See, here’s the thing about Ellery Queen books. Frequently (I would say almost always, but in fact I’ve read maybe half-a-dozen books out of approximately thirty-eight thousand) the murderer deliberately sets out to trap Ellery by leaving complicated false clues that Ellery figures out with unbelievable cleverness, and then belatedly discovers that the whole thing was misdirection. This can be fun as a game of detection, but stretches my disbelief to the breaking point. It’s one thing to leave a note blaming somebody else, but these false clues are so obscure as to require all the genius of Ellery Queen just to get to the wrong answer. If I were to commit a murder with malice aforethought (which I shan’t), I would not risk my freedom on some detective’s genius; if the detective has an off-day and doesn’t figure out the false clues, I’m up the creek.
In this one, the murderer finds a lothario and cons him into pretending to have an affair with the murderer’s wife while pretending (to the wife) to be blackmailing the murderer, then, oh, look, it’s completely insane. There are thirty things that could go wrong with the plan, that are likely to go wrong with the plan. Quite aside from the murderer playing his part perfectly over weeks in front of a moderately perceptive live-in secretary without her suspecting anything, what if Ellery doesn’t get hold of enough of the notes to decode them? What if, having decoded them, he doesn’t get hold of the bank records, which (bye-the-bye) was terribly illegal? What if, having got some of the bank records, he happened to look at the others? What if, having fallen for the whole thing, his conversation with the wife leads her to figure it out? Most of all, what if, in the climactic struggle for the gun, the wife or the lothario or Ellery get hold of it and prevent the actual murder from taking place? What kind of a schmuck spends all that time and effort on such a stupid plan?
And then, most annoying to me, there’s the stupidity of the code itself. It’s a version of the code in Murder Must Advertise, in which an easily available book (in this case, a guide book) and a letter give the location of the rendezvous. Only instead of the letter being essentially random, these bozos go in alphabetical order, so that once in possession of the book, the detective knows in advance which location is next. If they are going in alphabetical order, why even print the letter? Does the blackmailer not trust the wife to know the alphabet? And if (as it turns out) the inclusion of the letter is just to make it easier for a snoop to decode the thing, why bother with a code at all? Since the wife is not planning on showing the letters around anyway, why not just say “9:30 pm, at the Stork Club”? And why would the blackmailed wife be willing to accept this incredibly stupid rigmarole, since presumably she doesn’t want to be discovered?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.