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Today’s Mystery:
A private detective turns to Ellery for help when his income tax blank is stolen, along with sensitive information that could expose his wealthy clients to blackmail.
Original Radio Broadcast Date: March 12, 1942
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Originating in New York
Starring: Carleton Young as Ellery Queen; Marian Shockley; Ted De Corsia; Santos Ortega; Maurice Tarplin
Armchair Detectives: Manda Hedrom and Mayor Howard W. Jackson of Baltimore (Over the phone, not heard on broadcast)
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Join us again tomorrow for another detective drama from the Golden Age of Radio.
“Ellery Queen” remains a favorite of mine from those long-ago years of vintage mystery fiction although, as was then common, plots could be brilliant while not necessarily believable. Of the many incarnations of the E.Q. sleuth, the radio programs are among the rarest, so too the early TV shows. As a youth, I recall the second actor to star in the latter, Lee Bowman, and a few copies of these have survived. In the early Queen novels, attempts were made to produce telling instances of the least-likely-suspect theme, with the author (authors) getting a good deal of mileage out of the so-called “Birlstone gambit” found in the “Sherlock Holmes” novel, “The Valley of Fear” (1914) by Arthur Conan Doyle. My favorite example being “The Egyptian Cross Mystery” (1932), although how the culprit was strong enough to mount his crucified victims is, as I recall, never explained. In one of the four “Drury Lane” novels from the early Thirties by “Barnaby Ross” (actually Ellery Queen), each strove for that most-unsuspected-character-as-murderer motif, something of a zenith being reached in “The Tragedy of Y” (1932), which I initially found breathtaking until realizing how much of a literary stretch it entailed! This was said to have been inspired by S.S. Van Dine’s third “Philo Vance” mystery, “The Greene Murder Case” (1928) — a tour-de-force — the identity of the multiple murderer really taking me aback! My late friend, detective-fiction scholar Chris Steinbrunner, however, had once told me that he had guessed the killer’s identity early-on, so I guess there’ll always be those (if in the minority) who don’t get fooled!