The English Garden Mystery (2022) by Dan Andriacco

Last time, I babbled incessantly about "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century," rattling on how the reprint renaissance and translation wave is already leaving its traces, but those visible traces do not stop at a locked room resurgence – even if you don't always get that idea from this blog. So today's review has no murders in hermetically sealed rooms or someone disappearing at the end of a trail of footprints in the snow. Instead, it's a pure, undiluted fair play whodunit.

Back in November, I learned of Dan Andriacco's The English Garden Mystery (2022) when Ellery Queen: A Website on Deduction highlighted it as "an homage to Golden Age great Ellery Queen." A modern-day mystery complete with a dying message, false-solution, challenge to the reader and even a subtitle ("A Problem in Deduction"). Andriacco is a former journalist, reviewer and an active member of the Baker Street Irregulars who writes detective novels and wrote on his blog, "all of my books owe a lot to Golden of mystery fiction," but none more than The English Garden Mystery. In another blog-post, "The Logical Successor to Sherlock Holmes," Andriacco calls his series-detective a devotee of EQ whose "exploits often include the Queenian tropes of the dying message and the false-solution" with his latest adventure being "an out-and-out homage to Queen."

The English Garden Mystery is the thirteenth novel starring the celebrated mystery writer, Sebastian McCabe, whose side career as a local amateur detective is chronicled by his brother-in-law, Jeff Cody. The entire series takes place in the small town of Erin on the banks of the Ohio River and the town with its inhabitants appears to be as much of a "character" as McCabe and Cody. An apparently living, breathing and buzzing community as the story is littered with footnotes referring back to previous events or appearances of characters and locations. Such as meeting with a local lawyer or museum director whom McCabe and Cody had met before other times, "on the edges of cases," which have footnotes referring back to two short stories, "Art in the Blood" and "Foul Ball" – respectively collected in Rogues Galley (2014) and Murderer's Row (2020). While another footnote informs the reader that the setting from No Ghosts Need Apply (2021) had "gone out of business after COVID and a murder." Yes, even the fictitious town of Erin, Ohio, was unable to escape the pandemic and The English Garden Mystery finds the town "much changed by the COVID-19 pandemic" with "some of our old friends gone forever and others transformed."

I mention all of this because, as of this writing, The English Garden Mystery is the latest addition to the series and, chronologically challenged as ever, I dropped in at the end simply for the dying message, false-solution and EQ fanboying. That left me feeling disconnected from most of the characters and parts of the stories, but that's wholly on me. Not Andriacco. So this review will be limited to discussing the plot and its treatment of those Queenian tropes of the dying message and false-solution.

The English Garden Mystery begins as Erin emerges from the COVID lockdowns and their social bubbles, "still stir-crazy from a year of social distancing and Zoom meetings," to attend a fundraiser for the Erin Arts Council in the English garden at the Bainbridge family compound of houses known as Stratford Court. Ezra Bainbridge is "the pater familias of one of the oldest of Erin's old-money families" and Shakespearean scholar who named his triplet daughters, Desdemona, Portia and Ophelia, after characters from the Bard's plays ("...Des is the bad girl, Portia is the socialite and Ophelia is the scholar"). The story's opening finds the elderly Ezra Bainbridge in poor health, "battling brain fog in the wake of COVID-19," confining the patriarch mostly to a wheelchair and getting pushed around by his much younger wife, Fleur. She gets accused by Desdemona and Portia of elder abuse and adultery, but their sister Ophelia does not believe it. So asks McCabe and Cody to drop by Stratford Court to observe for themselves nothing is going on ("nobody observes more than Sebastian McCabe, except maybe Sherlock Holmes on a good day").

