The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020) edited by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews

The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) is a tribute to the American detective story, Ellery Queen, which collected a selection of quality pastiches, parodies and a potpourri of short stories paying tribute or poking fun at all things Elleryana – written by a who's who of the traditional detective genre. A smorgasbord of laudatory tributes from such notable short story writers as Jon L. Breen, William Brittain, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges and mystery novelists like Lawrence Block and Pat McGerr. The anthology was apparently successful enough for Wildside Press to commission the editors, Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews, to put together two additional volumes with The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (2020) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020).

I've not gotten around to The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe with the exception of one short story, Thomas Narcejac's "L'orchideé rouge" ("The Red Orchid," 1947), because it has a lot of excerpts from larger works. And that doesn't really appeal to me. The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen, on the other hand, has been near the top of the pile for nearly two years and the reason why I only just got around to it is my obsession with obscure, rarely collected or anthologized short (impossible crime) stories. 

The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen has a similar structure as The Misadventures of Ellery Queen with anthology being divided in five parts, "Prologue," "Pastiches," "Parodies," "Potpourri" and "Postscript," but the stories from both anthologies compliment each other – continuing and even completing a few short-lived series. For example, it contains the second of two Celery Green stories by Porges and a second case for Pachter's young E.Q. Griffen. So put on your pince-nez, pretend you went to Harvard and jump into the Duesenberg. We're going on a road trip through Ellery's Wonderland.

The collection opens with J. Randolph Cox's "The Adventure of the Logical Successor," originally published in the September 1982 publication of the Baker Street Journal, which serves as the collection's prologue. It's not really a detective story, but tells the story of a retired Sherlock Holmes who has "succeeded in replacing the pursuit of the underworld with the keeping of bees." However, the Great Detective keeps getting visitors who aspire to take on his mantle. There were two Americans, Nick Carter and Craig Kennedy. A Montenegrin of "somewhat corpulent proportions" and "a little Belgian fellow with an enormous ego," but only when a young Ellery Queen comes knocking does Holmes sees a potential and logically successor to his legacy. But only "if he can overcome his affectations" and "tendency to impress people with how correct he is in his deductions." And "if he is fortunate enough to find the right Boswell." So a fun little opening yarn playing on one of my guilty pleasures (crossovers).

The second part with pastiches begins with Maxwell E. Siegel's "Once Upon a Crime," written in 1951 when Siegel "was seventeen and besotted with Ellery Queen," but the story was not published until it appeared in Old-Time Detection #16 (2007). Siegel story's casts Ellery as a middle aged writer who's "running out of ideas for his novels" and his turned to children's books, fairy tales and nursery rhymes for inspiration. But, one evening, his study is burglarized, vandalized and the book-lined walls strewn with flowers. This sets in motion is a string of bizarre, seemingly unrelated incidents without apparent rhyme and reason. Ellery is struggling to find a logical link to tie them all together, which he eventually does. Admittedly, the story is nicely done piece of fanfiction, but, even in the world of EQ, it seems like (ROT13) n ebhaqnobhg jnl gb qryvire n zrffntr.

The next story is actually the first half of Chapter 11 from Marion Mainwaring's Murder in Pastiche (1954), but skipped it as the book is currently awaiting trial on the big pile.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Circle of Ink," originally published in the September/October, 1999, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, resettles the series in modern times and finds Ellery Queen lecturing applied criminology at a university – reflecting on how casual classroom dress had become and the presence of laptop computers. Wherever Ellery goes in the world, or time, there's usually a murder or two waiting just around the corner. And he soon learns that Professor Androvney was shot and killed in his office at the university. A murder linked to four other shootings on the Upper West Side during the past few weeks, which all have two things in common: the victims were shot with .22-caliber target pistol (likely equipped with a silencer) and "a small red circle on the back of each victim's left hand." That's where the commonalities end. So do they have a Son of Sam-type serial killer on their hands? Ellery cautions that serial killers shouldn't be confused with series killers "who kill a certain number of people with some goal in mind." While they're both insane, the series killer's insanity is "twisted into a pattern the killer can see." Find the pattern and you know whodunit. Since this is an EQ story, there's method to the murderer's madness with a decidedly classical touch to the motive. Leave it to Hoch to deliver one of the better and more entertaining detective stories of the collection!

