Ellery Queen Crackajack Funnies Compilation(1) Adventure of The Coffin ClueThe story starts off with an almost unbelievable occurrence - with a truck aiming at the client's car, forcing it off a hillside road, driving through the wire fence, and tumbling downward at full spped crashing headfirst into large boulders, with the engine catching fire and the windshield front windows shattering, and neither passenger is hurt in the slightest! They just walk away, several miles to the client's home. Interesting that the county coroner lives in the small town where the murder was committed AND, on top of that, he lives as a boarder (room renter in the very house the murder was committed!!! What are the odds against all this??? I wouldn't be surprised if HE, AND The police, who didn't bother to look in the accused's room (where they would have seen the bullet hole in the moved chair. A private detective (whose FATHER is chief of detectives if a big city police department), asks the family who owns the house in which the murder victim was killed to help him dig out the grave of the victim, to look at the body!!! Has there EVER been a murder case in which that was done by a private detective??? As soon as they dig out the coffin, the real murderer appears, firing
his gun at Ellery. I'm not sure I like the tutorial feature of the writer using narrative boxes to keep the readers on track with noticing clues. But i have never seen that method of telling a "Whodunit story"-so, to me it is unique, and so, interesting, at least from a comics history standpoint. The writer uses a story event to "sneak in' in what he feels could be taken by the reader as a "natural way" (although in reality, it is forced). The artist drew a chest of drawers instead of a bureau (office-type desk). He didn't know what piece of furniture a bureau was. The fact that the murderer knew that there was an identical wicker chair from the same set in the Bob Boyd's room, as in the victim's room, leads to the fact that the murdere had to have intimate knowledge of all the furniture in that house, either as a resident there or a frequent vistor who'd been in both rooms, or had spoken about the source of the furniture with the owner's family. The murderer heard everything the others were saying, so why didn't the writer indicate whispering balloons for Ellery and Margie when he was telling her his plan. Of course, it was the undertaker/coroner. Interesting that a blackmailer would move into the same house as his victim (to be more convenient to collect regular payments)? That seems VERY dangerous to him, given that someone in the house might overhear the 2 of them talking. I like the idea that the murderer took a bullet from a rabbit Bob killed with his pistol to frame him. A novel idea to come up with the weird happening that someone would think of killing rabbits with a pistol. I think it's very funny for the detective to warn his client to never again tell a trusted family friend her plans to hire a detective to solve a murder!!! This story was more of a "tongue-in-cheek" comedy than a challenging whodunit for would-be-amateur detective wannabes.
(2) Adventure of The Blood Red StampHiding a stolen very valuable stamp inside a book with many pages is a good method of stealing it and hiding it, unless the thief hides it in a bookstore that has many copies of that book, and sells several of them before the thief can come back to retrieve it. Convenient having the book shop where the thief hid the stolen stamp list the names and addresses of every purchaser of a book. I wasn't around in the early 1940s, but I WAS around during the later half of that decade, and don't remember book shops listing the street address of every purchaser. If you paid cash for a book and didn't have it delivered to your house, why would the store take down a customers' name and address? Perhaps a rare antiquariat book store might for high-priced rare collectors' items. But this shop had 3 copies of that book at the same time, and ALL were sold on the same day. So I doubt that it was terribly rare. Shop owners stealing valuable collectors' items they own to collect insurance money is already an interesting plot. But wouldn't it be even more interesting, especially for comic book collectors with the collection mania syndrome, to want to keep the rarest of the rare for themselves rather than sell it just to earn their living. So they fake it being stolen, collect the insurance money, and "eat their cake, and still have it, too!" A true compulsive collector can appreciate such a story.
(3) The Vera Oslo CaseA good set-up for a whodunit. A woman wronged all her co-workers selling them worthless land. Each has a motive to kill her. Even her husband has a reason to kill her, as the money was all in her name, but he was the benefactor of the money IF she would die. It was obvious to me when the author revealed that all the money from selling the worthless land was in Vera's name, and, of course, her husband would receive it if she would die. It's a clever touch to have Sven, her husband catch her around her neck in their trapeze practising rather than by grabbing her hands, and hiding his crime by using a rope to simulate a hanging, by covering up his thumb marks on her neck.
(4) The Ski Resort MurderTaking a workaholic friend or family member to a snowbound resort for a rest is a good idea. Of course the first crime wave in 50 years afflicts Inspector Queen, depriving him of his. badly-needed rest. 3 sets of different-sized boot tracks in the snow, leaving the murder cabin, and they ALL limped on their right side. Maybe just one man wearing 3 different sized boots to make the potential ransom payers thing it's a gang rather than just one man? That theory of mine turned out to be correct. I like the key to solving the crime being related to the one obvious detail that the murderer forgot to include in his subterfuge setup. He forgot to leave footprints in the snow with his OWN boots, near those he made with the boots of the other people. An interesting story, highlighted by the mountain scenery and skiing action scenes, as I was an avid nordic skier and ski mountaineer for over 30 years.
