The Tragedy of Errors and Others

This important book collects not only the unfinished TRAGEDY OF ERRORS but the long fugitive novelette TERROR TOWN from the 1950s, both of them essential items for the Queen Canon. There's also a spattering of minor short stories involving the Puzzle Club, the sort of thing some people love but I don't. I hate that stuff and it's here in spades. There's even one story, "The Reindeer Clue," which Dannay farmed out to another writer, and it's as good or bad as the others, but what could be the justification of printing this piece in the book if it's not even by Queen? The whole story of Queen's employment of ghost writers still sticks in my craw. Here we have two sons of Dannay arguing that, because three of the final Queen novels were not entirely written by others, they should be moved up higher in the canon. What temerity! The book is filled with tributes to Frederic Dannay's character, judgment, kindness, editorial prowess, but here and there you get an uncanny sense that these two cousins early on sold their birthright to the highest bidder and that this, their secret flaw, came to overshadow all their other achievements. They were already (1930s) doing fifty times better than the average detective story writer, but they were greedy, or something, and before you knew it they were publishing the work of others--that they had bought with money--under their name--inferior work, work that eventually diluted the brand name beyond repair. In fact I don't think it was greed precisely that motivated these men, but something deeper and darker entirely which has yet to be revealed--some sort of anxiety complex. They had to be number one, and Lee felt threatened by Dannay in multifold ways so Dannay was always compromising to satisfy his cousin. "Terror Town," like the other mid-1950s stories that foretold Lee's eventual collapse, is filled with political and social paranoia a la THE GLASS VILLAGE, INSPECTOR QUEEN'S OWN CASE, AND ON THE EIGHTH DAY--it's the story of a religious right bringing a new age of darkness to a little, insular community. I didn't guess the solution, and the novelette would have been a complete triumph if it didn't suffer from a really, really bad romantic matchup that sort of sinks the enterprise. As for THE TRAGEDY OF ERRORS, I don't know, it might have been OK, but to me it feels like leftovers from THE FOURTH SIDE OF THE TRIANGLE and FACE TO FACE. (The name of the victim, "Morna," seems like yet another working out of the anagram plot of the former--Ramon--Norma--Morna, anyone?) While Morna's extreme horribleness seems like a further turning of the misogynist screws of FACE TO FACE--if a woman if awful enough, readers won't care if she's killed. Highly recommended, especially for Queen lovers, and yet not a patch on the other Crippen and Landru volume, the incredibly excellent ADVENTURE OF THE MURDERED MOTHS which, at any rate, is 100 per cent Queen--the real Queen.

If you're already a fan of Ellery Queen, this is an excellent book to buy. It includes Dannay's outline for the final Ellery Queen novel, The Tragedy of Errors, several short stories, and a variety of essays on both authors and their work. The outline and letter from Dannay to Lee and the first essay especially provide a good picture of how the authors' collaboration worked, which make for fascinating reading if you're an admirer of the books. That said, if you're not a devoted fan or just looking for a good mystery read, this is not the book you're looking for. While The Tragedy of Errors would obviously have been a great book if it had ever been turned into one, it remains an outline-- it's more interesting as a picture of how Danny and Lee worked than as a mystery in itself, since it hasn't been fleshed out into a book. The short stories are excellent, especially the previously unpublished Terror Town, but there are six. If you're newly interested in Ellery Queen, wait on this book until you've read more of his (their) work.

There's been far too little written about Ellery Queen--truly the master of American detective fiction. This book from Crippen and Landru is a great step forward. In addition to the full outline of Dannay and Lee's final but never finished novel "The Tragedy of Errors," there's also a selection of EQ short stories and best yet, a collection of appreciations and essays by collaborators and contempraries to EQ, covering the early period of the pince-nez Ellery to the later ghost-written (but plotted and edited by Dannay and Lee) psychological and religious thrillers--and even the Ellery of radio and the comics! EQ's been sadly out of fashion in the mystery field over the last 20 years--following a resurgence in 1976 with the NBC-TV series, various publishers have reissued several books but let them go out of print quickly; the essays in "The Tragedy of Errors" remind me how much I wish all the EQs were still available for today's new mystery readers. This is the best book I've yet seen on the *history* of Ellery, the cousins who created him, and the groundbreaking "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine." The very best compliment I can give this book? It makes me *need* to go back and re-read all my EQ favorites. Now, if I can only figure out those cryptic dying clues...