Before the long, the personal favor becomes a full-blown murder case when Ophelia's body is found, "hit in the head with a marble bookend in an art deco design," holding a bright yellow bell-shaped flower – a columbine from the garden at Stratford Court. Erin Police Chief Oscar Hummel believes the murder is a bungled burglary, but McCabe believes the presence of the flower argues otherwise. Ophelia was a puzzle fiend who loved word games, anagrams and "the dying message stories of detective story great Ellery Queen" who reviewed detective stories for the Oxford Gazette and taught a course on "Locked Rooms and Dying Messages." So reasons a dying Ophelia must have taken "the columbine out of that vase after the killer left as she sought to tell us who killed her." A classic dying message straight out of the Golden Age detective stories! Why not? Leaving a dying message is something that would occur to someone who reads and collects Ellery Queen. Just one problem: the murderer is not even close to being done and every murder comes with its own floral tribute. So the flowery clue goes from a potential dying message to the killer's cryptic calling card. Or is it?

I noted earlier that airdropping into the thirteenth title in the series with its living setting and cast of recurring characters made me feel disconnected from the characters and parts of the story, but nothing to muddy the clarity or cleverness of the EQ-style plot.

Andriacco carefully constructed the correct-and false-solution alongside each other with enough clues and red herrings to delight, or frustrate, the amateur armchair detective who wants a shot at beating McCabe to the solution. Something that's absolutely doable with the given clues, even if you miss a small detail or two. Although the hook of the plot is the dying message/calling card and false-solution, The English Garden Mystery played the Queenian trope of the fallible detective card slightly better. There was already a hint and characters suggesting McCabe's luck ("let us say good fortune rather than luck") as the local Sherlock Holmes is eventually going run out, which all nicely builds up towards gathering all the suspects in the library to present and destroy the false-solution – punctuated by a short challenge to the reader ("...he didn't see it. Neither did anybody else. Do you?"). I just wonder how far Andriacco played out the fallible detective card as the ending left me with the feeling the second solution is also incorrect and will come back to haunt him in a future mystery novel. Something that does not appear unlikely in a series like this, but I could be wrong.

Either way, The English Garden Mystery succeeded with flying colors in capturing the feeling of the characters wandering into an EQ-style novel that fully does justice to the favorite tropes of those two mystery writing cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. If there's anything to nitpick at, it's that perhaps more could have been done with the English garden with its riot of lowers, bronze fountain and statue of a flute-playing Pan to evoke that "Ellery-in-Wonderland" atmosphere of There Was An Old Woman (1943) and The Player on the Other Side (1963), which would have been perfect for a story taking place right after the characters emerged from the pandemic lockdowns. Other than that, The English Garden Mystery is a compelling detective novel that comes highly recommended to every Ellery Queen fan and West 87th Street Irregular. But if you're completely new to series, like me, the characters can make you feel like a stranger among friends.

The Adventures of the Puzzle Club (2022) by Ellery Queen and Josh Pachter

The New York cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee were the heart and brain behind one of the most important names in the American detective story, "Ellery Queen," whose contributions as writers, editors and founders of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine cannot be overstated – promoting and spreading the detective story across the world. Ellery Queen still enjoys popularity today in counties like Italy and Japan where they influenced such writers as Alice Arisugawa and Rintaro Norizuki. And while the English-speaking world has yet to produce someone who can lay claim to the Queen's mantle, the cousins have to this day a dedicated and active fanbase who continue to champion their work.

 

A group of radical royalists, called The West 87th Street Irregulars, "who collectively have committed themselves to the preservation and revival of Ellery Queen" with "the goal of making Ellery Queen once again a vibrant and recognized name in detective fiction." A queen's quorum of writers and editors who write pastiches, parodies and continuations concerning all things Elleryana and editing anthologies. In recent years, Dale C. Andrews and Josh Pachter compiled two EQ themed anthologies, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020), which in spite of their titles are glowing tributes to Ellery Queen. And not a single truly bad story between them!

