American Gun Mystery
Read American Gun Mystery Online
Authors: Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen
To
C. RAYMOND EVERITT for one reason
and
ALBERT FOSTER, Jr. for
another
Interpolation: Challenge to the Reader
F
OR THE HALF-DOZENTH
time in a quartet of years I find myself confronted with the formidable task of introducing a new work from the pen of my friend, Ellery Queen. It seems only yesterday that I sat down to write a preface to
The Roman Hat Mystery,
that historic case which I bullied Ellery into fictionizing—the first Queen adventure to be put between covers; and yet that was over four years ago!
Now, so contagious is recognition of authentic genius, whether it is in the creation of a new
ocracy
or a new crime-story
metier,
Ellery Queen has become, a symbol of the unusual in detective fiction in America. In England he had been hailed by no less distinguished a critic than the
London Times
as “the logical successor to Sherlock Holmes”; and on the Continent, where (as Vivoudiére says in his florid but earnest tribute) “
M. Queen a pris d’assaut les remparts des cyniques de lettres,”
he has been translated into a polyglot of tongues (yea, even unto the Scandinavian), so that his bookshelves bristle with unfamiliar-sounding titles and his correspondence alone provides his son and her with a steady supply of foreign stamps which would delight the soul of even a less enthusiastic minor philatelist. In the light of such recognition, therefore—I am tempted to say “fame,” but that would probably cost me my friend—there is little I can offer which would not be sheer repetition. On the other hand, it should prove of interest to Ellery Queen’s readers to get his personal view on the case which forms the basis of the present volume. I quote verbatim a letter dated some months ago:
My long-suffering J.J.:
Now that the pestiferous Egyptian is safely tucked into his sarcophagus and the lid clamped down, perhaps I shall have time to work on a problem whose actual inception and solution you no doubt recall from history and some conversations of importance between us. For some time I’ve been yearning to do the Horne case. What an affair it was that centered about that salty old character, Buck Horne, and that agitated these rapacious brains some years ago!
It isn’t so much because I am endeared to my own cleverness in that fantastic brush with criminality that I propose to write my next opus around it. Oh, yes, the reasoning was interesting enough, and the investigation was not without its moments, I grant all that. But it’s not these things. Rather it’s the odd nature of the background.
I am, as you know, essentially a creature of cities; even in matters of practicality I must have my feet on the asphalt rather than the turfy ground. Well, sir, the dramatic
debacle
at our w.k. bowl which precipitated me into that improbable adventure also succeeded in wrenching me from the familiar gasoline atmosphere of our fair city and thrusting me into a strongly scented atmosphere indeed!—of stables, horses, alkali, cattle, branding-irons, ranchos. …In a word, J.J., your correspondent found himself conducting an inquiry into a murder which might have been committed a hundred years ago in—in, well, old Texas, suh, or Wyoming itself, from which so many of the principals came. At any moment I expected a yelling Piute—or is it Siwash?—to materialize out of the arena’s horsy air and come galloping at me with uplifted, thirsty tomahawk. …
At any rate, J.J., this florid explanation is to announce that my forthcoming
chef-d’oeuvre
will deal with cowpunchers, six-shooters, lariats, hosses, alfalfa, chaps—and, lest you think I have gone West of the Great Divide on you, let me hasten to add that this epic of the plains takes place—as it did—in the heart of New York City, with that fair metropolis’s not unpleasing
ha-cha
as a sort of Greek chorus to the rattle of musketry.Faithfully, etc., etc.
I have myself read the manuscript of
The American Gun Mystery
with my unfailing avidity; and in my opinion the Ellery Queen ’scutcheon remains gloriously untarnished, if indeed a new gloss has not been imparted to that brave
relique.
This latest episode from the intellectual exploits of my friend is every bit as stimulating to the connoisseur as
The Greek Coffin Mystery, The Dutch Shoe Mystery,
or any of the others in the Queen cycle; and possesses besides a tangy flavor pleasantly and peculiarly its own.
J.J. McC
NEW YORK
February, 1933
“…
now bend thy mind to feel
The first sharp motions of the forming wheel.”
“T
O ME,” SAID ELLERY
Queen, “a wheel is not a wheel unless it turns.”
“That sounds suspiciously like pragmatism,” I said.
“Call it what you like.” He took off his
pince-nez
and began to scrub its shining lenses vigorously, as he always does when he is thoughtful. “I don’t mean to say that I cannot recognize it as a material object
per se;
it’s simply that it has no meaning for me until it begins to
function
as a wheel. That’s why I always try to visualize a crime in motion. I’m not like Father Brown, who is intuitional; the good padre—bless his heart!—has only to squint dully at a single spoke. …You see what I’m driving at, J.J.?”
“No,” I said truthfully.
