Ellery Queen has stepped back from detective work due to his recent traumatic investigations in Wrightsville – Calamity Town, The Murderer Is A Fox and Ten Days’ Wonder – until it takes about one minute for his father to convince him to join the hunt for a multiple murderer stalking the streets of New York City, strangling people with silk cords – blue for men and pink for women.

With no apparent connection between the victims and nothing resembling a clue, Ellery is powerless as the death count rises. As tensions rise within the city, finding the killer becomes even more important. But given Ellery’s recent history of pointing the finger in the wrong direction, will he get it right this time?

Ah, a contentious one. A crime classic or an overwritten mystery with an ending that was written by our old friend, Captain Obvious…

Ellery Queen is a divisive author. People who like him tend to have a preference either for the puzzle-plot early Queen, or the more emotional Wrightsville era. I’ll come right out with it, for me, it’s the early books.

One of the issues that I have with the Wrightsville series is Ellery’s diminishing intelligence. Admittedly, it’s only Calamity Town that I’ve read in the past fifteen-ish years, but Ellery misses the blooming obvious in that one, and it takes an age in this one, after admittedly some clever reasoning, to establish the truth.

Stepping back for a bit, let’s take a look at the good stuff here. The description of the state of New York City and the indirect victims of the Cat, is well thought out. No idea if it’s based on an existing serial killer rampage in a different city or whether it came entirely from the Lee-Dannay imagination, but it’s worryingly convincing.

The motive for the murders as well is particularly effective and chilling. While it’s not clued, it’s the sort of thing that makes a lot more sense than most serial killer motivations, and it is understandable why the link between the victims is overlooked (unlike, say, The Murders In Praed Street).

But let’s not shy away from the bad. Some of the prose, especially the descriptive prose, is written in a deeply clunky style – at least when Brian Flynn gargles his thesaurus, he’s having a laugh when he does so. Here, it’s just so ponderous.

The ending is also obvious about 100 pages before the end of the book and it takes an absolute age getting to it. I know the Wrightsville books are a different style from the puzzle plots, but the others, even Calamity Town, still have a sting at the end of the tale.

Here, however, I think Dannay & Lee complete mishandle the ending. It’s clear who is responsible (to me at least) once… something happens, Ellery than spends a lot of time establishing the truth, including a trip to Europe (fitting in his investigations around time spent being rude about the continent), refusing to tell his father what he suspects until he has cast-iron proof, despite the fact that he actually has got the proof already and just wants to get some background information to be clear on the motive. And yet again, Ellery’s dallying costs lives – and in this case, it’s really inexcusable – but it’s all right because a quick page of therapy and everything is fine.

There are a lot of good ideas here but it’s a rubbish mystery. Yes, it’s a different style from The Nationality Object Mysteries, but the other Wrightsville books had more for the reader to mull over. I would note that other opinions are available – read Kate’s (Cross Examining Crime) first as she mostly agrees with me but if you must entertain him, then Brad at Ah, Sweet Mystery! is very much of the opposite (i.e. wrong) opinion.

I was really interested to re-read this – it was my choice for Book Club – as it’s supposed to be a classic so I wondered whether I would have changed my opinion on it, reading it knowing the structure of the whole thing going into it. Unfortunately not…