Customer Reviews

Chinese Orange Mystery

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Ellery Queen is both author and protagonist of this novel.It is one of a series which started in 1929 with "The Roman Hat Mystery" and as with the(superior in every way)Holmes and Watson tales the story is narrated by an admiring friend ,not the actual protagonist.The book -like all others in the series from this era -is scrupulously fair and shares a feature common to them all ,namely a "challenge to the reader"section which declares the reader is in possession of all the facts and clues required to solve the mystery.It then challenges her/him to do so.

This is a typical Queen tale from the 1930's .A man is murdered while waiting to see a wealthy New York publisher and collector named Donald Kirk,an old friend of Ellery's.The circumstances are bizarre to say the least-the waiting room furniture has been turned back to front ,the door is locked from the inside and the sole clue to the actions of the murdered man is the remains of a Chinese orange (in the UK a tangerine)in the waste bin.The victim's name is not known .There are no clues on his person to identify him and no-one has seen him in the vicinity of the crime .A range of potential suspects are questioned and statements taken probing means ,motive and opportunity,all in the time honoured tradition of the genre.Ellery is aided in the investigation by his father Richard ,a policeman.
The focus of the book is not an character but deduction and detection.Ellery is essentially an intellectual loner , a walking cerebellum .What we get is a locked room mystery with a solution both ingenious and plausible .Stylistically the prose is unremarkable and the characterisation functional if somewhat perfunctory.It does mercifully lack the facetiousness and intellectual showing off of the contemporaneous S S Van Dine books also set in New York society .

This is an ideal book and series for those who favour the traditional whodunnit and howdidhedoit crime novel and if that is your bag then please mentally add another star to my rating.I admire its intellectual rigour but favour the more hardboiled style of crime novel

This is one for those who enjoy and are good at puzzles of all kinds