"Maybe Life’s Not Quite So Strange As Fiction"

"Ten Clues for Mr. Polkinghorn."

By Charlotte Armstrong (1905-69; Wikipedia HERE; Mike Grost's Megasite HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the IMDb HERE; FictionMags HERE; and a book list HERE).

First appearance: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1957.

Reprints:

 Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (U.K.) #48, January 1957

 Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Australia) #117, March 1957

 Ellery Queen’s Anthology #2, 1961

 Ellery Queen’s Lethal Black Book, 1965

 Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1986.

Short story (12 pages).

Online at Faded Page (HERE) and The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to text page 3).

   EDITORS’ FILE CARD

   AUTHOR:  Charlotte Armstrong

 

   TITLE:   Ten Clues for Mr. Polkinghorn

 

   TYPE:   Detective Story

 

   DETECTIVE:  Amos Polkinghorn, mystery writer

 

   LOCALE:   A suburb in the United States

 

   TIME:   The Present

 

   COMMENTS:   Mr. Polkinghorn could see the newspaper headline: NOTED MYSTERY    WRITER SOLVES POLICE PROBLEM IN REAL LIFE. It was a cinch for a man with a trained deductive mind who had no less than ten clues.

STARTING with Ellery Queen (the detective) and passing through Jessica Fletcher and beyond to Richard Castle, we can't think of many fictional crime fiction writers who have proven themselves adept at solving fictional crimes in their own stories. But now we have another contender, one who thinks he's solved it. Certainly there are enough clues. The main problem with clues, though, is how to read them . . .

Principal characters:

~ Mr. Amos Polkinghorn ("creator of Daniel Dean, Ace Detective"), Conners and Farley ("they didn’t mind telling him all they knew about this real-life mystery"), at large: Mario Cossetti, Glenway Sparrow, and Matthew Hoose ("ten days ago, three convicts escaped. The alarm’s still out"), and Mr. and Mrs. Arnold, with their boy, Bob, and their little girl, Ginny ("they were hardly intellectuals, and besides, they were no fans of Daniel Dean").

References and resources:

- "Secret History of the American Revolution":

  It's online at Archive.org (HERE; borrow only).

- "Busman’s holiday? Ha, ha":

  See idiomdictionary (HERE).

- "dime-store socks":

  Believe it or not, some things used to cost five and ten cents, and businesses that sold them were called "dime stores" or "the five and dime":

  "Frank Winfield Woolworth had seen the success in Michigan and western New York of so-called nickel stores, where everything cost five cents (the U.S. five cent coin is called a 'nickel'). On February 22, 1879, Woolworth opened his Great Five Cent Store in Utica, New York, and it was his later success and expansion of that format as the F. W. Woolworth Company that would create the American institution of the 'five and dime'." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- An ONTOS survey of Charlotte Armstrong's Crippen & Landru collection, Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense, which doesn't contain today's story, is (HERE).

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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