Customer Reviews

Halfway House

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Halfway House (1936) ranks among the best of Ellery Queen, offering more realism than typically found in his mysteries. The setting for murder is an abandon house near a sewage disposal plant along the eastern shore of the Delaware River in Trenton, New Jersey. It is the fifth year of economic depression, marked by a growing anger and resentment directed at the wealthy class. This seamy murder pits a struggling family against wealth, aristocracy and political influence.

Ellery Queen is now about ten years out of school. He still drives his aging Duesenberg, and he has not completely shed his penchant for making literary references. His growing reputation for his deductive skills has reached Trenton, allowing him to participate with the local authorities in the murder investigation.

Although the Ellery Queen mysteries are now many decades old, they remain very entertaining. These mystery puzzles are among the best ever created, are quite challenging (but possible to solve), and yet are always imminently fair. The Halfway House plot provides a fair number of surprises, including the unexpected solution. Ellery Queen's logic is impeccable as he steps the reader through his deductions in the conclusion.

Halfway House has only five chapters: The Tragedy, The Trail, The Trial, The Trap, and The Truth. I may be mistaken, but I believe that other than Calamity Town (1942), Halfway House is the only story in which the Ellery actually participates in courtroom proceedings.

A word on gas prices: At one point in the trial a witness (a gas station attendant) testifies that the defendant purchased five gallons of gas, tossed him a dollar bill, and hurriedly drove away without waiting for change.

Halfway House was first published in Hearst's International Cosmopolitan magazine in June, 1936. It was published in hardback a month later, but a paperback version (Pocket Books) was not available until 1944. Halfway House was the eleventh Ellery Queen story. My copy is a Signet paperback issued in 1971.

This was the first Ellery Queen novel that didn't have a nationality in the title. Despite this, it has much more in common with these earlier stories than the later ones beginning with Calamity Town. In the present book, Queen is still very much in his "who done it" stage rather than his later "why done it" stage.

But it need make no apology for this. The puzzle the reader is invited to unravel is well up to Queen's (and anyone else's) high standards. Very effective is the trial sequence in the middle of the book.

Queen still struggles somewhat with characterization. None are particularly deep. The worst, of course, is Ellery Queen himself. He gives Philo Vance a run for his money as the most annoying detective ever published. Later books would round Queen out considerably making him more human and fallible.

The Kindle edition is error free. There is no table of contents, linked or otherwise, but this is no big deal since there are only five chapters which are pre-marked.

Highly recommended for fans of the classic mystery where the how and who are be all and end all.