Mă Tiān's "The Japanese Armor Mystery" (2005) was translated from Chinese by Steve Steinbock and is my favorite story from the collection as its plot is firmly rooted in the Japanese shin honkaku school of detective fiction. The story is set in a small, unassuming town, Montreux, where Joseph Marlow retreated to raise his four adopted children in quiet luxury, but, as the old patriarch got old, he also got sicker. And, as the story opens, he's dying of cancer. During a cold, winter night, the family mansion becomes the scene of a bizarre double murder. A noise rouses the household and they find the body of a local troublemaker outside in the snow, but what's weird is that the body is clad in "a suit of samurai armor made completely of wood." He had been shot at close range without any footsteps in the surrounding snow! A second shot is heard and Marlow is discovered dead in his bed. Fortunately, Inspector Richard Queen, Ellery Queen and Nikki Porter happened to be in the neighborhood to lend the local police a helping hand. What's uncovered in less than 15 pages could have easily supported a novel-length story as it has literary everything. A snowy country house. A murdered patriarch and an impossible crime that form a "two-body problem." Alibis and clues. A somewhat surprising solution that I should have seen coming, but was too busy starring myself blind on a completely wrong pet theory. But loved the story. It reminded me of what you would get if you combined a 1930s Christopher Bush novel with John Dickson Carr-style impossible crime.

The next story is "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" (2009) by Dale C. Andrews, but already read and reviewed the story back in 2020. However, it has to be said that the title of the story ended up outshining most of the plot. You have no idea how brilliant it's until you read the solution. 

"A Change of Scene" by Jane Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is original to this anthology and has Ellery Queen, Nikki Porter and Inspector Queen going to Chicago during the holiday season to do some sight seeing, Christmas shopping and watching the Christmas parade with floats – celebrating both the season and the city's storied history. During the parade, William Nagel was in the crowd with his wife and relatives. One minute he was right there beside his wife and the next moment he was gone. Did he disappear voluntarily or did his union job get him into trouble with the mob? Either way, Nikki has "a desire to beat Ellery to a case's solution" and begins to investigate on her own. A pleasant, lightweight detective story with a quasi-impossible problem that made good use of its historical setting.

Arthur Porges' "The Indian Diamond Mystery" first appeared in the June, 1965, issue of EQMM and is reprinted here for the first time to open the volume's parody section. So who better to do the honors than Celery Green. This is almost a direct sequel to the previous Celery Green tale, "The English Village Mystery," in which Inspector Dewe East "scored a minor triumph" in titular village with assistance of the well-known American detective, Celery Green. Not before "almost the entire population had been exterminated." Inspector East has an opportunity to redeem himself when a tip puts him on the trail of a well-known, international jewel thief, Fanfaron Mironton, who "stole the hundred-thousand-guinea Indian diamond." Mironton is trapped inside a hotel, tries to shoot himself out of a tight corner and is eventually arrested, but "there was no trace of the Indian Diamond." Luckily, Celery Green is still in England and usually needs no more than a few hours to solve a crime. And he quickly figures out how the diamond could have vanished from a closely guarded hotel. The solution is in principle not impossible, but Porges made it extremely silly.

The second parody is Jon L. Breen's "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" (1969), but also reviewed that story back in 2019. So moving on to the next EQ spoof. 

"The Little Sister in Crime" by Theodore B. Hertel, Jr. originally appeared in a chapbook that was put together for the 1997 Bouchercon with Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (1949) as a kind of unifying theme. All of the stories had to be titled "The Little Sister in Crime" and had to be set a fictional Bouchercon between 1920 and 1941 with a number of obligatory references and scenes that had to be included. So the story gave Ellery a little sister, Hillary Queen, who accompanied her father and brother to Bouchercon where they meet all the famous detectives like Philip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe and Perry Mason – most of whom either employ ghost writers to get their names out or trying to find one. Ellery Queen hires two cousins in New York to put together stories based on his cases and pays them "a pittance to do so." One of the attendees is a depressed Barnaby Ross who hasn't much work since Drury Lane's Last Case (1933) was published. But was it the reason why he committed suicide in his hotel room? And was the message scrawled in blood a dying message or a suicide note? There's a "Challenge to the Reader," but the solution couldn't have been more telegraphed if the story had been stuck in an anthology entitled The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen. Still a fun little story.

