The Adventures of the Puzzle Club

THE ADVENTURES OF THE PUZZLE CLUB And Other Stories Crippen & Landru Publishers Cincinnati, Ohio 2022 This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Ellery Queen characters copyright © 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 by the Frederic Dannay Literary Property Trust and the Manfred B. Lee Family Literary Property Trust. All introductions copyright © 2022 by their authors and included here with their permission. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. For information contact: Crippen & Landru, Publishers P. O. Box 532057 Cincinnati, OH 45253 USA Web: www.crippenlandru.com E-mail: [email protected] ISBN (softcover): 978-1-936363-66-7 ISBN (clothbound): 978-1-936363-65-0 First Edition: October 2022 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 3 PART I: THE ORIGINALS 13 INTRODUCTION BY FRANCIS M. NEVINS 15 THE LITTLE SPY INTRODUCTION BY JEFFREY MARKS 25 THE PRESIDENT REGRETS INTRODUCTION BY MARTIN EDWARDS 33 THE THREE STUDENTS INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH GOODRICH 41 THE ODD MAN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD DANNAY 53 THE HONEST SWINDLER PART II: THE PASTICHES 59 INTRODUCTION BY JANET HUTCHINGS 61 A STUDY IN SCARLETT! INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR VIDRO 71 THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED CIRCLES INTRODUCTION BY KURT SERCU 79 THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLACK-AND-BLUE CARBUNCLE INTRODUCTION BY JON L. BREEN 89 THE FIVE ORANGE PIPES INTRODUCTION BY DALE C. ANDREWS 101 THEIR LAST BOW PART III: THE GRIFFENS 111 INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC DANNAY 113 E.Q. GRIFFEN EARNS HIS NAME INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC DANNAY 127 E.Q. GRIFFEN’S SECOND CASE INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC DANNAY 141 SAM BURIED CAESAR INTRODUCTION BY JANET HUTCHINGS 155 50 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 171 COPYRIGHT INFORMATION 174 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 175 Introduction By Josh Pachter Before I turn my attention to Ellery Queen, I’d like to begin with Agatha Christie. Dame Agatha’s Jane Marple was introduced to readers in six short stories about the “Tuesday Night Club,” which appeared in six consecutive issues of the monthly Royal Magazine from December 1927 to May 1928 and were collected (with seven later Marple stories) as The Thirteen Problems, published in the UK in 1932 and in the US (as The Tuesday Club Murders) in 1933. The Tuesday Night Club was a group of six people—including former Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Henry Clithering—who met once a week for six weeks at Miss Marple’s home in the village of St. Mary Mead. In each story, one member of the group recounted a “real-life” mystery—each, of course, invented by Christie and not “real life” at all—which the other five attempted to solve. And each week it was the dithery Jane who saw her way to the mystery’s solution. Thirty-seven years later, Ellery Queen—I told you I’d come to him!—introduced the Puzzle Club in a story titled “The Little Spy,” which appeared in Cavalier’s January 1965 issue. A second story, “The President Regrets,” followed eight months later, in the September ’65 issue of Diners Club Magazine. It seems likely that Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the cousins who wrote together as Ellery Queen, quickly tired of the concept. Whether their Puzzle Club was a conscious or unconscious imitation of Christie’s Tuesday Night Club or only coincidentally similar to it, they didn’t return to it for six years. In 1971, though, three more stories appeared in quick succession: “The Three Students” and “The Odd Man” in, respectively, the March 1971 and June 1971 issues of Playboy (of all places!), and “The Honest Swindler” in the Summer ’71 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Why did they end the series there, before producing enough Puzzle Club stories to fill a book? I haven’t seen any of the various EQ biographers or other scholars address this question, but I note the following: • It’s generally acknowledged that, while Fred Dannay was the plotter in the EQ partnership, Manny Lee did the lion’s share of the writing. • Manfred B. Lee died on April 3, 1971. • The final Ellery Queen novel, A Fine and Private Place, was published in 1971. (One additional novel, The Blue Movie Murders, came out in ’72, but it featured Mike McCall, not Ellery, and though credited to “Ellery Queen” it was ghostwritten by Edward D. Hoch.) Given these facts, I conclude that the Puzzle Club died with Manny Lee in 1971. Ten months later, “The Acquisitive Chuckle”—the first entry in Isaac Asimov’s long-running series of tales of the Black Widowers—appeared in the January 1972 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. It would be followed by another sixty-five stories, most of which were published in EQMM. Conventional wisdom has it that the idea for the Black Widowers came from the Trap Door Spiders, a literary dining club Asimov belonged to, but I find it hard to believe that the birth of Asimov’s puzzle-solving dinner club following so close on the heels of the death of the co-creator of Ellery Queen’s Puzzle Club was coincidental. Compare the memberships of the two groups, and the possibility of coincidence becomes, at least in my opinion, remote: The six members of the Puzzle Club included Ellery Queen (a mystery novelist), Darnell (a criminal attorney), Dr. Arkavy (a biochemist), and Emmy Wandermere (a poet), while the six members of the Black Widowers included Emmanuel Rubin (a mystery novelist), Geoffrey Avalon (a patent attorney), James Drake (a chemist), and Mario Gonzalo (an artist). The only two members who don’t overlap are the Puzzle Club’s Cyrus Syres (an oilman) and Dr. Vreeland (a psychiatrist) and the Black Widowers’ Thomas Trumbull