Josh Pachter's most recent project, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club (2022), is dedicated to a largely forgotten passage from the tail-end of Dannay and Lee's writing career. During the 1960s and early '70s, they produced five short-short stories introducing Ellery Queen and his readers to the members of the Puzzle Club. A tiny group of puzzle enthusiasts comprising of Cyrus Syres ("multimillionaire oilman"), Emmy Wandermere ("the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet"), Dr. Vreeland ("noted psychiatrist"), Darnell ("celebrated criminal lawyer"), Dr. Arkavy ("the Nobel biochemist") and the famous detective novelist, Ellery Queen. The Puzzle Club convene regularly at Syres' Park Avenue penthouse to mystify each other, "in a sort of ritual adoration of the question mark," which originally covered five short-short stories published in two badges – two in 1965 and three in 1971. The series ended with Lee's passing in 1971. The stories were collected separately, in Queen's Experiments in Detection (1968) and The Tragedy of Errors (1999), but never appeared together as there simply were not enough of them to justify a collection.

Fortunately, Pachter had a pastiche, "a further adventure for Ellery and the Puzzle Club," published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 2019 and editor Janet Hutchings accepted the story with "the caveat that it would be a one-off, not the kick-off for a series of Puzzle Club pastiches." So he wrote four additionally Puzzle Club with Sherlockian-themed titles. Suddenly, the amount of material had doubled. Add introductions for each individual story and Pachter's four short stories about Tyson County’s Griffen family, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club was practically ready to go to the printers. Let's see how this collection turned out.

"The Little Spy" originally appeared in the January, 1965, issue of Cavalier and begins with Ellery Queen receiving an invitation to attend the next meeting of the Puzzle Club to be subjected to a membership test ("...if you fail to solve the puzzle we're going to throw at you tonight, you'll never be invited to try again"). The WWII-era problem he has to solve concerns an undistinguished ex-civil servant, "who came out of retirement to do his bit for Uncle Sam," but, shortly before D-Day, Intelligence received an important tip – accusing the undistinguished civil servant of being a German spy. So when he suddenly booked a priority airline passage to London, they yanked him off the plane and gave him "the most thorough search in the long and honorable history of spy-catching." It took them a while, but, in the end, they found the top-secret material. The question Ellery Queen has to answer is where the Intelligence people discovered the spy message. A clever little story that gives the central clue in the setup of the problem and then becomes a process of elimination as Ellery goes over every possible hiding place. Needless to say, Ellery passes the test to become the sixth regular member of the Puzzle Club.

 

"The President Regrets" first appeared in the September, 1965, issue of Diners Club Magazine and the Puzzle Club intended to welcome no less a figure than the President of the United States ("...known to be a devotee of mysteries in all lawful forms"), but the president had to cancel at the last minute. So it's up to Ellery to improvise a puzzle for his fellow club members and imagines the murder of a Hollywood starlet, Valetta van Buren, who had been threatened by one of her four suitors and had written to Ellery to ask for help. But the letter arrived too late. Valetta was murdered by the suitor who had threatened her without naming him, but she wrote in the letter "she had something in common with three of the four, and that the fourth was the one who had threatened her." Arguably, the most obvious and telegraphed solution ever devised by EQ.

"The Three Students," originally published in the March, 1971, issue of Playboy, centers on the problem of a ring taken from the office of a college president and "a delegation of three students who represent three dissident groups at the college" play the role of suspects. Only clue is a scrap of paper with a gibberish verse written on it. Unfortunately, the solution hinges on a specialized piece of knowledge. So practically unsolvable for most readers.

A note for the curious: the story is introduced by Martin Edwards and comments how extraordinary it seems that it was originally published in Playboy, which is a subject that came up not so long ago on this blog. Back in March, I reviewed Lawrence Block's "The Burglar Who Dropped In On Elvis" (1990) and "D," from Vintage Pop Fiction, commented, "Playboy published some excellent fiction because they could afford to pay writers real money."