Jon L. Breen and Josh Pachter's "The German Cologne Mystery" had a long road to publication and began sometime during the 1970s as solo-effort by Pachter to write an EQ parody, which was originally titled "The Cologne Cologne Mystery." But the story was turned down by EQMM. Years later, Breen got to tighten up the story and was published in the September/October, 2005, issue of EQMM thirty years after it was originally conceived. The celebrated mystery writer and amateur detective, Celery Breen, is playing cards in a room of the Hotel Madrid when someone gets himself killed down the hall. Carlos Nacionale is lying in a pool of blood and clutching a pair of ordinary dice between his right thumb and forefinger, but Celery ensures his father, Inspector Wretched Breen, the victim had been poisoned and the slit throat was simply a shaving accident as all the classic symptoms of poisoning are there – no heartbeat, no pulse, no nothing ("Q.E.D."). Celery believes the dying message will reveal the source of the poison, but Inspector Breen draws a different conclusion. A very fun take on both the fallible detective and the exasperating sleuth who can't get to the point.

Rand B. Lee is the son of one half of the EQ writing team, Manfred B. Lee, whose "The Polish Chicken Mystery' is published here for the first time and has three famous detectives answering that age-old question. Why did the chicken cross the road? I didn't care much for Miss Marple's solution, but liked the one Sherlock Holmes came up with and Ellery Queen had the best answer. Although he had more to work with it. A fun short-short.

One of the highlights of the previous anthology was Josh Pachter's "E.Q. Griffen Earns His Name" (1968), which he wrote when he was sixteen and concerns the eleven children of a policeman all named after famous detective characters. “E.Q. Griffen's Second Case” is the sequel and first appeared in the May, 1970, issue of EQMM and has E.Q. assisting his father with the murder of a hippie, poet and children's author. Garrett Conway was stabbed while walking down the street, but Conway, "long familiar with the doings of children," scrawled a dying message on the concrete. A simple "1 2 3." The answer to the problem is not bad and a child would likely catch on to the meaning of the dying message faster than an adult, but the Author's Note explained that readers at the time complained about the dying clue. There's a technical flaw in it and a few simple changes would have improved the story, but Pachter decided to leave it as he originally wrote it. I agree and respect that. This story and premise of the whole series is nothing to be ashamed off considering how old he was when he wrote it. I still want that Gideon Fell Griffen locked room story!

Arthur Vidro's "The Mistake on the Cover of EQMM #1" (2018) was first published on the EQMM website and is more of a snacksized puzzle than a story with the story title summing up the puzzle. However, this short-short puzzle is loaded with Easter eggs and there's a lengthy Editor's Note ("Easter in the Autumn") pointing them all out. 

"The Pink Pig Mystery" by Jeffrey Marks is original to this anthology and visits an often overlooked patch of the Elleryverse, the Ellery Queen Jr. series. Between 1942 and 1966, eleven juvenile mystery novels were published with nine starring a young Djuna and his Scottish terrier, Champ. Marks returned took a stiff dose of childhood nostalgia and returned to the series with a story set during the Second World War. There were talks in Manhattan "about bomber strikes like the ones in London" or "the kamikaze attacks on Pearl Harbor." Ellery packed up Djuna and Champ to the country side, but there they become involved (together with two other kids) in the mystery of a pristine pink pig in a muddy pigsty. Very much a children's mystery with a simple, straightforward plot, but perfectly replicated those vintage juvenile mysteries and the EQJR series.

The collection ends with a postscript from the real "Ellery Queen," Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, which is an anecdote illustrating "the authors' recognition (and humility) that their deductive powers do not match those of their fictional detective." The piece is fittingly titles "The Misadventures of Ellery Queen" and made perfect ending to the collection. 

