Ellery Queen: Forgotten Master Detective
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Ellery Queen: Forgotten Master Detective by Cathy Akers-Jordan Presented to the American Culture Faculty at the University of Michigan-Flint in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Liberal Studies in American Culture A ugust 11, 1998 First Reader Second Reader Introduction For the sake of simplicity and easier reading, all titles in this work (books, short stories, films, etc.) are italicized and long quotations are single spaced. Citations for short stories always refer to the collection in which the story appeared. It is nearly impossible to discuss the techniques of a mystery writer's style without giving away as least some of the endings. I have avoided discussing the solutions whenever possible, but readers unfamiliar with all of the novels may find a few spoilers here. A complete list of the Ellery Queen books in included in Chapter 11 and in the bibliography. Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to Francis M. Nevins, Jr., Rand B. Lee, Johan Blixt and Gregg Parmentier for their support and information. Ellery Queen: Forgotten Master Detective Section I: The Stage is Set 1. Paving the Way to the Golden Age......................................................................... 1 2. The Golden Age Mystery........................................................................................... 13 Section II: The Men Behind the Mask 3. Who Was That Masked Man?................................................................................ 20 Section III: Literary Themes and Techniques 4. Q ueen's W o rld............................................................................................................ 30 5. Reality vs. Fiction....................................................................................................... 42 6. Father and Son............................................................................................................ 64 7. Ellery Queen: Working Author.............................................................................. 76 8. The Queen Method..................................................................................................104 9. The Inconsistent Queen..........................................................................................125 10. Literary Motifs........................................................................................................... 144 Section IV: Recent Developments 11. Who Really Wrote Ellery Queen?.......................................................................156 12. The Forgotten Master...............................................................................................166 13. Lest We Forget........................................................................................................... 169 Bibliography......................................................................................................................172 Paving the Way to the Golden Age Traditional detective stories, those written in the "Golden Age" of the 1920s and 1930s, follow a basic formula set forth by W. H. Auden: "a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies" (Symons 3). Three writers were instrumental in the evolution of this formula: Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and S. S. Van Dine. Poe created the genre by writing the first detective stories; Doyle made the genre popular by creating Sherlock Holmes; and Van Dine redefined the genre by writing guidelines for authors. Each of these men made such significant contributions that without them modern detective stories probably would not exist. In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe publishedThe Murders in the Rue Morgue, which became the prototypical detective story. By 1845 he had completed two more stories, The Mystery of Marie Roget andThe Purloined Letter, featuring the same detective, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin was an eccentric, brilliant amateur detective who solved mysteries using "ratiocination" or deductive reasoning. His tales were chronicled by an admiring nameless friend, of average intelligence, who watched as Dupin solved cases that left the police baffled. In Murder for Pleasure Howard Haycraft cataloged the motifs Poe created in these three stories: 1. The transcendent and eccentric detective. 2. The admiring and slightly stupid foil. 3. The well-intentioned blundering and unimaginativeness of the official guardians of the law. 1 4. The locked-room convention. 5. The pointing finger of unjust suspicion. 6. The solution by surprise. 7. Deduction by putting one's self in another's position. 8. Concealment by means of the ultra-obvious. 9. The staged ruse to force the culprit's hand. 10. The expansive and condescending explanation when the chase is done (Haycraft 166). These three short stories contain all the elements that comprise what is now called the traditional or classic1 detective story. Some scholars, notably Dorothy L. Sayers, argued that two more Poe tales should be included:Thou Art Man andThe Gold Bug. The former contained the now-familiar element of the trail of false clues laid by the real murderer and the solution by way of the least likely suspect (82). In the latter the main character solved a cipher which lead him to a buried treasure; the narrator, a friend of the main character, was unaware of this until it was revealed at the end of the tale. Howard Haycraft disagreed with Sayers, callingThou Art Man "one of Poe's saddest debacles" from a literary point of view (164). He found the elements acceptable, but the story poorly written in the first-person point of view. He dislikedThe Gold Bug because it withheld evidence from the reader until after the solution had been given; the reader did not have a chance to solve the puzzle along with the detective. Unfortunately for Poe events in his life took a turn for the worse shortly after these stories were published. After the death of his beloved young wife in 1847, Poe fell into despair. Although he continued to write, he drank heavily and attempted suicide. When Poe died in 1849, he did not 2 realize that he had fathered a whole new genre of fiction: the detective story. After Poe's death, a few writers attempted to write mystery-type stories, but on the whole they were more sensational than deductive. As a genre, the detective story laid nearly dormant for over forty years, until Sir Arthur Co nan Doyle publishedA Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story. During the gap between Poe and Doyle, two types of popular magazines influenced the shape of the newly-forming detective fiction genre: dime novels and pulp magazines. Dime novels were small, inexpensive booklets published from 1860 until approximately 1915. Originally featuring frontier and wild west stories with emphasis on adventure, their focus gradually shifted to stories about mystery, crime and detection. They focused on the adventures of the persistent detective-character, whose techniques included things like eavesdropping, following suspects, using disguises and shooting it out with the bad guys. The similarity between the sheriff who must tame the outlaws on the frontier and the detective who single-handedly outsmarts and defeats criminals is obvious. The target audience was children and adolescents. Pulp magazines (or pulps), published from 1896 until the 1950s and named for the inexpensive wood-pulp paper on which they were printed, also featured mystery stories. Like Doyle's works, pulps emphasized deductive reasoning, with the focus gradually moving to action-melodrama. Unlike dime novels, the target audience was adult readers. The action- melodrama themes of pulps led to the development of the hard-boiled 3 detective style: an action-oriented, unsentimental approach which featured a tough detective with a heart of gold, who struggled against crime and corruption, yet always triumphed in the end. Pulps also led to development of comics books with mystery themes, like Detective Comics (DC). After the introduction of Superman inAction Comics in 1938, more comics began to feature stories about heroic crimefighters such as Batman and The Shadow. This, of course, was the beginning of the superhero comic book. The target audience, again, was children and adolescents. The main influence of dime novels, pulps and comic books was that, because they were inexpensive and easily affordable by even people with the least income, they brought the detective story to readers of all incomes and all levels of society. The dime novel, and subsequently the pulp magazine, "... re fleeted certain national spirit in showing how American characteristics such as self-reliance and common sense were all that was necessary for survival..." which also reminded the reader that "...the world of the dime novel detective was not an ordered world, but one filled with constant danger and violence" (DeAndrea 94). By the time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publishedA Study in Scarlet in 1887, the public was eager for more detective stories. Doyle picked up where Poe had left off. Using Poe's motifs, Doyle created a series of stories about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes as told by his associate, Dr. John Watson. Part of the key to Doyle's success lay in his format. In the 1800s serial stories were 4 a popular feature in monthly magazines and daily newspapers. The fact that readers had to keep buying the newspapers or magazines to follow the story kept circulation up. Unfortunately, if readers missed an installment they were unlikely to purchase