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 anywher...

Originally posted May 10, 2024. I’ve long maintained that the enduring popularity of murder mysteries has far less to do with the murder than it does with the mystery . To me, at least as far as fair-play detection is concerned, a mystery holds the same appeal as a magic trick (in fact, there have been quite a few detectives , several culprits , and a couple authors who are stage magicians or magic designers, if not actual wizards ). Although, that isn’t an exact analogy: with stage magic, audiences want to be baffled, and the cliche is that finding out how a trick was done, in a way that is both mundane and audaciously complicated, invariably leads to disappointment. With a fair-play mystery, on the other hand, it’s desirable for the solution to a baffling trick to be audaciously simple: not “I never saw that coming,” but “I’m kicking myself for not having seen it.” Which brings me to Ellery Queen’s The Lamp of God , which John Dickson Carr included in his list...