Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Lamp of God by The Adventures of Ellery Queen by Ellery Queen. Is it possible for a man to lift himself off the ground by his shoelaces and fly away? Can a water buffalo transform itself into a little boy? What is science to make of a dead man climbing out of his coffin, escaping his tomb . . . and breaking into song? Such incidents seem impossible, but stranger things have happened at the home of old Sylvester Mayhew. When Ellery Queen, the world-famous amateur detective, is called to Mayhew's ramshackle old mansion, he expects to be investigating an ordinary hoax. Instead, he finds murder. The novella The Lamp of God is vintage Ellery Queen-puzzling, atmospheric, and utterly delightful. Paired with eight short stories, including "Man Bites Dog" and "Long Shot," it is simply irresistible. Category: Mystery Anthologies, Mystery Anthologies, Traditional Detective Mysteries. The Lamp of God by Ellery Queen. Soft cover. Condition: Near Fine. No Jacket. 1st Edition. The Lamp of God by Ellery Queen. In pictorial wrappers. Publisher: Dell Book, New York, (1935). Wrappers are in very good to near fine condition. A few surface lines to front of wrappers. Contents clean, paper toned with age. 4 � x6 3/8 inches. Dell number 23 with 10 cent price on the cover. 64 pages. Protected by a mylar sleeve. Inventory #16-059. Price: $45. Language: eng Language: eng Language: eng. The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (Including the Amazing Short Novel : The Lamp of God) Queen, Ellery. Published by World Publishing Company, Cleveland, OH, 1947. Used - Hardcover Condition: Very Good. Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. First Thus. Hardcover; first Tower Books edition; unclipped dust jacket. Boards are worn at edges, lightly scored on front; tanned page block and page edges, light tanning to end papers. Jacket has significant edgewear, including a taped repair to inside spine; spine ends are chipped and inside of jacket is foxed. Pages are clean, text is clear and spine is tight. AD. Used. The Lamp of God (1935) The House of Haunts , a novella, was originally published in Street & Smiths Detective Story Magazine in October, 1935. The name changed to The Lamp of God when it was included in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (1940). It was also published on its own in 1950. The story is a fun little romp. A lawyer friend desperately contacts Ellery, needing him to meet a ship at the New York docks, in order to meet a young woman from England, arriving to collect an inheritance from her estranged father. They accompany her to the family estate, marked by two houses, the Victorian “Black House,” and the newer “White House.” They meet the eccentrics of the family, and upon waking the next morning find the Black House has disappeared. Of course, that was where the family fortune was supposedly hidden. Clues are unearthed, culprits apprehended. As an aside, we do learn something of Ellery Queen’s culinary tastes. “…if there was one dish he detested, it was lamb; and if there was one culinary style that sickened him, it was curry.” The story is, of course, the Lamp. not the Lamb, of God. Anyway, here is a nice recipe for curried lamb. At the heart of the solution is the question of recognition. One character is introduced, and when she is next seen, she has a huskier voice caused, she claims, by an oncoming cold. Seems normal. Why doubt that? When we meet someone, we get to know them in that moment: their hair, their clothes, their voice, their basic features. When we see them again, we have to adjust our memory of them: their hair may be different, their clothes have changed, their voice could be slightly altered for a number of reasons, and their features could look slightly different based on the lighting and the angle we are looking at them from. The context in which we see them may also require a software upgrade. But this is normal. We can expect it. So, how easy would it be for a similar looking doppelganger to slip into their person, to pass as someone else? Would our brains process the second person as just a slightly newer version of the first person? Would we just accept the huskier voice as an oncoming cold? How can we trust our senses, our brains, especially when houses can apparently disappear over night? Throughout the novella, Queen keeps alluding to the unreality of the situation, comparing the events to fairy tales, the possible involvement of God in the situation, and even points out, “There’s even…a character named Alice.” Ellery Queen: The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1934) – Part 1 of 2. There’s no denying that the early Ellery Queen books (the nine [Nationality] [Object] Mysteries , , and the novella The Lamp of God ), published between 1929 and 1936, will not be to the taste of every reader today. Ellery the character is often a smug prig, the style of writing is mannered and can be hard to plod through, and the stories can move at a slower pace than we moderns are used to. (Much the same kind of thing could be said of the four books written in this period as by Barnaby Ross, featuring alternate sleuth Drury Lane.) On the other hand, considered as puzzles, this group of works includes some of the finest fair-play mysteries ever to challenge a reader, and it would be a shame if a serious mystery fan were to try reading the first few chapters of, say, The Roman Hat Mystery , get scared off, and never get to enjoy the delights of Greek Coffin or Siamese Twin . So what’s a reader to do? My recommendation: start with The Adventures of Ellery Queen , a collection of short stories published in 1934. They feature the same insufferable Ellery as the contemporaneous novels and the same florid writing style… but they move right along, and most of them feature the same ingenuity of plotting, even better than in some of the above-mentioned novels. There are eleven stories in this collection. Here’s a look at the first six. Before I start, I am going to make one general observation that applies to all eleven stories: “A lesser writer could easily have taken the plot of this one and expanded it into a novel… and it still would have been a good, solid mystery. The two Queen collaborators were so good at coming up with puzzles that they could afford to write up this one as a short story.” “The Adventure of the African Traveler”: Queen had a lot of fun over the decades with stories that presented the reader with one or more false solutions before you got to the true one. This is one of the earliest examples: Ellery teaches a criminology class to three hand-picked students and takes them with him on a murder investigation. Each comes up with a different explanation that he demolishes before revealing the truth. The long arm of coincidence may get stretched a bit in this one, but it’s nice in one passage to see Queen poking fun at (instead of quietly going along with) some of the casual racism of the period. “The Adventure of the Hanging Acrobat”: a vaudeville performer is found with a rope around her neck in her dressing room. The lady seemed to be sleeping with every male member of the troupe, but which one of them decided life would be better without her? The real delight of this one is the way it gives the reader a taste of the world of a kind of performance now relegated to history. As for the puzzle… well, if you do anticipate the identity of the murderer, well, you won’t be the only one. “The Adventure of the One-Penny Black”: Everyone who buys a copy of a certain book from a certain bookseller becomes the victim of a robbery – in which that book alone is stolen. I’m not quite sure this one plays fair with the reader, although it’s hard to say without committing a spoiler. But once you’ve read it, have a look at the last line and see if you don’t agree there’s an adjective in there that hasn’t been fairly set up earlier. “The Adventure of the Bearded Lady”: A murdered artist’s last act was to paint a beard and moustache on his portrait of a woman. The first Queen short story to use what would become the team’s trademark device of the dying message; unfortunately, this particular message is not as ingenious as the ones they would dream up in later years. As well, the other clues to the identity of the murderer will probably be easier for a reader in the 2020s to pick up on than they were in the 1930s. “The Adventure of the Three Lame Men”: The kidnapping of a wealthy businessman turns into murder, but not in the way you might expect. A lot of good clues, yet it’s not unlikely you will beat Ellery to the solution. “The Adventure of the Invisible Lover”: Ellery investigates a murder in a small New York town, committed with a gun that was unquestionably in the possession of one man and only one man during the period when it could have been committed. Yet everyone who knows him swears he’s no murderer… By far the best story in the first half of the book, this is a clear example of a complex story that could have been stretched out into a perfectly good full-length novel. Queen gets a little pretentious toward the end of the story with some Deep Thoughts about Weighty Matters, but they don’t really get in the way, so I’ll forgive him. ELLERY QUEEN'S THE LAMP OF GOD. Ellery Queen’s great 1935 novella “The Lamp of God” turned out to be the perfect antidote for the lousy weather here Thursday. The forecast was for sleet, and maybe ice, starting late Wednesday night and continuing