So, on a whole, my opinion of The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen is pretty much the same as The Misadventures of Ellery Queen. Not every story is a winner or will stick in your mind, but not a single truly bad story or even one I just disliked. An impressive accomplishment for any short story collection, but especially impressive when it's an anthology of pastiches, parodies and homages written by a bunch of unapologetic fanboys and fangirls – which makes it even more impressive I liked both anthologies. As some of you regulars know, I'm not very big fan of pastiches in general and stand with Rex Stout that authors should “roll their own,” but never had much of problem with EQ pastiches. Probably because the series (sort of) allows for all these alternative universes to exist. Hopefully, a third anthology is somewhere in the future as their should be more than enough material left. There's Donald A. Yates' "The Wounded Tyrolean" (c. 1955), Rintaro Norizuki's "Midori no tobira wa kiken" ("The Lure of the Green Door," 1991), Dale C. Andrews' "Four Words" (2020) and the uncollected radio scripts. Highly recommended to every EQ fan!

A note for the curious: I don't know if there anymore Misadventure anthologies in the work, but there's American detective character with the name recognition and more than enough material associated with him to cobble together The Misadventures of Philo Vance.

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.

Fiendish Flattery: A Review of Three Detective Pastiches

One of the many titles listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) that has always fascinated me is a short story docketed as entry #1361, Thomas Narcejac's "L'orchideé rouge" ("The Red Orchid," 1947), which is part of a series of pastiches he wrote during the late '40s and were collected a decade later in Usurpation d'identity (Identity Theft, 1959) – published as by Boileau-Narcejac. "The Red Orchid" is, as you might expect from the title, a pastiche of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

The story was originally translated into an English by Lawrence G. Blochman, published in the January, 1961, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but a new translation was commissioned for its inclusion in The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (2020; edited by Josh Pachter). Rebecca Jones previously translated Narcejac's "Le mystère des ballons" ("The Mystery of the Red Balloons," 1947) for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018; edited by Pachter and Dale C. Andrews).

I'll come back to The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe some time later this year, but now, I want to concentrate on "The Red Orchid." A story that, peculiarly enough, gives Archie and Wolfe an impossible crime to annoy each other with. I believe the closest Stout ever came to the locked room genre was in Champagne for One (1958) and The Doorbell Rang (1965). But that combination is probably what attracted me to the story.

Isabella Tyndall is the niece of an inventor and savant, Sir Lawrence Tyndall, who has been experimenting in "absolute secrecy" with ultrasound and has developed "a simple machine that allows the user to stop engines from miles away," but, around the same time, the attacks began – a bullet grazed his head in the park and there was poison in his herbal tea. These attacks coincided with the disappearance from the house of a bottle of sherry, a ham and a Cheshire cheese. And worst of all, the press smells a story and the place is now "besieged by a crowd of journalists." Sir Lawrence can't work anymore and wants a private detective to clear up the case, but someone predicted Wolfe would refuse the case because he rarely goes out.

Nero Wolfe is "more sedentary than the Empire State Building" and has to be bribed and prepared, like an over-sized child, with a big fee, promise of food and a rare orchid. One of Sir Lawrence discoveries is a way to influence the development and coloring of flowers, which resulted in a red Coelogyne pandurata. Wolfe has tried for two years to breed one in red and refuses to believe it was done outside of his rooftop greenhouse.

Archie finally succeeds in getting Wolfe out of the house and on the road to an earning an easy fee, but when they arrive, the orchid has been stolen and the potato masher has disappeared. During the night, Archie discovers various members of the household, relatives and boarders, sneaking around the place and the next morning they have to break down the door of Sir Lawrence's bedroom – behind it they find his body. Sir Lawrence, clad in pajamas, lay collapsed against the wall with a disfigured face suggesting a nasty dose of poison. The way in which the locked room-trick worked was surprisingly inventive, even if it required a bit of luck, but something you would never associate with Stout. Same goes for the clueing, which was not always one of Stout's strong suits. But the way in which Archie and Wolfe tackled the case was typically Stout. Wolfe reasons the answer while laying in bed and tests Archie's patience when he uses him to test his deductions ("Listen, boss, I'm a patient guy, but..."). So, yeah, I enjoyed it.