"The Odd Man" originally appeared in the June, 1971, issue of Playboy and is the best of the original five Puzzle Club stories brilliantly playing on that EQ specialty, the multiple solutions. The Puzzle Club has concocted a riddle bound to confound their resident mystery writer and has to do with an undercover agent whose assignment it is to track down a dope supplier, which the agent narrowed down to three suspects who all live in the same building – a three-story house ("someday... instead of a three-story house, I shall make up a three-house story"). The undercover agent is murdered, but there was a clue in his last report referring to the drug supplier as "the odd man of the three." The Puzzle Club believe there's only one possible solution to the problem, but Queen points out there are two more solutions. All three solutions come back to the same person. A minor tour-de-force!

"The Honest Swindler" appeared in The Saturday Evening Post during the Summer of 1971 and relatively simple, straightforward problem of Old Pete who gathered funds to finance his hunt for uranium with the promise that "every last investor at least gets back his original investment" in case of failure. So how was Prospector Pete able to pack back everyone of his backers when he returned empty handed? A decent enough short-short, but unremarkable.

The next five stories, "The Pastiches," were penned by Pachter who brought the band back
together after nearly fifty years and aged the characters along. Syres is now a wiry, crippled old man in a wheelchair and Ellery takes an Uber to the Park Avenue skyscraper. Pachter's pastiches unapologetically revels in the typical EQ elements of dying messages, missing clues and the-three/four-suspects. So, in a way, Pachter succeeded in making his pastiches even more Queen-ish than the original five Puzzle Club stories.

"A Study in Scarlett," originally published in the May/June, 2019, issue of EQMM brings the club together for the first time in decades and they immediately place Ellery in the hot seat – known known as the "Problem Chair." The intellectual challenge of the meeting takes Ellery to the Sherbert Theater, on West 47th Street, where lead actress, Brooke Rivers, is found murdered in her dressing room. Rivers loved word games, "crosswords, cryptics, acrostics, word searches, logic problems," fittingly left a dying message. A hastily scrawled word, "FOUR." Even more fittingly, there are exactly four suspects who could have murdered the starlet. I suppose the dying message is solvable, but you probably should put the book away when you arrive at the challenge to the reader and mull it over. I didn't get this one.

"The Adventure of the Red Circles" first appeared in the January/February, 2020, issue of EQMM and the Puzzle Club have a tailor-made problem for Ellery: owner of a successful chain of grocery stores and a collector of first editions of Golden Age detective novels, Jeremiah "Red" Edwards, died in his (unlocked) library of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. On the desk, the police finds the proofs for next week's advertising circular and Edwards had circled photographs of four items on the page with cheeses ("...in true dying-message-story fashion"). The fun solution is something only an Ellery Queen fan can dream up and appreciate.

"The Adventure of the Black-and-Blue Carbuncle" was originally published in the November/December, 2020, issue of EQMM and the Puzzle Club have another dying message problem for Ellery, but found the premise and backdrop of the puzzle better than its execution. Professor Lee Dannay is a SETI researcher (The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) who's hunched over the controls of the radio telescope one night, when a gunman enters the observatory. The gunman forces the professor to write a suicide note and shoots him, but the professor hide a clue to the murderer's identity in the note. Ellery has to find it and correctly interpreter it to solve the puzzle. The problem is that the plot (deliberately) recycles the central idea from a previous story, which came with exactly the same limitation.

A note for the curious: the story is introduced by Kurt Sercu, founder of Ellery Queen: A Website On Deduction, who writes Pachter warned him that it might be impossible for him to beat Ellery to the solution, because Sercu's not American "born and bred." Funnily enough, both Pachter and Sercu speak Dutch. If you speak Dutch, you should be able to eliminate one of the three suspects.

"The Five Orange Pipes" was first published in the January/February, 2021, issue of EQMM and is the hardest story to describe. This time, Ellery challenges the other members of the Puzzle Club with a problem starved of details, but the central question is the proximate cause of death of two of the characters. The solution is one of those elbow-in-the-ribs jokes, but amusing enough. Somewhat like a lighthearted take on Edmund Crispin and Geoffrey Bush's "Who Killed Baker?" (1950). I learned that the term Sherlockian is used in the United States and Holmesian purely British. I always used them interchangeable. There's a lock in Sherlockian. So I'll stick with that one from now on.

