You Didn't See That One Coming, Did You?

AN UNEXPECTED TURN in a storyline is a time-honored literary device that's been exploited by fictioneers as diverse as Aesop, O. Henry, and Alfred Hitchcock; it's a technique that can be very satisfying to the reader if done well. Today's stories come from two very different writers living in very different decades with very different writing styles, but, as you'll see, they both have the same impulse, to surprise the reader. We'll let you decide if they're successful . . .

(1) "The Game."

By Dorothy Norwich (?-?).

First appearance: Weird Tales, January 1931.

Short short short story (3 pages).

Online at SFFAudio (HERE).

  "Did they suppose him so utterly simple that he had not been aware this long time of the desperate game they were playing?"

Main characters:

~ Mallory ("No, the way he had chosen was best"), his wife ("her lips, full, curved, and greedy"), the doctor ("I've warned you about undue exertion"), and Hendricks ("from 

the next farm had been in to see him").

Resource:

- We can't find anything about our author; "The Game" is her only item on FictionMags's list.

(2) "Fast with a Gun."

By William Schwartz (?-?).

First appearance: Murder, March 1957.

Short short short story (2 pages).

Online at SFFAudio (HERE).

   "The forty-five was looking bigger now and a hell of a lot closer."

Main characters:

~ Meeghan ("when it was a personal matter, Meeghan took the job himself and never made jokes") and Marty ("This was going to be a rough one to get out of. I was caught").

Resources:

- As biographically elusive as Dorothy Norwich was William Schwartz, although Schwartz was far more prolific in many pulp fiction genres.

- If we limit ourselves to William F. Schwartz's crime fiction, we see he had a series character, Nate Stone (FictionMags data; ss = short story; nv = novelette; na = novella):

  "No Murder Tonight," (ss) Smashing Detective Stories, March 1953

  "No Season for Murder," (ss) Smashing Detective Stories, January 1956

  "Blood Will Tell of Murder," (nv) Smashing Detective Stories, March 1956

  "The Wrong Killer," (nv) Smashing Detective Stories, July 1956 (online HERE; go to text page 6)

  "The Shotgun Slay," (na) Smashing Detective Stories, November 1956.

- A crime short story not featuring Nate Stone is "Bait the Hook with a Blonde" (online HERE).

- Other places on the Interweb that relate to our stories: Wikipedia (HERE and HERE) and the amazing TV Tropes (HERE).

The bottom line:

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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"I Do Not Desire Millions at the Risk of Wrecking the Economy"

"The Guy Who Remembered Ahead."

By Mack Reynolds (1917-83; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; and the SFE HERE).

First appearance: Bluebook, September 1954.

Short short short story (3 pages).

Online at SFFAudio (HERE).

   "In case you're slow with your arithmetic anybody who had a hundred-dollar bill and could name seven winners in a row without a miss could own just about all the green in the country."

"VIRTUOSO: a person who has exceptional skill, expertise, or talent at some endeavor." If individuals in music, singing, playing instruments, painting, or other specialized fields who show excellence can be praised as virtuosos, then why can't con men? A virtuoso like, say, the one in today's story . . .

Principal characters:

~ Throckmorton ("deep down I'm a sucker for guys with principle"), Mr. Perkins ("It was after my operation"), Pete ("I didn't know it was no weirdie, boss"), Joe Coty ("the kind of guy who wouldn't lie to his own wife"), and Mort Kessler ("He gives me a horse strictly from glue").

Typo: "Mork" Kessler.

Resources:

- Our first encounter with a Mack Reynolds story was ten years ago, "He Took It with Him" (HERE). Since then: "Dark Interlude" (with Fredric Brown) (HERE), two Solar Pons adventures (with August Derleth) (HERE), "Gun for Hire" (HERE), another Solar Pons (with August Derleth) (HERE), "My Best Friends Are Martians" (HERE), and "Mind Over Mayhem" (HERE).

The bottom line:

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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"About Two Hundred Yards Away He Saw a Puff of Smoke Between Two Pine Trees"

REVENGE invades the comics with . . .

"The Hunter."

By Earl(e) Basinsky (1921-63; Wikipedia HERE and Mystery*File HERE).

First appearance: Don Fortune Magazine, November 1946.

Short short short story (2 pages).

Online at Comic Book Plus (HERE; select pages 36-37).

   "The forest would conquer. But best of all, he could tear down the fence, that hateful barrier to his freedom."