Even with the out-of-place locked room poisoning, Narcejac's "The Red Orchid" is a good and well done pastiche of Archie, Wolfe and Stout. One that can even be enjoyed and appreciated by barbarians readers who don't like Archie, Wolfe and Stout.

Well, since "The Red Orchid" is a pastiche, I decided to use it as an excuse to expend this review with two more pastiches that have been lingering on my to-be-read pile for ages.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Wrightsville Carnival" has only appeared in the Sep/Oct, 2005, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and brings an elderly Ellery Queen to an altered, modernized Wrightsville. The corner store now occupied the entire block and the local ice cream parlor was turned into a Starbucks, while many of the old inhabitants had either passed away or moved elsewhere.

Police Chief Anselm Newby made his debut in Ellery Queen's "The Death of Don Juan," collected in Queen's Full (1965), who recognizes Ellery and tells him about the new editor of the Wrightsville Record, Polly Watkins. Ellery learns through Polly about the town's bad boy, Sam Nation, who's the reason why Janice Collins left her husband and Polly had used the newspaper to hound him out of the town, but there was a baby and Janice put it up for adoption – which infuriated Sam when he found out. And demanded to know where his son was. Sam has returned to Wrightsville working as a roustabout at the carnival, which comes to the town every year in August.

So he naturally becomes the primary suspect when Janice is found bludgeoned to death in her home, but Ellery effortlessly deduces the correct solution and escapes the clutches of an enraged murderer with "only minor bruising."

Hoch's "The Wrightsville Carnival" has something curious in common with Narcejac's "The Red Orchid." Character-wise, the detectives echo their originals incarnations, but the plots are a little uncharacteristic. Stout barely touched the locked room mystery, but "The Red Orchid" has Wolfe solving an honest to God locked room murder. "The Wrightsville Carnival" lacked any of the usual Ellery Queen tropes. No dying, or coded, message. No ingenious false-solution or multi-faceted clues. Not even a challenge to the reader. Just an alibi that has be destroyed. It's not exactly an alibi-trick that will fool many seasoned and suspicious-minded armchair detective, but I suppose the novelty of this story comes from seeing Ellery interact with the modern, ever-changing world. And the many references to the original stories.

So a more than decent pastiche with some sense of continuity, but not even close to being one of Hoch's best detective stories.

The last of these three pastiches is a short-short by Arthur Porges, "In Compartment 813," which was originally published in the June, 1966, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and has a double-layered solution with the final twist being the true identity of one of the characters – somewhat reminiscent of John Dickson Carr's "The Gentleman from Paris" (collected in The Third Bullet, 1954). You can probably guess by the title of the story who's playing detective, but we'll pretend it's not Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin.

The story opens with a young and an old man sharing Compartment 813, of the Cote d'Azur Express, when the old man, Monsieur Sernine, recognizes the younger man as the grandson of an old friend, Bertrand de Monsoreau. Sernine asks Bertrand to kill the time and tell him about the night he attended one of Baron Duclaux's dinner parties. During the party, Baron Duclaux showed his guests the Tiger's Heart, "a fabulous ruby," which he had just bought for two million francs. The ruby "was passed from hand to hand" and, all at once, "no one had the ruby." Nobody had left the room when the police arrived, but nobody had the ruby on them and it was not found anywhere in the room. The ruby had "utterly vanished."

Considering the short length of the story (barely 4 pages), I suspected the good old camouflage-trick with the ruby having been secreted in a glass of wine or hidden in the chandelier, but Porges came up with an unexpectedly different kind of solution. A good trick that would have been better had there been room to drop some clues and more hint. Yes, even in this short-short, Porges was able to foreshadow the solution. Porges was such a good and underrated mystery writer!

Alice's Evidence: "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" (2009) by Dale C. Andrews

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine published a majestic pastiche in their May, 2007, issue, entitled "The Book Case," written by two long-time Ellery Queen fans, Dale C. Andrews and the creator of "A Website on Deduction," Kurt Sercu – anthologized a decade later in The Midadventures of Ellery Queen (2018). Generally, my purist streak makes it nigh impossible to enjoy pastiches, but "The Book Case" and its sequel can be counted among the exceptions.

Dale C. Andrew's "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" has, as far as I can tell, only appeared in the September/October, 2009, issue of EQMM and the story stands with one foot each in a world of the EQ multiverse.