"Their Last Bow," originally published in the January/February, 2022, issue of EQMM, is equally difficult to discuss. In his introduction, Pachter writes "I was determined not to write more about the Puzzle Club than Dannay and Lee did, I felt that I had to do something in the fifth story to make it clear that there would never be—could never be—another one." Ellery does not meet his Reichenbach, of course, but it's the end for the Puzzle Club. I think Dannay and Lee would have approved of the conclusion to this unfinished chapter of their writing career.

The collection ends with Pachter's four short stories about the eleven children of Inspector Ross Griffen, of the Tyson County Police Force, all of whom he named after famous detective characters. I previously reviewed "E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name" (1968) in The Misadventures of Ellery Queen and "E.Q. Griffin's Second Case" (1970) in The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen. So onto the third story.

"Sam Buried Caesar," originally published in the August, 1971, issue of EQMM, when Pachter was 18-years-old and, as I read the story, it went from a highlight of the collection to one of my all-time favorite detective parodies. The story tells the only recorded case of the youngest child of the Griffen family, Nero Wolfe Griffen, who runs a detective agency from the family garage with his best friend, Artie Goodman – who needs to keep reminding everyone his name Artie ("...not Archie Goodwin"). They charge fifteen cents, plus expenses, which is "nowhere near as profitable as a good paper route but lots more enjoyable." Their newest client is Sam Cabot whose dog, Caesar, has just been killed by a speeding car near a lonely and vacant field. Not knowing what to do and without any adults around, Sam decided to bury Caesar in a corner of the vacant field. But decided to go back to get Caesar's collar and tags as a memento. When he dug up the grave, Caesar's body was gone! So what happened? Just like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Artie has to do all the legwork and comes away with skinned arms, while N.W. Griffen never left the armchair in the garage. But at the end of the day, they both arrive at exactly the same conclusion. An incredibly amusing story and a strangely spot on parody of Rex Stout.

A note for the curious: Pachter mentions on his website that Stout "was still alive at the time the story appeared in print and I got a very nice not from him, telling me that he's enjoyed it."

"50" originally appeared in the November/December, 2018, issue of EQMM and written to mark the 50th anniversary of "E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name," which makes it as difficult to discuss as "Their Last Bow." The story is a reminiscence rather than a detective story in which Pachter seems to have merged himself with the now 66-year-old Professor E.Q. Griffen who teaches English literature at a small college. When the story opens, Griffen is preparing a lecture when his mind begins to wander to the past and reveals he wrote “E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name” as sixteen year old ("for the purposes of this, his first short story, young Ellery had expanded the family to eleven children..."). That brings him to an old and solved murder case as his father told him "not all crimes are mysteries," but reviewing his old, half-forgotten memories supplemented by a couple of Google searches proposes a new solution to the murder based on the victim's dying message. But what can be done five decades after the facts? A very odd, but weirdly effective, story to round out the collection. I really liked the blurring between author and character.

The Adventures of the Puzzle Club is an enjoyable collection and an even better tribute to an obscure passage from Ellery Queen's varied career, but comes with the proviso that the Puzzle Club stories are riddles and brainteasers in short-short story form. So the stories are just slightly more substantial than the radio episodes of Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries or the one-page shorts from How Good a Detective Are You? (1934). "The Odd Man" being the only real exception with its impressive triple solutions. Unless you're a fan of EQ, you have to approach this collection as something of an oddity, but if you're a fan or simply like EQ, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club is not to be missed.

 On a somewhat related and final note: I always wanted to see Timothy Hutton reprise his father's role from the 1975 TV-series of Ellery Queen, if only for a one-off, but it has pointed out that Hutton is getting a little too old to play Ellery. So why not adapt Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's pastiche "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery as the canonical ending to the original TV-series? You can age him up with makeup and he would like Jim Hutton's Ellery at age 100.