FORGETTING something important is merely an inconvenience, but forgetting something of vital importance just might get you killed . . . 

Main characters:

~ Lester Hacket ("lay on his stomach, sighting down the shiny barrel of his rifle") and Devers ("appeared at the corner of the cabin").

Typo: "with hard figures" [fingers].

Resources:

- Our author also wrote another story for the same issue of Don Fortune Magazine, "Knife Act" (HERE; select pages 23-26).

- The FictionMags thumbnail about Earle Basinsky, a protégé of Mickey Spillane: "Born in Vicksburg, Miss.; served in USAF in WWII; then lived for a time in Brooklyn where he wrote with Mickey Spillane, before returning to Vicksburg to enter his father’s printing business."

- And the FictionMags list (ss = short story; na = novella):

  "Killer’s Choice," (ss) Vic Verity, May 1946

  "The Broken Window," (ss) Manhunt, February 1957

  "The Prison Break," (na) Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October 1957

  "Decision," (ss) The Saint Detective Magazine, March 1958.

The bottom line:

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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"If You Want My Opinion, It's a Fake from Start to Finish"

OVER the course of twenty years, today's sleuth appeared in seventeen novels, but here 

he makes a rare appearance in a short story with the baffling (but soon to be made clear) 

title of . . .

"Before Insulin."

By J. J. Connington (Alfred Walter Stewart (1880-1947; Wikipedia HERE; the SFE HERE; about Sir Clinton Driffield, Wikipedia HERE; the Roy Glashan Library J. J. Connington page HERE and a complete bibliography at RGL HERE; and Mike Grost's megasite HERE).

First appearance: The Evening Standard, September 1, 1936 as "Beyond Insulin."

Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).

Other reprints:

  Fifty Masterpieces of Mystery, 1937, as "Before Insulin" (today's text via RGL).

 

  The Orion Book of Murder, 1996.

  The Edinburgh Mystery and Other Tales of Scottish Crime, 2002.

  Bodies from the Library, 2018.

Short story (14 pages as a PDF).

Online at Roy Glashan's Library (HERE).

   "The boy fell in love with one of the nurses, who happened to be under the influence of the doctor, Sir Clinton went on. If he lived to make a will, there was little doubt that he would leave the fortune to the nurse. A considerable temptation for any girl, I think you'll agree."

IT'S a sad commentary on human nature that some of us are willing to take advantage of somebody else's infirmities for gain. Such is the situation in our story, which seems to confirm that ancient verse a lot of people know in part but seldom in full. The guardian of righteousness (although he would balk at the term) in this case is first described elsewhere like this:

  "Sir Clinton was a slight man who looked about thirty-five. His sun-tanned face, the firm mouth under the close-clipped moustache, the beautifully-kept teeth and hands, might have attracted a second glance in a crowd; but to counter this there was a deliberate ordinariness about his appearance. Had a stranger, meeting him casually, been asked later on to describe him, it would have been difficult; for Sir Clinton designedly refrained from anything characteristic in his dress. Only his eyes failed to fit in with the rest of his conventional appearance; and even them he had disciplined as far as possible. Normally, they had a bored expression; but at times the mask slipped aside and betrayed the activity of the brain behind them. When fixed on a man they gave a curious impression as though they saw, not the physical exterior of the subject, but instead the real personality concealed below the facial lineaments."

  Heaven help anyone who has to contend with an adversary like that.

Principal characters:

~ Squire Wendover ("It's a matter of an estate for which I happen to be sole trustee, worse luck. The other two have died since the will was made"), Sir Clinton Driffield ("I'm Chief Constable of the county, you know—I should probably have had to prosecute that unfortunate nurse for attempted fraud"), Robin Ashby ("was worn to a shadow, simply skin and bone and hardly able to walk with weakness"), Dr. Prevost ("about thirty, black torpedo beard, very brisk and well-got-up, with any amount of belief in himself. He spoke English fluently, which gave him a pull with Robin, out there among foreigners"), Harringay ("was a taciturn man by nature, and his pride had been slightly ruffled"), and Sydney Eastcote ("I was very very sorry for him, and I'd have done anything to make him feel happier").

References:

- "young Robin took diabetes, a bad case, poor fellow"; "the usual diabetic coma":

  "Diabetes accounts for approximately 4.2 million deaths every year, with an estimated 1.5 million caused by either untreated or poorly treated diabetes." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "quarto size, ten inches by eight":

  "Quarto (abbreviated Qto, 4to or 4º) is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves." (Wikipedia HERE.)