"The Mad Hatter's Riddle" takes place in 1975, a transitional year, in which the twentieth century took "a quick breath as it prepared for the final twenty-five-year dash to the millennium." A now seventy-year-old Ellery Queen had given up on writing detective stories and now only edits the magazine, but Universal Studios has hired him as a consultant on the shooting of a very special episode of NBC's Ellery Queen – based on one of his most popular short stories, "The Mad Tea Party" (collected in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1933). The studio wants to use the episode as vehicle to reunite two "fabled stars of yesteryear," Ty Royle and Bonnie Stuart, who are tagged to play Spencer and Laura Lockridge in the episode.

Bonnie and Ty have been out of the public-eye for nearly three decades, redrawing inside a "comfortable cocoon," where they lived a quiet, hermit-like existence. So the episode marks the first time in twenty-five years that "the once-married duo" appeared together. Something that was easier said than done. The studio had to hire another, one-time consultant, Jacques Butcher, who previously appeared in the Hollywood-period EQ novels The Devil to Pay (1938) and The Four of Hearts (1938).

The episode has to be ready to air in six weeks. So, naturally, the whole shoot threatens to come crashing down when Bonnie and Ty announce they are going to be married (again). Something that'll end the quiet, comfortable existence of the people around them.

A second problem comes in the form of a typewritten, acrostic poem reminiscent of an untitled poem by Lewis Carroll that revealed "the name of the real Alice," but this poem only revealed a cryptic message, "trip required no chances" – a prescient "warning in verse." On the day of their announcement, Bonnie and Ty are murdered at the place they were staying for the duration of the shoot (echoing the double death from The Four of Hearts). This is the point where the story, quality-wise, splits in two parts.

The solution to the murders is routine with a decent, but simple, dying message and an alibi-trick that, while a delight to long-time EQ fans, is a trifle unconvincing. I don't believe the huge discrepancy in time would have gone unnoticed. On the other hand, the answer to the titular riddle was excellently handled and the identity of the writer was a pleasant surprise. You've no idea how clever the title of the story is until you have read it. Even if it has a touch of sadness about it.

So, purely as a whodunit, "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" is a disappointingly weak story, but the presence of the acrostic poem elevates it as an excellent code cracker and the respectful treatment of the original characters makes it a first-class pastiche. A better Hollywood-set EQ story than the original and comes highly recommended to other EQ fans.

Department of Juvenile Justice: The Ellery Queen, Jr. Mysteries

Frederic Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, better known by their shared penname of "Ellery Queen," were two of the most important mystery writers, editors and champions of the detective story of the previous century – whose monthly Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine kept the home fire burning during darker times. It's not for nothing, Anthony Boucher proclaimed Ellery Queen to be "the American detective story" incarnate.

There is, however, another reason why Ellery Queen is typically American: the name became one of the earliest examples of a branded franchise in the publishing world.

During the 1960s, Lee's health began to falter and developed a nasty case of writer's block, which forced Dannay to assemble an all-star cast of ghostwriters to continue their work in the sixties and seventies – an assembly that included Avram Davidson, Flora Fletcher, Edward D. Hoch and Theodore Sturgeon. This came on top of the name Ellery Queen branching out in all directions. There was a popular radio-series, a TV show, movies, comic books, a magazine, board games and literal jigsaw puzzles (e.g. The Case of His Headless Highness, 1973). Only thing they missed out on was having their own burger joint in New York. Who wouldn't want to order a Velie Burger with a side of Porter Fries and a Djuna Shake at A Challenge to the Eater?

An EQ venture not as well remembered today is their excursion into the juvenile corner of the genre with the Ellery Queen Junior Mysteries, which produced eleven novels in two (short) series between 1942 and 1966. There also appears to be an unpublished, long-lost twelfth novel, The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly.

Nine of the novels star a recurring side-character from the main series, Djuna, who's the small, gypsy orphan adopted by Inspector Richard Queen when Ellery was attending college. The book-titles of this series follow The [Country] [Noun] Mystery pattern of Queen's early international series, but with colors and animals (e.g. The Black Dog Mystery, 1942). The other two novels are helmed by a specially created character, Gulliver Queen. So I wanted to take a closer look a novel from each of these series.

