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About the author: Ellery Queen is a crime fiction pseudonym created in 1929 by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, and later used by other authors under Dannay and Lee's supervision. Dannay and Lee's main fictional character, whom they also named Ellery Queen, is a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve baffling murders. (from Wikipedia - full article).
Major characters:
- Martha Lawrence, wealthy with lots of old money
- Dirk Lawrence, her jealous husband, a writer
- Ellery Queen, amateur detective
- Nikki Porter, Ellery's secretary
- Van Harrison, a fading washed-up actor
- Leon Fields, gossip columnist
Locale: New York City
Synopsis: Ellery Queen becomes aware of trouble in the three-year old Lawrence marriage. Martha, independently wealthy, has taken on a token position as a play director to cover up her absences for her affair with fading leading-man actor Van Harrison. Harrison has a mansion in Darien, Connecticut; yet has no visible means of support.
Martha and Harrison have devised a coded method for arranging their trysts, using letters of the alphabet to indicate locations around Manhattan. Husband Dirk gradually catches on, and starts cleaning his old army gun.
Ellery fears violence is at hand, and seeks to prevent it. He installs secretary Nikki Porter in the Lawrence apartment, ostensibly to assist Dirk in his dictation; but really spying on him and trying to predict his moves.
Review: The Ellery Queens always have a hook, and this one is the alphabet code. It is revealed early on and we just follow along as Martha and Harrison have their little hookups. The title refers to their coded letters which were typed in red characters, and also hints at Martha's adultery as written in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 book The Scarlet Letter.
I expected a murder mystery, but this is not one. There is a murder, which finally occurs near the end, and there is no mystery about it.
One aspect I enjoyed was the limited cast of characters. The list above is it. There are no red-herring cardboard characters introduced just to fill up a suspect list. The gossip columnist Leon Fields is an interesting character, I enjoyed reading how he works and decides what to publish and what to withhold. A tiring aspect is following Martha and Harrison though most of the alphabet.
The modern reader should be aware that in the "old days" typewriters could use a bi-color ribbon (black and red) and select the type color as they went along.
Please note that like a few other Queen stories, there are homophobic slurs slipped in here and there. There are also several cheap plugs for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
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