 - "All we did was to put the envelope into a printing-frame with a bit of photographic printing paper behind it and expose it to light for a while"; "that little defect shows up when one exposes the envelope over a sheet of photographic paper":

  "In forensic science, questioned document examination (QDE) is the examination of documents potentially disputed in a court of law. Its primary purpose is to provide evidence about a suspicious or questionable document using scientific processes and methods. Evidence might include alterations, the chain of possession, damage to the document, forgery, origin, authenticity, or other questions that come up when a document is challenged in court." (Wikipedia HERE; also see Forensic Sciences Simplified HERE and Robson Forensic HERE.)

- "like a sort of St Andrew's Cross":

  "A saltire, also called Saint Andrew's Cross or the crux decussata, is a heraldic symbol in the form of a diagonal cross. The word comes from the Middle French sautoir, Medieval Latin saltatoria ('stirrup')." (Wikipedia HERE.)

Resources:

- We first communed with J. J. Connington with respect to his novel, The Tau Cross Mystery (HERE), and later with what appears to be his only science fiction story, "The Thinking Machine" (HERE).

The bottom line:

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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UPDATE: SEARCH TV series

Updated links and added a video cover (HERE).

"In His Hand Was a Sub-machine Gun"

"The Vanishing Witnesses."

By Ross Rocklynne (1913-88; Wikipedia HERE; ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; and Project Gutenberg HERE).

Illustrated by Robert Fuqua (1905-59; ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Fantastic Adventures, January 1941 (ISFDb HERE).

Short story (16 pages).

Online at Archive.org starting (HERE) and finishing (HERE).

   "And out of the invisibility into which their incredibly fast, yet normal, motion had placed them, three men were becoming visible!"

IT could be a brilliant, but destructive, notion: There's no need to speed up the criminals, just slow down the crime busters . . .

Main characters:

~ D. A. Parkins ("Boyle, you are going to be that witness! You are going to be kidnaped!"), Dick Boyle ("Wa-a-a-it a minute — whoa!” Boyle halted him. “I’m not sticking my neck in any death trap . . ."), Patricia Velney ("The State’s key witness! Without her, we haven’t got a case"), Etienne Montcliff ("chuckled, made a hopeless gesture. 'I saw you watching from the window. It is an amusing game. One tries to escape. One almost reaches his goal when — pouf'"), Tonio Pagli ("had been about to turn state’s evidence on the leader of a powerful gang when he had disappeared. Boyle didn’t like the sullen, anarchic gleam in his black eyes"), Haggart ("It couldn’t have been more than seven or eight days ago — though, as you doubtless know, days and nights pass so quickly — not more than eight or ten minutes each — that there’s no way to keep track of time"), Harrigan ("It’s a job of murder now"), and Arno Vachel ("The master mind apparently was Arno Vachel, a physicist who had been disbarred from one of the big universities. It was he who had discovered the metabolism-slowing radiation, and its accompanying maintaining radiation").

Gosh-Wow science in a footnote:

  "Body metabolism has much to do with our time-sense, or our conception of the passage of time. And the metabolism-slowing ray of Dr. Vachel no doubt utilizes this apparent connection. Time is a relative thing, and perhaps its normal rate of passage is not normal at all, but simply a manifestation of our own physical reaction to it. Thus, the metabolism ray might be called, with more accuracy, a time-ray. At least, no scientific argument can exist against the paradox of time, when it obviously depends on so variant a yardstick as physical energy expenditure. — Ed."

Comment: If Rocklynne had taken more care with his plot, then this could have been, but isn't, a real winner.

Typo: So which is it, John or Arno?

References:

- Our author seems to be tapping into the myth of Sisyphus:

  "In Greek mythology, Sisyphus or Sisyphos is the founder and king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth). He reveals Zeus's abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus, thereby incurring Zeus's wrath. His subsequent cheating of death earns him eternal punishment in the underworld, once he dies of old age. The gods forced him to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. Through the classical influence on contemporary culture, tasks that are both laborious and futile are therefore described as Sisyphean." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "They were actually living, having their being, at a vastly slower rate than their captors. To their captors, they were but infinitely slowly moving statues; while the captors were, in comparison, almost streaks of lightning!":

  An episode of the original Star Trek series rests upon a similar premise. (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).

