The Tragedy of Z
Authors: Ellery Queen
The Tragedy of Z
A Drury Lane Mystery
Ellery Queen
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
Contents
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The publication of this third novel in the Drury Lane trilogy makes a brief word of explanation necessary.
The cases entitled
The Tragedy of X
and
The Tragedy of Y
occurred very close to each other in point of time. But
The Tragedy of Z
took ten years in the making. By that I mean that a full decade elapsed before a problem arose which made possible a title consistent with the titles of the first two.
In the intervening period Drury Lane solved many strange and perplexing cases, the most interesting of which will be recorded at some future time.
E
LLERY
Q
UEEN
Cast of Characters
AND THE PAGES ON WHICH THEY FIRST APPEAR
Patience Thumm,
Inspector Thumm's daughter, and the narrator; a sophisticated young woman with a flair for detection
Inspector Thumm,
ex-inspector in charge of homicide of the New York police: now an inquiry agent
Elihu Clay,
a contractor in Leeds, Tilden County, who claimed to be more sinned against than sinning
Walter Bruno,
Governor of the state, erstwhile District Attorney of New York County, friend of Inspector Thumm, and
Drury Lane,
celebrated Shakespearean actor (now retired) whose brilliant feats of detection have been recorded in
The Tragedy of X
and
The Tragedy of Y
Joel Fawcett,
State Senator and grafter extraordinary, more surprised than anyone by his murder
Dr. Ira Fawcett,
Joel's brother and Elihu Clay's partner, whose depature from this life was as sudden, as dramatic, and as deserved as his brother's
Jeremy Clay,
Elihu Clay's son, in love with Patience
District Attorney John Hume,
a shining knight in not-so-white armor
Dr. Bull,
Coroner and Police Doctor
Chief Kenyon,
Chief of Police in Leeds; the perfect picture of a heel
Carmichael,
Joel Fawcett's secretary
â
who was other things besides
Rufus Cotton, a
political boss, who determined that nothing should interfere with John Hume's political future
Fanny Kaiser,
who made a good thing out of vice, thanks to the protection of the Fawcett brothers
Warden Magnus,
Warden of Algonquin prison at Leeds. His was the responsibility for Aaron Dow, and his was the failure
Father Muir,
Chaplain at Algonquin prison. The world was too much with him
Aaron Dow,
twice convicted of murder, and twice released
Mark Currier,
Dow's lawyer, who would defend the devil for a price
Park Callahan}
prison guards who failed in their duty
Tabb,
a trusty, assistant librarian at the prison
1. I MEET MR. DRURY LANE
Since my personal participation in the events of this history cannot evoke more than a polite and passing interest from those who follow the fortunes of Mr. Drury Lane, I shall dismiss myself with as brief a
dossier
as the vanity of woman permits.
I am young; so much is granted by my sternest critics. My eyes, which contrive to be large, blue, and liquid, areâI have been told by various poetic gentlemenâstellar in grandeur and empyrean in hue. A nice young
gymnasium
student in Heidelberg once compared my hair with honey, and a vitrolic American lady in Cap d'Antibes with whom I had had some words compared it with rather brittle straw. I discovered recently as I stood in Clarisse's salon in Paris by the side of her most treasured Size Sixteen that my figure indeed approximated the arithmetical charms of that supercilious female. I possess hands, feet, the complete physical quota, in fact; andâthis on the authority of no less an expert than Mr. Drury Lane himselfâa brain in excellent working order. It has been said, too, that one of my chief charms is “an ingenuous lack of modesty”; a canard which I feel sure will be thoroughly blasted in the course of this writing.
So much for the grosser details. As for the rest, I may aptly term myself the Wandering Nordic. I have been on the run, as it were, ever since my pig-tail-and-sailor days. My travels have been interspersed with occasional stop-overs of respectable duration: I spent two years, for example, at an appalled finishing-school in London, and I tarried on the Left Bank for fourteen months before I convinced myself that the name of Patience Thumm would never be mentioned in the same breath with Gauguin and Matisse. Like Marco Polo, I visited the East; like Hannibal, I stormed the gates of Rome. Moreover, I am of the scientific spirit: I have tested
absinthe
in Tunis,
Clos Vougeot
in Lyon, and
aguardiente
in Lisbon. I stubbed my toe climbing to the Acropolis at Athens, and with lustful enjoyment gulped in the enchanted air of the Sapphic Isle.