through Thursday morning. My response to such a forecast is to a) batten down anything that needs battening down and b) decide what to read during the deluge, I had been meaning to reread “The Lamp of God” for years—it’s probably three and maybe four decades since the last time I read it, even though I have gone on more than a couple of Queen binges since. But those binges are almost always focused on the novels, particularly the great run of their middle period, the 1940s and early ‘50s, starting with . I would read an occasional Queen short story, sometimes a handful of them, but their shorter-length masterpieces, 1934’s “The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party” and “the Lamp of God” from the following year never got picked up. That changed this week. I reread “Mad Tea Party” this past Tuesday, and enjoyed every bit of its crazy cloud-cuckoo-land playfulness. For all its whimsy, it’s a major Queen story, and a lovely example of the cousins’ ability to fabricate a universe unto itself, in which outlandish clues and misdirections are part of the natural order of things, things which, set asunder, only Ellery can set aright. “the Lamp of God” is something else—and something more. By 1935 Ellery’s character was in full evolution from the snobbish Philo Vance-clone of the early novels into a more recognizably human figure. Still brilliant, still obsessed with order, but less supercilious, less artificial, less derivative, less affected. Indeed, only once in “Lamp” does Ellery fiddle with his pince nez— and while I can’t guarantee it I believe this might be the last mention of that particular Philovian affectation in the entire Queen canon . The Ellery of “Lamp of God” is on the brink of becoming the Ellery of Calamity Town, Cat of Many Tails, Ten Days’ Wonder and the other masterpieces that lay just few years ahead. “Lamp” offers a magnificent stage-setting for the debut of this new, improved Ellery—in fact, the setting, and the mystery that unfolds there is arguably the most magnificent of all the Queen venues (although the forest fire that rages around the mountain-trapped Queen in The Siamese Twin Mystery is a close second). Certainly the mystery that unfolds against “Lamp’s” setting is the most audacious the Queens ever wrote. The novella is set on a remote Long Island estate during a fierce snowstorm. A young heiress has come to America to re-establish communications with the miserly father from whom she’s been estranged for decades. Ellery is asked by the miser’s attorney to accompany him and the heiress to the estate—where they are immediately snowed in, along with a gargantuan physician, the physician’s wife, and a hulking, mysterious (aren’t they all?) groundskeeper. The miserly father has died, secluded in his immense, decrepit, foreboding stone mansion. Ellery and the others are put up in the more comfortable (though lacking in modern conveniences such as electricity and plumbing) house beside it. The stage is set. The story grabbed me as I began to read in the middle of the night and held me on past dawn as a cold rain fell outside. We were spared the ice and sleet, but Thursday was a raw, bitter day, and I stayed in, reading “Lamp” and marveling at what the Queen cousins wrought as they wrote. There is of course a murder. There is a missing fortune in gold. There are multiple suspects. And there is, most audacious of all, the strange case of the stone mansion the disappeared in the night. Seriously—in the annals of impossible crimes, the disappearance of an entire stone mansion has to be at the top of the list. Pince nez aside, I don’t think the cousins missed a single note in the entire short novel. They hold the reader’s attention in thrall, the characters are convincingly drawn, the mystery unfathomable, even by Ellery who, though committed to agnosticism, finds himself invoking God more than once —and from more than one religion. To say much more would be to spoil the revelations (sic) that cascade over the novella’s final pages. I will say only that the cousins play fair— everything in the story makes sense. Admittedly, the novella takes place in a Queenian pocket-universe, though less artificial than the one in “Tea Party,” and the tricks that are pulled out of a hat in the denouement come from a hat in a believably real world, not a Mad Hatter’s Wonderland. This is a marvelous story, well-deserving of John Dickson Carr’s opinion that it’s one of the ten best mystery stories of all time (the time of Carr’s opinion being the mid-40s). I have no doubt that it’s the finest thing the Queens wrote at less than novel length, and is the equal of all but two or three of their novels. Perfect reading for perfectly awful weather! (And any other kind of weather, too.)