Resource:

- Earlier we dealt with Ross Rocklynne's "Atom of Death" (HERE).

The bottom line:

   “The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitude.”

   ― Aldous Huxley

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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"Archons of Athens! What an Idiot I've Been! What a Turnip! What a Dunce!"

HERE'S a first from Ellery Queen (the editor) meant to follow another first, an earlier radio play reprinting, which we dealt with (HERE) . . .

"The Hangman Won't Wait."

By John Dickson Carr (1906-77; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; the Authors' Calendar HERE; and the IMDb HERE).

First appearance: An episode of Suspense, CBS radio, February 9, 1943. Online HERE (15 minutes 31 seconds).

Reprints:

  Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September 1944 (today's text).

  Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine “Overseas Edition for the Armed Forces” #18, September 1944.

  Alfred Hitchcock’s Fireside Book of Suspense, 1947.

  The Door to Doom and Other Detections, 1980.

Radio play script (14 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE; go to text page 115).

(Note: Some defacing on pages 127-128.)

   "Then, with your permission, I propose to prove that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points."

THINGS look bad for Helen Barton—very bad. A classic victim of post-traumatic stress disorder, tried and convicted of murder, and due to hang in a few hours for it, Helen has, 

as a barrister in a different context put it, "one foot on the gallows and the other on a 

banana peel." Her only hope lies in the far-reaching sagacity of Dr. Fell . . .

References:

- "a combination of Dr. Johnson and G. K. Chesterton":

  "Dr. Fell is supposedly based upon G. K. Chesterton (author of the Father Brown stories), whose physical appearance and personality were similar to those of Doctor Fell." (Wikipedia HERE, HERE, and HERE.)

- "With sudden shock the prison clock / Smote on the shivering air . . .":

  The quote is from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." (Poetry Foundation HERE.)

- "And you hang her tomorrow morning":

  It looks as if JDC anticipated the Ruth Ellis case by twelve years:

  "Ruth Ellis (née Neilson; 9 October 1926 – 13 July 1955) was a Welsh-born nightclub hostess and convicted murderer who became the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom following the fatal shooting of her lover, David Blakely." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "a .32 revolver":

  . . . or, more likely, a .32 automatic.

Resource:

- The last JDC play that we featured was "Cabin B-13" (HERE).

The bottom line:

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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"Quite Simply, the World Is Not As You Suppose. It Never Was."

LET'S get a jump on Halloween with a story where high tech collides with horror inside a . . .

"Model Collapse."

By Matthew Kressel (ISFDb HERE; homepage HERE).

First appearance: Reactor Magazine, October 1, 2025.

Illustrated by Keith Negley.

Short story (17 pages as a PDF).

Online at Reactor Magazine (HERE).

(Parental caution: Very strong language.)

   "A government agent and his mentee are sent into a remote town on a mysterious and dangerous project."

"KNOW THYSELF." So says the inscription on that Greek temple, but for one person in our story such knowledge will reveal a terrible truth . . .

Main characters:

~ L ("was young and ambitious, not tainted by decades of whatever lurked out in the dark. One day soon she’d take his place"), M ("was a battered fifty-eight, his dark-circled eyes firmly fixed on the exit door. They said a decade at the agency was an eon, and M had been there three times that"), the woman guard ("in a black uniform stepped out from the guard booth. Her uniform was devoid of markings or insignia"), and Rochelle ("Her gray hair was long and wild, and her eyes, wide open, seemed empty of awareness. There was something familiar about her face too, and L’s stomach rumbled loudly as she remembered: She had seen this woman’s face during training, but she wasn’t sure where").

References:

- "the neurodivergent":

  "Neurodivergent is a nonmedical term that describes people whose brains develop or work differently for some reason. This means the person has different strengths and struggles from people whose brains develop or work more typically. While some people who are neurodivergent have medical conditions, it also happens to people where a medical condition or diagnosis hasn’t been identified." (Cleveland Clinic HERE).

- "Greys from Zeta Reticuli":

  "The bestseller The Interrupted Journey (1966) about Barney and Betty Hill reproduced a 'star map' drawn by Betty, allegedly based on one she saw aboard an alien spaceship. Based on the map, a fan of the book named Marjorie Fish speculated that the aliens might originate from Zeta Reticuli. By 1974, the Hill case was referred to as the Zeta Reticuli incident.

