 alendar of
Crime (1952)In the merry month of May, Ellery Queen made a trek to Gettysburg to witness an annual celebration--and an annual murder. February found the ingenious Ellery locked in a furious battle of wits with a dead US President. These are but two of the 12 appointments with crime that make up Queen's baffling calendar of conundrums. Each elegant enigma ticks off all the surprise and excitement that have made Queen the dean of American detective fiction.
EQMM, 12/65) All of the above titles begin with "The Adventure of..." and
were published first in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
before being collected into this compilation volume. "During the 1940's EQ wrote a large number of radio plays. Several of these were later converted into prose works and collected in Calendar of Crime. Among the best of these works are the radio play "The Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds" (1943) and the Calendar story "The Dauphin's Doll" (1946). These works are both about seemingly impossible jewel robberies, and share a distinct family resemblance. Although they did not specialize in impossible crimes, many members of the Van Dine school occasionally wrote about them, starting with Van Dine himself. Many of EQ's previous stories had elaborate quasi-historical backgrounds, based in a family history, or an earlier crime. In "The President's Half Disme" (1946), EQ takes the plunge into fiction involving actual historical characters, solving a mystery involving George Washington. "The Three R's" (1946) mentions Anthony Abbot, G.K. Chesterton, Doyle, Poe, and Israel Zangwill. It also is EQ's take on an R. Austin Freeman style plot. Like several stories in Calendar of Crime, it has elements of parody of standard mystery approaches. Like "The Inner Circle" (1947) and "The African Traveller" (1934), it has a University setting, something that always results in sophisticated wit and satire in EQ's work. "The Inner Circle" is especially satisfying as a work of storytelling.
"The Medical Finger" (1951) refers to Frederick Irving Anderson's The Notorious Sophie Lang. It is one of the last and least of EQ's minimalist poisoning tales and features the same sort of perverse personal relations as "The Bleeding Portrait" (1937). The pirate tale "The Needle's Eye" (1951) has an island setting, just like "Portrait", but otherwise it seems far more similar in its detailed enjoyable storytelling to "The Treasure Hunt" (1935). "The Dead Cat" (1946) is not a great mystery plot, but it does have an intriguing background of a crime committed in near darkness, reminiscent of "The House of Darkness" (1935) and "The Adventure of the Mouse's Blood" (1946). The last is a radio play with some good storytelling, and a sports milieu like the Paula Paris stories of 1939. Its mystery plot recalls Melville Davisson Post's "The Straw Man". The radio plays and Calendar include a new character, EQ's secretary and gal Friday, Nikki Porter. She only shows up here and in a few novels, such as the excellent The Scarlet Letters (1953), but she seems an important part of the EQ saga. These "typical" American detective short stories give a typical portrait of EQ as a detective. He is helpful, responsive, flexible, with a full support team of Nikki, the Inspector, Sgt. Velie, and so on. He is open minded, intelligent, investigatory, exhaustive in his searches, fertile in coming up with new ideas, and deductive in his solutions Private eyes and Raymond Chandler are memorably satirized in the opening of "The Ides of Michael Magoon" (1947)." (Michael E.Grost) |
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