The Mystery of the Merry Magician (1961) is the first of only two titles in the Gulliver Queen series, but ghostwriters and unauthorized sub-ghostwriters have made determining authorship somewhat of a puzzle – which is discussed by Kurt Sercu on his Ellery Queen website (click on the covers to read more). James Holding was contracted to write the 1960s Ellery Queen Junior novels, but he farmed out the work to sub-ghosts and The Mystery of the Merry Magician was written by the author of the Dig Allen series, Joseph Greene. I understand Lee was not amused.

Gulliver "Gully" Queen is the sixteen-year-old nephew of Ellery and the grandson of Inspector Richard Queen. His father is Ellery's hitherto unknown and nameless brother, an engineer, who's in Europe working on "a long-term United Nations project," which is why Gully is staying an entire year with his uncle and grandfather in New York. The presence of the regular characters from the main series makes the book feel like a crossover and really is what makes it standout as a juvenile mystery. Ellery Queen briefly appears in the opening and closing chapters. Gully is even seen reading one of his uncle's detective novels (The Finishing Stroke, 1958). Nikki Porter is mentioned in passing, but, more importantly, Inspector Queen and my personal favorite side-character from any series, Sergeant Thomas Velie, have supporting roles to play in the story!

I've always been of the opinion it was a gross oversight to never let Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie solve a case without Ellery helping them out. So it was nice to see them here working together in giving support to Gully.

The Mystery of the Merry Magician begins with Ellery having to break his promise to take Gully on a camping trip to the mountains, because the Treasury Department has asked him to go the New Orleans waterfront to investigate some baffling reports – a "strange creature" has been haunting the docks down there. Ellery notices Gully is trying to mask his disappointment and gives him a leather notebook, which he's to use to write down the names, addresses and the story of anyone who might come to see him. And there's only one rule, Gully is not allowed to "go off trying to solve mysteries." He just has to write down the facts in the notebook.

So, as to be expected, the moment Ellery has gone someone comes knocking at the door of the Queen residence. A boy of Gully's age, named "Fisty" Jones, who has a most astonishing story to tell and Captain Foster, "an old buddy of Inspector Queen," told him to go tell it to the inspector's son, Ellery. Gully has to keep a record for his uncle and asks Fisty to tell him the story.

Fisty was visiting Captain Foster and his granddaughter, Peggy, who live on a barge tied up at Pier A of the New York waterfront. On his way back home, Fisty passed a block of mostly abandoned, boarded-up old houses and peeked into the window of an empty story. Fisty described, what he saw, as "a monster from space." A creature with black, smooth skin, big, floppy feet and "one big, round eye," right in "the middle of his face." So they go to have a second look at the empty shop, but discover that the window has been painted black and are told by a tattooed man to mind their own business or else they might get hurt. The tattooed man has designs on the building next door, which is leased to "an old-time magician," Magnus Merlin, who now makes a living by making magic tricks and always accompanied by his happy little dog, Banjo – who proves to be a huge help to the boys throughout the story.

The central plot-thread is very basic for a juvenile mystery novel and therefore easy to figure out, but there were some nice touches that punched it up a bit.

Besides the obligatory dangers and tight corners, there's an attempt to make the role of the merry magician in the plot ambiguous (friend or foe?) and there's an honest-to-god impossible situation witnessed by Gully and Fisty! When they're swimming in the river to find origin of hammering noises heard on the barge, they see "a man walking on water." Solution is not terribly clever, but it fitted the plot. There's also very subtly done "Challenge to the Reader," when Gulliver remarks he has "a strange feeling that all the facts Uncle Ellery will need to solve the case" is in his notebook to which Peggy responds, "well, then, solve it yourself." This made the last chapter, entitled "Gully's Little Notebook," all the better. One of those nice little touches that really helped the plot.

I've to say, though, with all the magicians, magic-tricks, tattooed men and an impossible crime, the story felt more like the junior to Clayton Rawson than Ellery Queen.