  "In the episode entitled 'Encyclopaedia Galactica' (S1 E12) of the limited series Cosmos (1980), Carl Sagan demonstrated that the Hill map bore no resemblance to the real-life map." (Wikipedia HERE and HERE).

- "excession":

  "An act or state of exceeding something; excess." (Wiktionary HERE).

- "follow Polaris"; "the guide star":

  "The position of the star lies less than 1° away from the north celestial pole, making it the current northern pole star. The stable position of the star in the Northern Sky makes it useful for navigation." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "a trompe-l’oeil":

  "Trompe-l'œil (French for 'deceive the eye') is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Trompe-l'œil, which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving painted objects or spaces as real. Forced perspective is a related illusion in architecture, and Op art a modern style mostly dealing with geometric patterns." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "spiraling fractal piles":

  "The term 'fractal' was coined by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975. Mandelbrot based it on the Latin frāctus, meaning 'broken' or 'fractured,' and used it to extend the concept of theoretical fractional dimensions to geometric patterns in nature." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "Strange attractors":

  "An attractor is called strange if it has a fractal structure, that is if it has non-integer Hausdorff dimension. This is often the case when the dynamics on it are chaotic, but strange nonchaotic attractors also exist." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "Model collapse":

  "Model collapse is a phenomenon where machine learning models gradually degrade due to errors coming from uncurated training on the outputs of another model, such as prior versions of itself." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "too much of an ontological shock":

  "Ontology is the study of being. It is the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and how they are divided into basic categories of being. It aims to discover the foundational building blocks of the world and characterize reality as a whole in its most general aspects." (Wikipedia HERE).

Resources:

- When it comes down to how artificial intelligence (AI) should be employed, there seem to be some dark aspects to the technology, especially with its effects on children; see "Transcript: U.S. Senate Hearing on ‘Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots'" (Tech Policy HERE).

- We've lost track of how many times we've encountered AI and its physical embodiment in the real world, i.e., robots, which are usually presented in a negative light. As examples, you might have missed Dan Morgan's "Insecurity Risk" (HERE), Harry Harrison's "The Velvet Glove" (HERE), Allen Kim Lang's "I, Gardener" (HERE), Francis Flagg's "The Mentanicals" (HERE), and Ben Singer's "REALIZATION" (HERE).

The bottom line:

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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"It Will All Come to You When I Die, My Boy"

SETTING UP the perfect murder doesn't get much easier than this ("The victim practically selected himself"), but, you see, that's just the problem . . .

"Nearly Perfect."

(Subtitled "Shortest Mystery Ever Written" in Cosmopolitan).

By A. A. Milne (1882-1956; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; and the IMDb HERE).

First appearance: Cosmopolitan, August 1950.

Reprinted in (FictionMags data):

  Best Detective Stories of the Year—1951.

  Good Housekeeping’s Best Book of Mystery Stories, 1958.

  Suspense (Australia), September 1958.

  Suspense (U.K.), September 1958 (today's text).

  Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1994.

  The 50 Greatest Mysteries of All Time, 1998.

Short short story (7 pages).

Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to text page 115).

   "For him, one murder in a book was no longer enough. There must be two, the first one preferably at a country house party, with plenty of suspects."

THE EXPRESSION "out of left field" almost certainly has its origin in the great American pastime of baseball, but it's an avaricious Englishman who will discover just how unexpectedly an oversight can come out of left field that will ensure him an appointment 

with the hangman . . .

Comment: As in The Red House Mystery and elsewhere, Milne is having fun playing with common detective fiction clichés.

Principal characters:

~ The unnamed narrator ("Is it a murder story?"), Coleby ("I don't know if any of you have ever wondered about how to murder an uncle"), Julian Crayne ("'You know, Uncle Marius,' he said, 'you ought to write a detective story'"), Uncle Marius ("Oh, I dare say I should be all right with the deduction and so on—that's what I'm really interested in—but I've never thought of myself as a writer"), and Sir George Corphew ("Julian was no great chess player, but he was sufficiently intimate with the pieces to allow Sir George the constant pleasure of beating him").

Reference:

- football-pool:

  Of course Milne is referring to British football:

  "In the United Kingdom, the football pools, often referred to as 'the pools,' is a betting pool based on predicting the outcome of association football matches taking place in the coming week. The pools are typically cheap to enter, and may encourage gamblers to enter several bets." (Wikipedia HERE).

