The Perfect Crime by Ellery Queen (1942)

photo: Wildwood Antique Malls

Major characters:

Ellery Queen, detective

Nikki Porter, his secretary

Walter Mathews, young millionaire

John Mathews, his uncle, a stock swindler

Carlotta "Aunty Carlo" Emerson, Walter's maiden aunt with the on/off accent

Togo, her pet chimpanzee

Arthur Rhodes, a lawyer, partner of John

Raymond Garten, rare book collector

Marian, his daughter, fiancée of Walter

Henry Griswold, his librarian

Locale: New York City

Synopsis:

Rich Walter Mathews comes to ask Ellery Queen for his help. His uncle, John Mathews, has swindled many people with oil well stock scams; including Raymond Garten, the father of Walter's fiancée, Marian Garten.

Raymond Garten, now broke, is forced to auction his beloved rare book collection. Altruistic Walter has an idea: He gives Ellery $250k to purchase the collection for him as a third-party, so Raymond will be unaware Walter is the buyer. He plans to give it to Marian as a wedding gift, so that it will stay in the Garten family and Raymond will be unable to refuse it. Ellery buys the lot and moves it to Walter's home; next door to the Mathews home.

No sooner has this been accomplished than John Mathews is found dead in his study. 

Review:

This book is prefaced with "Based on the Columbia Motion Picture Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime", an ominous admission that it was back-written from the movie - generally a bad sign, and one that the Queen authors (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee) had little to do with writing it. Eye-rolling continued when I find that one of the characters is a chimpanzee who has been taught how to shoot a gun (thought this sort of thing went out with Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue).

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find a respectable, concise plot; in the same vein as Queen's country-titled novels of the same era (Chinese Orange, French Powder, etc). My 1942 Grosset & Dunlap edition has a sketch map of the crime scene in Chapter 6 (p. 75), which is essential if you wish to figure out how the murder occurred, and careful study of the map itself may provide the answer for you.

A rather humorous aside is the conversations in which the investigators speculate 1). does a chimpanzee have fingerprints, and 2). if so, is it possible to take them?