of the story taking place in the last week of 1929 and the first week of 1930 – concluding nearly three decades later in 1957. There are references throughout the story to what happened in the world during that period. They listen on the radio to Chris 'Red' Cagle, the Cadets' great All-American halfback, playing his last college game. They discuss the Hoover administration, mock New York's Mayor Jimmy Walker being sworn in "for his second hilarious term" and talk international politics ("the growing power of the Dutchman") and other subjects of the time ("the new I B M calculator"). Naturally, there are plenty of references to "the ravages of Prohibition" and Black Thursday, but Ellery also reads Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) and How Like a God (1929) by "someone named Rex Stout." These historical crumbs served their purpose by placing the setting in that particular period in time, but let the reader be warned. Not everything is period dressing!

But what about the plot, you ask? That's an entirely different kettle of fish. The Finishing Stroke is more interesting in what it tried to do than how it was done. 

The Finishing Stroke is, technically speaking, a fair play detective story, but the clueing is too esoteric and the red herrings too rich to give average reader a fair shot to arrive at the same conclusion as Ellery. You can spot the murderer by figuring out the motive, but deciphering the secret of the Christmas packages is beyond most readers. Not everything is explained. What about the locked bedroom door and where were the packages hidden? A bit sloppy compared with the methodical plotting of the 1930s EQ novels. However, the central idea behind the whole plot was devilish clever and possibly unique at the time as (ROT13) gur zheqrere unq ernq Ryyrel'f obbx naq qrfvtarq n cyna pnyphyngrq gb znavchyngr naq zvfyrnq uvz. Something that had, to my knowledge, not been done before. I think our mystery writing cousins deserve praise for how they handled one of the biggest no-noes of the detective story. 

Father Ronald A. Knox stated in his "Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction" (1929) that "twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them." Not only was the reader duly prepared for the presence of a twin brother, which took away the problem of how John Sebastian could be in two places at the same time, but Queen somehow succeeded to get several extremely ingenious twists out of that lengthy prologue. If you're going to use twins in a detective story, this is how its done! But the end result is a very uneven, atypically EQ novel.

Ellery Queen is often called the embodiment of the American detective story, but this intended last outing strangely reminded me of two novels by a highly unorthodox, British mystery writer, Gladys Mitchell – who's as different from EQ as a witch is to a mathematician. Mitchell's The Echoing Stranger (1952) is another detective novel that knew how to use spotty twins, but The Finishing Stroke reminded me the most of her own trip down memory lane. Late, Late in the Evening (1976) is, like The Finishing Stroke, a nostalgic trip back to the 1920s. Both stories almost read like the detective story itself is reminiscing about happier days. And the uneven plotting did very little to dispel that impression. 

The Finishing Stroke is not the best or fairest of the Ellery Queen novels, but the plot toyed with some interesting, even original, concepts and ideas to tell a detective story. Despite some of its shortcomings, the story of a cocky, know-it-all Ellery ("I must have been insufferable") failing to solve the case until he matured into middle age is fascinating and would have made a fitting conclusion to both the character and series. So not to be skipped by true EQ fans.

Notes for the curious: out of simple, historical curiosity, I looked up the football player (Chris Cagle) and discovered he was born in 1905 and died the day after Christmas, 1942. The body on the library rug in the story is discovered on December 26. A coincidence or done by design? And why? Lastly, The Finishing Stroke revealed just how much Ton Vervoort's Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) was modeled on Queen's work.