Resources:

- A. A. Milne is most famous among detective fiction fans for The Red House Mystery, a collection of reviews of it being gathered (HERE). Other ONTOS intersections with Milne: "The Watson Touch" (HERE); The Red House Murder, which was the original title (HERE); several shorter pieces (HERE); and "A Didactic Novel: The Mystery of Gordon Square" (HERE).

The bottom line:

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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"A Special Pick-proof Lock on Her Bedroom Door, Iron Bars on All Her Windows, Never Leaves the House, Sees Hardly Anyone . . . This Sounds Bad"

WE surmise from the headnote that today's story seems to have been the first time that Ellery Queen (the editor) published an Ellery Queen (the detective) radio play script in their magazine . . .

"The Adventure of the Frightened Star."

By Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay, 1905-82, and Manfred B. Lee, 1905-71; Wikipedia HERE and the ISFDb HERE and HERE).

Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine “Overseas Edition for the Armed Forces,” August 1945 and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Australia) #13, July 1948.

Radio play script (15 pages).

First broadcast on CBS, July 14, 1940, as The Adventure of the Frightened Star.

Online at Archive.org (HERE).

   "Shot through the chest. Funny place for a suicide to shoot herself. Maybe they do it different in Hollywood."

TRACKING DOWN criminals on the East Coast isn't enough for Ellery Queen (the detective). He heads west in search of research material and possible problems to solve and finds both when a reclusive, bordering on hysterical, movie star is found dead in a locked room. A simple suicide it seems to be, but Ellery notices something everyone else, including the local law, have overlooked. "Then," he politely asks, "where’s the revolver she’s supposed to have shot herself with?" . . .

The famous Challenge to the Reader:

  "Ellery Queen has just said he knows who the murderer is. Do you? You can have some additional fun by stopping here and trying to get the solution before Ellery gives it. Getting the correct criminal is not enough, if you play the game. You must get the correct reasoning, too! Now go ahead and read Ellery’s own solution to The Adventure of the Frightened Star."

References:

- Grand Central:

  "Grand Central Terminal (GCT; also referred to as Grand Central Station or simply as Grand Central) is a commuter rail terminal at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan." (Wikipedia HERE).

- (Ad libs):

  "In music and other performing arts, the phrase ad libitum (Latin for 'at one's pleasure' or 'as you desire'), often shortened to 'ad lib' (as an adjective or adverb) or 'ad-lib' (as a verb or noun), refers to various forms of improvisation."

  "In film, the term ad-lib usually refers to the interpolation of unscripted material in an otherwise scripted performance." (Wikipedia HERE).

- U. S. Postal Savings passbook:

  "The United States Postal Savings System was a postal savings system signed into law by President William Howard Taft and operated by the United States Post Office Department, predecessor of the United States Postal Service, from January 1, 1911, until July 1, 1967.

  "From 1921, depositors were fingerprinted. Although this practice was initially 'not to be associated with criminology', the early 1950s Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar radio show suggested that in some instances, Postal Savings account fingerprints were used for positive identification in criminal cases." (Wikipedia HERE).

......................................................................................................................................

From Ellery Queen: A Website on Deduction (HERE):

Episode 57: "The Frightened Star".

First broadcast: 07-14-40. Running time: 30:00 mins.

Repeated 10-21-43 or 10-23-43 (Episode 148).

Script printed in EQMM Spring '42.

Guests: Armchair Detectives. West: Mitzi Cumming. East: Dr. Henry R. Junemann (dentistry professor).

Ellery visits the West Coast at the urgent request of movie producer Tony Pepper who wants to discover why his greatest star, Nina, an actress with one name, suddenly retired from public life and work at the height of her career. Pepper believes that if he can learn the reason for Nina's queer actions, he can induce her to resume screen work. A locked-room mystery involving the death of a mysteriously retired Hollywood actress ...

Plot gimmick from The American Gun Mystery (1934).

......................................................................................................................................

Resources:

- Our last encounter with Ellery Queen (the detective) was the case of an unamusing murder in an amusement park, "The House of Darkness" (HERE).

- Other EQ plays that we've featured: the three plays in The Case Book of Ellery Queen (HERE); "The Scorpion's Thumb" (HERE); "Mr. Short and Mr. Long" (HERE); and "The Adventure of the Mouse's Blood" (HERE).

The bottom line:

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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