“Let me make it clearer by example. You take the case of this preposterous and charming creature, Buck Horne. Well, certain things happened before the crime itself. I found out about them later. But my point is that, even had I—by some miraculous chance—been an invisible spectator to those little preambulatory events, they should have had no significance for me. The driving force, the crime, was lacking. The wheel was at rest.”
“Still obscure,” I said, “although I begin to grasp your meaning dimly.”
He knit his straight brows, then relaxed with a chuckle, stretching his long lean limbs nearer the fire. He lighted a cigaret and puckered smoke at the ceiling. “Permit me to indulge that rotten vice of mine and play the metaphor out. …There was the case, the Horne case, our wheel. Imbedded in each spoke there was a cup; and in each cup there was a blob of color.
“Now here was the blob of black—Buck Horne himself. There the blob of gold—Kit Horne. Ah, Kit Horne.” He sighed. “The blob of flinty gray—old Wild Bill, Wild Bill Grant. The blob of healthy brown—his son Curly. The blob of poisonous lavender—Mara Gay, that … what did the tabs call her? The Orchid of Hollywood. My God! …And Julian Hunter, her husband, the dragon-green of our spectroscope. And Tony Mars—white? And the prizefighter Tommy Black—good strong red. And One-Arm Woody—snake-yellow for him. All those others.” He grinned at the ceiling. “What a galaxy of colors! Now observe those little blobs of color, each an element, each a quantity, each a miniscule to be weighed and measured; each distinct in itself. At rest, inanimate, each by itself—what did they mean to me? Precisely nothing.”
“And then, I suppose,” I suggested, “the wheel began to spin?”
“Something of the sort. A tiny explosion, a puff of the cosmic effluvium—something applied the motive-power, the primal urge of motion; and the wheel turned. Fast, very fast. But observe what happened.” He smoked lazily and, I thought, not without satisfaction. “A miracle! For where are those little blobs of color, each a quantity, an element, a miniscule to be weighed and measured—each distinct in itself, as distinct as the component suns of a fixed universe? They’ve merged; they’ve lost their prismatic quality and become a coruscating whole; no longer distinct, you will observe, but a flowing symmetrical pattern which tells the whole story of the Horne case.”
“How you go on,” I said, holding my aching head. “You mean that they all had something to do with the death of—”
“I mean,” he replied, and his fine features sharpened, “that the non-essential colors vanished. I often wonder,” he murmured, “what Father Brown or old Sherlock would have done with that case. Eh, J.J.?”
A
LARGE SUBTERRANEAN CHAMBER
strongly acrid with the smell of horseflesh, loud and resonant with the snorting and stamping of horses. In one corner an alcove hewn out of solid concrete, and in the alcove a smithy. Its forge was violently red, and fireflies of sparks darted about. A half-naked pigmy with oily black skin and preposterous biceps hammered like Thor’s little brother on metal which curved sullenly under his rhythmic blows. The low flat ceiling, the naked walls, framed the chamber in stone. …This might be Pegasus, this arch-necked stallion champing in his stall, naked and sleek as the day he was foaled. His harem of mares whinnied and nickered about him; and occasionally his scarlet eyes flashed as he pawed the strawed floor with the dainty arrogance of his Arabian ancestors.
Horses, dozens of them, scores of them; tame horses, trick horses, wild horses; saddle horses, raw horses. The sharp effluvium of dung and sweat and breath hung, an opalescent mist, in the strong atmosphere. Gear gleamed before the stalls; brass glittering on oily leather; saddles like brown satin; stirrups like shining platinum; halters like ovals of ebony. And there were coiled lariats on the posts, and Indian blankets. …
For this was the stable of a king. His crown was a flaring Stetson, his sceptre a long-barreled Colt pistol, his domain the wide and dusty plains of the American West. His praetorian guard were bow-legged men who rode like centaurs, drawled in a quaint soft speech, rolled cigarets deftly, and whose brown wrinkled eyes held the calm immensities of those who scan the stars under an unadulterated vault of heaven. And his palace was a sprawling rancho—thousands of miles from this place.
For this stable of a king with his odd crown and his strange sceptre and his extraordinary guard was not set in its proper place on the plains of a rolling country. It was not in Texas, or in Arizona, or in New Mexico, or in any of the curious lands where such kings rule. It lay under the feet of a structure endemically American; but not the America of mountains and hills and valleys and trees and sage-brush and plains; rather the America of skyscrapers, subways, rouged chorines, hotels, theatres, breadlines, night-clubs, slums, speakeasies, radio towers,
literati,
and tabloids. It was as remote from its native habitat as the cots of England or the rice-fields of Japan. A stone’s-throw away that equally curious domain, Broadway, speared through the humorless laughter of New York. Thirty feet above and fifty feet to the south and east roared the metropolis. Past the portals of the architectural Colossus in whose cellars it lay flew a thousand automobiles a minute.