Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

The September/October 1999 issue of this magazine, commemorating the seventieth anniversary of The Roman Hat Mystery, featured two new pastiches, both set in the present and both calling Ellery by his full name: Edward D. Hoch’s “The Circle of Ink” (about Ellery the college guest lecturer) and my own “The Gilbert and Sullivan Clue” (about Ellery the Hollywood screenwriter).

Indirect pastiches, maybe more accurately termed homages, have been much more numerous. James Holding was the author of the earliest, longest, and most ambitious series of these, adopting the nationality/object pattern of the early Queen novels and featuring not a stand-in for Ellery himself but two men based on his creators, Fred Dannay and Manny Lee. King Danforth and Martin Leroy (collaborators under the name Leroy King), embarked on an around-the-world cruise with their wives, find a puzzle in every port. The series began with “The Norwegian Apple Mystery” (November 1960) and continued through “The African Fish Mystery” (April 1961), “The Italian Tile Mystery” (September 1961), “The Hong Kong Jewel Mystery” (November 1963), “The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery” (December 1963), “The Tahitian Powder Box Mystery” (October 1964), “The Japanese Card Mystery” (October 1965), “The New Zealand Bird Mystery” (January 1967), and “The Phillipine Key Mystery” (February 1968), reaching a total of ten entries with “The Borneo Snapshot Mystery” (January 1972).

Margaret Austin’s “Introducing Ellery’s Mom” (July 1962) actually recounts two cases (one respectable failure and one cleverly plotted success) narrated by the middle child of mystery writer and amateur sleuth Kate McKay. Young Ellery has older siblings named Nicholas Charles and Hildegarde and younger ones named Ngaio and Perry.

William Brittain, a prolific contributor of fair-play detective stories to EQMM, launched a new series in December 1965 with “The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr” and “The Man Who Read Ellery Queen.” In the latter, the only possession 80-year-old Arthur Mindy brought to the Goodwill Senior Citizen Home was his collection of EQ novels, and he applies Queenian logic to the theft and concealment of another resident’s gold coin. Editor Queen inserted the appropriate Challenge to the Reader. Brittain would subsequently produce stories about readers of Agatha Christie, John Creasey, G. K. Chesterton, Georges Simenon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Isaac Asimov, in addition to his long series of puzzle stories about high-school science teacher Leonard Strang.

Josh Pachter came on the scene in the December 1968 issue with “E.Q. Griffen Earns His Name,” written when he was 16, making him second only to James Yaffe in the ranks of youngest EQMM contributors. (Pachter’s account of his first sale is entertaining: Told by his mother that Frederic Dannay was on the phone, he picked it up and said, “Dad, this isn’t funny!”) The character would return in “E.Q. Griffen’s Second Case” (May 1970), written when Pachter was 17. Ellery Queen Griffen is one of eleven children of Inspector Ross Griffen, all of them named after famous fictional detectives. In his first case, he confronts two mysteries — he strikes out on the more trivial but solves the more serious, a robbery from a jewelry store, summarizing his conclusions very much in the EQ manner, in this case making a rather obvious solution sound more brilliant than it is. In his second and stronger outing, the victim is a hippie poet and children’s-book writer who is stabbed in the back and scrawls a dying message on the sidewalk. The second story includes a reference to the young sleuth’s Uncle James, an aspiring writer — an in-joke for serious Queen fans: James Griffen, along with Wilbur See, was one of the character names Dannay and Lee considered before settling on EQ. Subsequently, only one of the other Griffen children had a published case: “Sam Buried Caesar” (August 1971) about Nero Wolfe Griffen.

In the broad field of crime-mystery-detective-suspense-thriller fiction, Conan Doyle undoubtedly remains the most frequent object of parody and pastiche, distantly followed by Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane, more distantly still by Raymond Chandler, Dorothy L. Sayers, S. S. Van Dine, and a few others. But Queen the author — and not entirely thanks to the enthusiasm of Queen the editor — surely must rank in the top ten.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Jon L. Breen.

EQMM is proud to claim Nancy Pickard on its list of Department of First Stories authors. She went on from her debut to win Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus awards for her short stories — plus a short story Edgar nomination. She has also won Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards for her novels, and was twice up for the Edgar in that category, too. Her latest novel is The Truth Hurts, and The Virgin of Small Plains is due in 2006 from Ballantine.

As the five-hour flight from Santiago came within sight of its destination, the man in the window seat said to Katharine Peters, “Have you ever been to Easter Island before?”

A little embarrassed, realizing she was practically leaning over him to look out, Katharine pulled back and said, “No. It’s our first trip.” With a gesture of her hand, she indicated that by “our” she was including her husband, on the other side of her, as well as the couple seated in front of them.

The man beside her pushed his seat back so that Katharine could see better.

Although they had sat beside each other for hours, they hadn’t conversed, except to utter the usual courtesies of “Hello” and “Is my bag in your way?” and “Sorry to bother you, but I need to get into the aisle.” He had slept or read for most of the trip, making conversation impossible anyway. Now Katharine heard more distinctly the Spanish accent she had noticed in his brief earlier words. When they boarded, she had seen him use a Chilean passport for his identification. He was a carmel-skinned man of late middle-age, tall enough to look even more cramped than most people would be in the small space allotted to him. Feeling sympathetic, Katharine had left him the armrest they shared, but now she leaned her elbow on it as she looked out the tiny window. She saw her own face in the glass, superimposed on the clouds: a red-haired woman in her worried forties, with a high, lined forehead and a long, thin nose.

The man pointed to the patch of land their plane was circling.

“See the volcanos?” he asked her. “The big one at the top of the island is Terevaka. But the one you really want to climb is Rano Kau. That’s where the quarry is. That’s where all the famous statues were carved, right out of the rock walls of the crater. I always tell people, think of Mount Rushmore, only imagine if the sculptor had cut the presidents loose from the mountain and then set them up on platforms.”

“It doesn’t look like there’s much there,” Katharine said, meaning on the island.

“There isn’t,” he agreed with a slight smile, “except for history. Everybody lives in that one town you see down there, and except for the army base, the rest of the island is essentially one big public park.”

It was a funny-looking island, Katharine thought; it was shaped like a soft triangle with the big volcano at the apex, smaller volcanos holding down the other corners, and a bottom edge that curved in and out, as if it were rippling. Its odd configuration brought to her mind a Halloween ghost costume — a small child with a sheet draped over him.

“I don’t see any statues,” she said, squinting.

“You will,” the man told her, “when you get closer.”