(5) Kane's Carnival MysteryThis is a story with too few characters, resulting in too few suspects (only 2). It does have a not-so obvious twist at the end that we find out that the carnival co-owner, himself, sold the carnival, without telling his sister, and murdered the buyer, who had a lot of extra cash with him for the purchase and maybe sprucing up the operation. This wouldn't have been totally unexpected by experienced mystery-solving readers, given that there are only 2 possible suspects, and it would be totally unfair to the reader, and terrible story-writing form or etiquette, to not have introduced a murderer early into the story and just toss him out of the blue into the story, just before its climax. So, this story is, like several others in this series, is not very satisfying to the average "whodunit" reader.
(6) The Hattan Limited Train Crash MysteryLots of interesting action scenes in this diamond heist - train wreck mystery. Unfortunately, some of the best-looking scenes were coloured in a haphazard, seemingly completely illogical manner, making the outdoor seems seem very unnatural, and making it more difficult to understand what is happening with rainbow colouring parts of cliffs with vertical stripes of very bright, clashing colours. It was unexpected that the train's flagman was the jewel thief and murderer, and not the disaster scavenger, and the professional jewel thief(who was interjected into the story, out of nowhere, seemingly just to add another suspect).
(6) The Munitions Factory MysteryI expected this story to be a spy story. And, it turns out that this story is about sabotage and 5th columnists trying to undermine the loyalty of workers, and perhaps find some to become spies for the enemy(Germany), and/or commit sabotage. So Ellery Queen was not only a private detective who wrote about his detective case adventures, but he also wrote scripts for detective/crime genre films. He was one of us!
This story has some nice drawing of action scenes of airplanes and mountain/forest backgrounds. A German plane, full of enemy agents, attacks Ellery's plane, and a disabled man in Ellery's plane, seems to panic and jump out the plane's door. I suspect he's an enemy agent only pretending to be crippled. unbelievably, both planes land safely. Inspector Queen's men and Ellery capture the spy crew. Ellery already knew who the spy leader was (as their passenger, who'd been pretending to be disabled, ran for the plane's door, when the plane was spiralling downward. An inventive plot! The FBI had the spy's every road and train watched, as well as every airplane's boarding carefully watched, and so, the only plane the spy could use safely, was the plane containing the US agent sent to capture him. it's quite far-fetched, and could never really happen. But it's an inventive idea.
(7) The Western Film MysteryI think it's interesting that the film director and producer allowed the film's actual stars to be endangered by being caught in a cattle stampede, rather than using stuntmen and women in key shots and using filming tricks such as superimposing, as was common during the late 1930s and 1940s. As SuperScrounge mentioned above, I wonder if the adapter started with a non-Ellery Queen Western genre story, and adapted it, morphing it into a detective/crime story? The story isn't so clear to me. The cowboys who were playing the parts of cattle rustlers in the film, turned out to be real cattle rustlers, stealing the cattle used in the film, and the leading actress in the film ended up dying in the stampede, making all the rustlers guilty of manslaughter!
(8} The Crime/Detective Writer MurderInteresting lead-in, as Ellery joins a staff of film script writers, where one writer just happens to murder another. An unusual method used by the murderer, having weights on pulley ropes pull him up and down to avoid leaving footprints, but more importantly, to quickly reach the victim 4 floors up, and get back down into the writers' meeting room quickly. This was a relatively boring story that never even revealed the method of the murder, and the motive of "perhaps" not being fired because he could "possibly" take over the victim's job on the writing staff, is far too ridiculous for a writer to risk being burnt up in The Electric Chair, on a remote possibility.
(9) The Boat Racing MysteryAlready, a detail that shows the writer has little to no knowledge about the chosen subject and setting of his story, and didn't bother to do any research. Anyone who's ever watched an organised boat race in an ocean harbour area, lake or river boat docking area knows that someone couldn't possibly wait until a couple minutes before the race starts to sign up for it, because the starting point of the registered boats and start-off tracking areas is assigned long before, and the boats have to already be positioned there. A man crippled by a boat crash the year before, wants vengeance against the racer who crashed into his boat is killed when his boat capsizes. But, Ellery states that the man was dead before the boat turned over. I suspect that the vengeful Race administrator handed the victim a blunt pencil tipped with poison, guessing that he'd lick the tip, to make it write better. Somehow I don't understand how licking a blunt pencil would make it start writing better.
(10) The Van Gogh Painting Murder MysteryA VERY short story in which there are only a couple suspects, who are eliminated almost straight-away, with details given that are very obvious. The man hired to guard the valuable painting kills the owner, to steal the painting late on the night before he is to start guarding it, No one else but the victim's sister and the expert who examined it, and pronounced it authentic, knew it was a real masterpiece. Most of these later stories could be told in 3 pages with illustrations, like real police case information pages. No fun for amateur would-be detectives to try to exercise their detective skills,
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Topic: Reading Group #321 - Ellery Queen (Read 1048 times)