The Thief Who Stole Christmas: "The Adventure of the Dauphin's Doll" (1948) by Ellery Queen

Ellery Queen's "The Adventure of the Dauphin's Doll" was originally conceived as a radio-play, written by Manfred B. Lee, which aired in December 1943 as the 157th episode of The Adventures of Ellery Queen and later reworked into a short story – published in the December, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The short story version was collected a few years later with other radio-play adaptations in Calendar of Crime (1952) and has since been reprinted in a number of anthologies. Most notably, Hans Santesson's The Locked Room Reader (1968) and Otto Penzler's The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries (2013).

So you can see how "The Adventure of the Dauphin's Doll" turned up in several anthologies over the decades, but the story can be called contentious. Some think it's "one of EQ's best impossible crime tales" and Robert Adey wrote in an essay, titled "The Impossible Mr. Queen" (collected in The Tragedy of Errors and Others, 1999), that the story "displays such skill and inventiveness that I would rate it as Queen's most accomplished miracle story at this length," but it also has its fair share of detractors. Jim and Kate reviewed the short story, here and here, which were not exactly dripping with raw enthusiasm. I remember liking the story upon my first read, sometime during the late 2000s, but can it stand up to a second read? Let's find out! 

"The Adventure of the Dauphin's Doll" begins with the law of Christmas stories stating that "stories about Christmas shall have children in them" with an "incline toward Sweetness and Light."

This is "a story about Dolls, and that Santa Claus comes into it, and even a Thief." The dolls in question are part of a collection, or "Dollection," that belonged to the recently departed Miss Cytherea Ypson and it falls on her estate lawyer, John S. Bondling, to dispose of the estate – which has turned out to be headache dossier. Firstly, the collection constitutes the entire estate, "sank every nickel she had in it," but there's "no set market for the damnable things" ("museums always want such things as free and unencumbered gifts"). Only one the dolls can be called a "negotiable asset," the Dauphin's Doll. An exquisite royal doll that was a birthday gift from King Louis XVI of France to his second son, Louis Charles, who became dauphin at the death of his elder brother in 1789. What makes the doll so valuable is that it wears a "gold circlet crown surmounted by single blue brilliant diamond of finest water" easily "worth a hundred thousand dollars at the present state of the market." Secondly, Miss Ypson's will stated the entire collection to be sold at auction and proceeds used to create a fund for orphan children. Thirdly, the will also provides that, on the day preceding Christmas, the Cytherea Ypson Dollection is to be publicly displayed on the main floor of Nash's Department Store. And that brings the estate lawyer to the doorstep of the Queens residence.

John Bondling tells Inspector Richard Queen and Ellery Queen that the Dauphin's Doll not only is going to attract every crook in New York, but has already attracted the attention of "the most dangerous thief operating in the United States." Comus is a gentleman thief "in the grand tradition of Lupin" who "seems to take a special delight in stealing valuable things under virtually impossible conditions." He personally informed the lawyer he's going to steal the doll when it's on display at Nash's Department Store.

So the New York police goes all out to protect the doll and erected a six-feet high platform, surrounded with counter displays for the normal collection, on which stands a Valhalla-like throne from the Fine Furniture Department – sitting on it is Sgt. Velie dressed as Santa Claus. The Dauphin's Doll is placed in a special display case with "a thick glass door" that has "a formidable lock" on it and the key lay buried in Ellery Queen's pocket. Inspector Queen handpicked twenty-four assorted gendarmes who kept the display case under constant observation. The gemstone was authenticated by an expert from headquarters, before it was locked inside the glass case. But, at the end of the day, they discover the doll had been replaced with a replica! Comus did it, but how?

