Ellery Queen Double, double, double

The Door Between by Ellery Queen  

published 1936-7

Double Double  by Ellery Queen 

published 1950

 

 

 

‘She seemed to challenge attention, for she had draped her frail figure in a gorgeous Japanese kimono and brushed her blue-black hair back in the loose sleek bulging Nipponese style.’ 

Cultural appropriation not an issue in 1936.

I have done a few Queen books on the blog, but then he wrote a lot and I am nowhere near having as much coverage of them as I have with many other Golden Age authors. Many of my blogfriends are far more expert in their Queen studies than I am, and I tend to follow the odd recommendation or pick up what comes to hand – I am by no means reading them in order.

The Door Between was mentioned by Brad at Ah Sweet Mystery in a helpful post (some years ago) taking an overall look at Queen. (For those not in the know, Ellery Queen is both the protagonist in the books, and the name of the author. Except that’s a pseudonym, and covers two people, and some other strange goings on at the end of Queen’s career. This is partly why I don’t get too involved in Queen studies…. It’s too complicated.) Brad said of this one ‘it does something at the end that is quite unique for Queen (and isn’t found in a lot of mysteries.)’ An intriguing idea that would always pull me in. I very much enjoyed the book, with its strange setting in a house in New York’s Washington Square – but a house that is done out in oriental style by a woman who lived all her formative years in Japan, and now writes prize-winning novels. The book starts with a literary party in the house. Queen does a considerable job of creating a beautiful setting, but one that at the same time is slightly off, maybe unsettling, and then placing a very creepy crime there. The downside was that the younger heroine (not the house-owning author, but her potential stepdaughter) was highly annoying – she is accused of the crime, and though she is plainly believed to be innocent by all the good people in the story, I’d have been tempted to leave her to her wrongful fate. She was about as unreal as a Golden Age female created by male writers could be, particularly one who was obviously meant to be appealing. I thought the detection aspect of the story was hampered by the fact that it was all aimed at exonerating her, and also by a key character holding back on something very, very major, and lying about it. It was a locked room mystery with one of the standard (though rare) solutions, with some fancy accoutrements, some of them wholly unbelievable. (The stone in the window…?)

One of the male characters wears rather dashing clothes, suits in unusual colours and ‘a hat a little too rakish – a white leghorn pulled down over one gray eye.’ And ‘a honey-colored gabardine suit and a brown shirt and a yellow tie.’

Definitely an entertaining read.

My other random selection was Double Double, more than 10 years later and part of the important Wrightsville era of Ellery Queen – there are a number of books set in this fictional New England town, and the town itself always is strangely convincing and easily imaginable: a very good world to build some crimes into. In this case a number of apparently separate incidents have to be linked, and the key understanding of the link comes a long way in, so I don’t feel I can spoiler it by saying. This rather hampers discussion of the case. There are all kinds of comments one could make about the theme (including, ‘Agatha never thought of this one’ and ‘is it different in America?’), but you will have to do without my important perceptions. Worryingly, there was another absolutely awful young heroine, the child-woman Rima (and yes, just the words ‘child-woman’ set my teeth on edge). She is very reminiscent of the heroine of recent bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing, a book I hated with a great passion, what with her free-spirited upbringing and education by nature.  Awful, and again wholly unconvincing. You can tell I must have hated her because Queen gives her a makeover, usually my favourite thing to illustrate, and I just couldn’t bring myself to act on it.

 But, yet again, an entertaining read, one I enjoyed.

There were a few interesting discoveries from the book: the phrase ‘a damned dirty piece of xanthous journalism’.

The main definition in Merriam Webster is ‘having yellowish, red, auburn, or brown hair’ which (by the by) seems a singularly pointless definition of a colour – I mean, it doesn’t exclude much does it? And the more you go into it, the more you think, yes it is racist: ‘of, relating to, or designating races with yellowish hair and a light complexion.’ Whatever, it seems a particularly stupid way of saying ‘yellow journalism’ which is all you can assume about the original phrase.

One character wears a ‘silver lame evening gown of Polynesian decolletage’. This seems to have been gratuitously invented by Queen, I think to imply that the dress was very lowcut indeed. We are  meant to dislike this character, but I liked her a lot better than I liked Rima the child-woman – but this may be because this lady wanted to become a journalist because she had a ‘secret yen to look like Rosalind Russell’ – I have explained before (twice) that I had exactly this trait & ambition myself.

Some small children belonging to top families were described as the ‘sunsuit set’, which I thought was splendid. Someone’s cousin is described as ‘running a suds parlour at Revere Beach’. This is obviously meant to be a comedown in the world (he has an MA from Harvard) but extensive googling failed to get a definitive answer as to what a suds parlour is. It seems it could be a bar, a laundromat or a pet grooming service. Expert readers, please advise.

There was something called Decoration Day, which turned out to be what I knew (when living in the US) as Memorial Day.

The Japanese lady is from Flickr Commons.