All this, needless to add, on a generous allowance, and accompanied by the rarest of mortal creaturesâa chaperon with convenient astigmatism and a sense of humor.
Travel, like whipped cream, is broadening; but after repeated helpings it is also nauseating, and the traveler, like the glutton, returns with thankfulness to a sturdier diet. So with maidenly firmness I took leave of my poor precious duenna in Algiers and sailed for home. The good roast beef of father's greeting settled my stomach beautifully. True, he was horrified at my attempt to smuggle into New York a lovely and tattered French edition of
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
over which I had spent many a purely aesthetic evening in the privacy of my room at the finishing-school; but when we had settled this little problem to my satisfaction he hustled me through the customs and, two very badly acquainted homing pigeons, we made in sedate silence for his apartment in the City.
Now I find, on reading
The Tragedy of X
and
The Tragedy of Y,
that this great, hulking, ugly old sire of mine, Inspector Thumm, never once referred in those ebullient pages to his peregrinating daughter. It was not from lack of affection: I know that from the rather astonished adoration in his eyes when we kissed at the pier. We had simply grown up apart. Mother had packed me off to the Continent in the care of a chaperon when I was too young to protest; the dear thing had always been of a sentimental turn, I suspect, and vicariously steeped herself in the dripping elegances of continental life through my letters. But while poor father never had a chance, our growing apart had not been entirely mother's fault. I recall dimly getting under father's feet as a child, pestering him for the goriest details of the crimes he was investigating, reading all the crime news with gusto, and insisting on popping in at him in Centre Street with preposterous suggestions. He denies the charge, but I am sure that it was with relief that he saw me packed off to Europe.
At any rate, it took us weeks on my return to cultivate a normal father-and-daughter relationship. My flying visits to the States during my period of errancy had scarcely prepared him for the experience of lunching with a young woman each day, and kissing her good-night, and going through all the delightful shams of paternalism. For a while he was actually haggard; he was more afraid of me than he had been of the countless desperadoes whose scalps he had hunted during his lifetime of detective work.
All this is necessary prelude to my story of Mr. Drury Lane and the remarkable case of Aaron Dow, the convict of Algonquin Prison. For it explains how such an erratic creature as Patience Thumm came to be involved in a murder mystery.
During the years of my exile, in correspondence with my fatherâparticularly after mother's deathâI had been piqued by his frequent and affectionate allusions to that strange old genius, Drury Lane, who had come so spectacularly into his life. The old gentleman's name was, of course, well known to me by reputation; for one thing because I was an avid reader of real and imaginary detective stories, and for another because this retired dean of the drama was constantly being referred to in both the continental and American press as something of a superman. His exploits as an investigator of crimes after his unfortunate deafness and consequent desertion of the theater had been heralded far and wide, and echoes of them had reached me in Europe many times.
I suddenly realized, on my return to the fold, that there was nothing I desired quite so much as to meet this extraordinary man, who lived in state in a fantastic but enchanting castle overlooking the Hudson.
But I had found father immersed to his ears in work. After his own retirement from the New York Detective Bureau he had naturally found idle existence an intolerable bore; for most of the years of his life crime had been his meat and drink. So he had inevitably drifted into the private detective agency business; and his personal reputation had made the venture a success from the start.
As for me, having nothing to do, and feeling that my life and training abroad had scarcely fitted me for the serious business of living, it was perhaps inevitable that I should take up where I had left off so many years before. I began to spend much time at father's office, pestering him as of old, to his grumbling disapproval. He seemed to think that a daughter should be decorative, like a
boutonnière.
But nature had endowed me with his own grim chin, and my persistence wore him down. On several occasions he even permitted me to pursue a modest investigation of my own. In this way I learned a little of the terminology and psychology of modern crimeâa sketchy training which was to be so helpful to me in my understanding of the Dow case.
But something else happened which was even more helpful. To my own astonishment as well as father's I found that I possessed an extraordinary instinct for observation and deduction. I realized suddenly that I was equipped with a very special sort of talent, perhaps nurtured by my early environment and my eternal interest in
criminalia.