I can see why I liked this story on my first reading. Sgt. Velie is one of my favorite side-characters and giving him a slightly bigger role is always going to get my approval, but had also discovered the 1975 Ellery Queen TV-series at the time. I remember now thinking the story would've made a great character-piece to the series as it gives some interesting glimpses of the main characters around Christmastime. Inspector Richard Queen likes "his Christmas old-fashioned" and "his turkey stuffing, for instance, calls for twenty-two hours of over-all preparation" with "some of its ingredients are not readily found at the corner grocer's." Ellery Queen is "a frustrated gift-wrapper" who "turns his sleuthing genius to tracking down unusual wrapping papers, fine ribbons and artistic stickers." And "he spends the last two days creating beauty." And then you have Sgt. Velie playing Santa Claus! You can even translate the editor deleting Sgt. Velie's rude reply with a hard cut to the next scene. I really believe "The Adventure of the Dauphin's Doll" would have been a better TV episode than a short story, or even radio-play, because the plot is not as good as I remembered. Not even close!

Ellery Queen is correct when he says, after the facts, that the theft of the doll was "a fundamentally simple problem." The solution is completely logical. So logical, it should have occurred to everyone the moment the substitution of the doll was discovered. I guess that explains why it took so long to get to the meat of the story and plot (one of Jim's complaints) as the puzzle would have been more at home in a filler-episode of Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries. Even worse, the solution is so horrendously logical and simplistic, it makes the detective and criminal look like a pair of idiots. That "luminous prodigy" is fooled by one of the most transparent tricks on record, which becomes even more damning when Queen's false-solution concerning Sgt. Velie is proven incorrect. Comus is an idiot as his scheme is basically a full-proof plan to get caught, because anyone with a claim to sentience can see right through it.

So, all in all, Queen's "The Adventure of the Dauphin's Doll" is a fun, American-style Christmas story with a detective hook, but, purely as a plot-driven detective story, it can be counted among EQ's weakest detective stories. And not anywhere close to being one of the best impossible crime stories in the series. For example, the virtually unknown, 1943 radio-play "The Adventure of the Vanishing Magician" is actually one of EQ's better attempts at the locked room mystery, but the script was never adapted into a short story and has been practically forgotten. 

A note for the curious: Kaito KID said in Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 16, "a thief is a creative artist, devising brilliant ways to steal his prize and a detective following in his footsteps and hunting for faults is no better than a mere critic." Fair enough. So, as the resident locked room fanboy, I want to propose an alternative, hopefully better, solution to the impossible theft – which was not easy with such an incredibly tightly-drawn situation. I've to ROT13 my alternative solution as it contains spoilers. So my solution hinges on modifying and muddying the real-solution as (ROT13) Obaqyvat fgvyy znxrf n fhofgvghgr jura ur qbrf va gur erny fbyhgvba, ohg, vafgrnq bs fhofgvghgvat n pbcl bs gur qbyy, ur bayl fhofgvghgrf gur pebja naq qvnzbaq jvgu n pbcl. Naq uvqrf gur bevtvany vafvqr gur eblny pybguvat bs gur qbyy. Fb ur unf abguvat ba uvz jura Ryyrel whzcf gb gur cnegvnyyl pbeerpg fbyhgvba naq npphfrf uvz bs univat fjnccrq gur qbyy jvgu n pbcl. Erzrzore, vg jnf Obyqyvat jub pynvzrq gur qbyy jnf n pbcl naq gur cbyvpr rkcreg pna bayl gryy gurz gur qvnzbaq unf orra ercynprq jvgu n snxr. Jura rirelbar vf frnepurq, abobql unf gur erny qbyy be qvnzbaq ba gurz. Lbh qenj nggragvba njnl ol qenjvat nggragvba gb vg, ohg jvgu gur jebat bowrpg. Naq jura Ryyrel svanyyl svtherf vg bhg, ur pna ravtzngvpnyyl erznex gung gur cbyvpr unq sbetbggra gb frnepu bar crefba (gur qbyy). This is the best I could do with the premise and solution of the story. Hope you enjoyed the alternative solution.

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!