All in all, The Mystery of the Merry Magician has pretty decent plot, but it's the characters who stole the show! Gully, Fisty and Peggy can stand with the best teenage detective-characters from the genre's juvenile corner and Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie shined in their supporting roles. So I can highly recommend it to either readers of these vintage juvenile mysteries and die-hard Ellery Queen fans. Something that'll probably give JJ an existential crisis!

Now that we got the first Gulliver Queen novel out of the way, let's move on to the book that almost closed out the Djuna series.

The Blue Herring Mystery (1954) is the eighth and penultimate installment in the Dunja series, which was supposed to have been written by Samuel McCoy, but he hired a sub-ghost, Harold Montanye, to write the last six books on his contract – which were the titles from The Green Turtle Mystery (1944) to The Blue Herring Mystery. Reportedly, Montanye experienced "some difficulties getting his stake in the half share McCoy had." The Black Dog Mystery (1942), The Golden Eagle Mystery (1942) and the unpublished The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly were written by yet another sub-ghost, Frank Belknap Long. More than a decade later, Holding penned the final book, The Purple Bird Mystery (1966). Well, that's what everyone still hopes. What a goddamn mess! No wonder Lee's heart was playing up.

The Blue Herring Mystery is not as strong as The Mystery of the Merry Magician when it comes to character portrayal, or story-telling, but it found an interesting way to use EQ's signature trope, a dying message, in a detective story belonging to a usually murderless branch of the genre.

Djuna has a week-long holiday ahead of him and has a friend from Florida, Bobby Herrick, who's coming over and, in preparation of his arrival, Miss Annie Ellery takes him to Aunt Candy's house to borrow cinnamon for an apple pie. Aunt Candy is the great-granddaughter of a 19th century merchant mariner, Captain Jonas Beekman, who passed away over seventy years ago and muttered something with his last breath – telling people to "lift th' blue herrin." Some believe this was a clue to where he had hidden a fortune in pears he had brought back from the South Seas. Djuna is allowed to thumb through the captain's old logbook and reads some curious entries as well as discovering a page had been torn out.

Coincidentally, a drugstore owner, Doc Perry, is turning Captain Beekman's old house into a museum and is assisted by a mysterious, disheveled man, Professor Kloop, who has taken over the whole project. Doc Perry has become mighty suspicious of Kloop as he's always "peekin' into dark corners in the cellar" or "tappin' walls." So what is he's exactly up to?

Well, this pretty much sums up the whole plot. A paper-thin, but thickly padded, plot hinging on a single idea. The dying message. Admittedly, the solution to the 70-year-old dying message was delightfully simplistic and as believable as the one from Queen's own short-short "Diamonds in Paradise" (collected in Queen's Full, 1965), which why it drowned in this already short novel. This single idea could easily carry a short-short or a short story, but not a whole novel. And the poor characterization didn't help either.

Djuna is used in the opening chapters to explain things to its young readers and, in combination with constantly uttering "Golly" or "Jeepers," he comes across a little dull-witted. Something that strikes a false note when its time to play detective and correctly interpret the dying message of the old sea captain. Most of what happens between the opening and closing chapters is boring padding or just boring. There was such a lack of any interest in the story that it became very noticeable how much the characters were eating all the time, which ranged from apple pie, pancakes and kippers to egg salad sandwiches, baked potatoes and spaghetti – topped with chocolate nut sundaes. This only represents a small selection from their holiday menu! Just padding at its worst.

So, yeah, The Blue Herring Mystery tried to tackle an interesting concept with a good premise and solution, but it was lost in a deadly dull, overly padded story and I simply can't recommend it. I'll definitely tackle the second Gulliver Queen novel in the future, but don't expect me to return to the Djuna series anytime soon.

A note for the curious: I've already mention a missing, presumably unpublished manuscript in the EQ Jr. franchise, The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly, which reminded me of the unpublished, long-lost last novel in The Three Investigator series. Back in 2016, I put together a small selection of lost detective stories and one of them was M.V. Carey's The Mystery of the Ghost Train, which was completed when the series was canceled in 1986 and the manuscript was presumably lost. A website dedicated to the series posted an update in 2018 reporting that the manuscript is in "the possession of the Carey family," but Random House "has expressed no interest in it." Hopefully, this will change in the future.