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?
Not only is this book based on the movie, the movie was based on a previous Ellery Queen book, The Devil to Pay. The chimp is in the original book, but if I remember correctly it was not trained to shoot.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the note, John! I have both books, but I never connected them up as you pointed out! I will have to read Devil to Pay again! - Rick
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