Ellery Queen Puts on His Big Boy Pants in THE GREEK COFFIN MYSTERY (1932)

Originally posted May 22, 2024.

Ellery Queen, you lucky devil! thought Ellery Queen.

There were a couple of Ellery Queen novels whose eBooks were on sale for $2 (no longer at time of writing), so I picked this up alongside Cat of Many Tails. You might think based on how I talk about them that my least favourite part of EQ stories is when I’m able to solve them—not so! In fact, my least favourite parts are the moments where Ellery behaves like an unrepentant skeezebucket. How does The Greek Coffin Mystery score on those two counts? Let’s dig in.

During the funeral for millionaire art dealer Georg Khalkis, his lawyer discovers that the dead man’s new will is missing. Khalkis had written in a new name, but refused to tell the witnesses who it was, so without the will, they’re in a very awkward legal position. To make matters worse, there was only a tiny window during the funeral that it could have been stolen, but an extensive search fails to locate the will anywhere in the house. The police are baffled, and eventually Ellery and pater arrive on the scene.

Now Greek Coffin is, we are informed, a prequel, featuring “a younger Ellery than has heretofore been encountered” who has yet to iron out his technique. So, so young. A 22-year-old minor. This younger Ellery is even more arrogant and even more prone to speaking in quotations and peppering his dialogue with French/Latin/German than usual. They really turn it up to eleven.

Ellery murmured, in a jingly rhythm: “‘Wie machen wir’s, dass alles frisch und neu—Und mit Bedeutung auch gefällig sei?‘”

Pepper blinked. “Eh?”

“Goethe in a twinkling mood,” said Ellery gravely.

Not having solved any cases before, the young lad is accompanying his father for unclear reasons (take your kid to work day?). Ellery proceeds to annoy the investigation team until they want to beat him to death:

“An excellent principio operandi,” chuckled Ellery.

His father turned on him a very cold and disapproving scowl. “You—you think you’re smart,” he said weakly.

And the reader might also want to beat him to death, once a pretty young woman shows up, and he starts with his harem anime antics:

“Sir,” she said severely, “you have the advantage of me.” […]

Ellery grinned. “That’s not literally true, my dear. Don’t you think that if I had the advantage of you my circulatory system would know it?”

God, I wish he was gay.

Anyway, Ellery makes the brilliant deduction that there’s only one place they haven’t searched for the will, so it must be there: Georg Khalkis’s coffin! And this is where the mystery actually takes off, because the will is NOT inside the coffin, but what IS inside is the body of a murdered man they’ve never seen before!

This setup is way more interesting than everything leading up to it. The investigation pivots to this murder, which makes up the rest of the book (while Khalkis is involved in the situation, the death that kicks off the story is not murder and is only briefly floated as potentially murder). There’s a stolen Da Vinci painting and a mysterious bundled-up visitor. There are some offensive phonetic accents and a cognitively disabled cousin who is not treated very well. Ellery notices a tiny, out-of-place clue and draws a brilliant deduction as to who the murderer is. However, he’s failed to tie up all the loose ends, and this deduction is totally, totally wrong. He crashes and burns in embarrassment, and, to be honest, you probably feel a bit of Schadenfreude (that’s a German word, Ellery!).

(Side note: The narrative device that “this is the prequel where Ellery announces his deduction too early and gets the wrong answer” is, according to a footnote, in order to placate readers who keep asking why Ellery never lets Inspector Queen in on his deductions before the climax. Which… that has to be tongue-in-cheek, right? You wouldn’t seriously entertain a criticism from fans who have, from the sound of it, never read a mystery novel before? It’s very weird.)

Ellery’s humiliation motivates him to investigate in earnest, this time keeping his plans to himself, and after this he’s… mostly… more tolerable.

“It really was a stroke of genius,” murmured Ellery, “and I congratulate myself upon it. What—no applause?”

There are some extremely off-colour jokes about Ellery seducing the secretary, and a blackmailer shows up to “milk [the millionaire] properly” (ahem). There’s a “lady-sleuth” and a stakeout and ANOTHER missing painting, and I’m curious to know if John Dickson Carr or Ellery Queen did the relevant trick first.

We’re presented with three more deductions before the end, and of course Ellery ends up at the right one and showstopper. In his defense, the murderer was messing with him, your honour. Maddeningly, one of the key pieces of evidence is a bit of typography that is clearly meant to be an illustration, but in the eBook is just written down as plain text. So Ellery and co. are like “Do you see the significance of this half-printed shape?” [Line of completely normal text] And I’m like, no, I literally do not see. It isn’t plot-breaking—I put together what it was probably meant to be from context clues—but it was a bit of a sloppy oversight. Ignoring problems with the specific edition, this final deduction successfully bamboozled me, and really was airtight this time. If while reading this you ever feel that Ellery’s deduction is kind of disappointing and makes no sense, then my advice is to keep reading. He really does do a great job, for a boy detective.