Ellery Queen

The Chinese Orange Mystery

Sarah Sammis

Over the summer while Sean was taking his swim lessons I read through three Ellery Queen mysteries: The Penthouse Mystery, The Chinese Orange Mystery and The Dutch Shoe Mystery.

Both The Penthouse Mystery and The Chinese Orange Mystery cover the clashes and misunderstandings between American and Chinese cultures. Although the overall set up of The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) is more challenging than The Penthouse Mystery (1941), Ellery Queen is far more ignorant of Chinese culture than he is in the later novel.

The set up is this: a John Doe is found murdered in a private office in the Hotel Chancellor. His clothing has been removed and put on backwards and all the furnishings in the room have been turned around too. How can inspector Richard Queen with the help of his son, Ellery, solve the murder if they don't know his identity?

What bothered me most was the implication early on in the novel that the backwardness of the crime scene was a message to imply the backwardness of Chinese culture. Ellery Queen is usually more worldly than this. Thankfully though he does realize the error of his ways. Although the dead man is tied to China, the reason behind his murder is far more interesting than what Ellery Queen first implies.

A topsy-turvy crime scene sends a detective on a puzzling quest for the truth.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

I am a huge fan of traditional mysteries, where the puzzle is more important than the actual crime. Add in an eccentric and preferably amateur detective and I’m usually hooked. Not so here. This was my first Ellery Queen story but it could well be the last. I found the writing style infuriating, in prose and dialogue there was an abundance of broken sentences and far too many ellipsis as though neither the characters nor the writer(s) were capable to finishing a thought or a sentence.

The story itself is irritatingly gimmicky. All of the theatrical complications were frankly ridiculous and I found them less entertaining than infuriating. It may be considered one of the best locked-room mysteries but I almost put it down with only a few pages of exposition to go, simply because I couldn’t bring myself to care. The balance between complication and convincing puzzle is simply off. It wasn’t difficult to work out who the murderer was but the how and the why were horribly contrived. The constant references to the old, tired ideas of the exotic, esoteric East were deeply trying.

Ellery’s irascible Police Inspector father was a welcome foil to all the showboating and folderol (and I normally like this feature on my mysteries!) and his men offered most of the more believable deductions. At one point he bemoans his son’s unlikely theorising, declaring 
“I give up. Go the whole hog. Go puzzlin’ your brains about Chinese oranges and Mexican tamales and alligator pears and Spanish onions and English muffins, for all I care! All I say is—can’t a man eat an orange without some crackpot like you reading a mystery into it?”

I can’t help but agree. I did however enjoy the interactions between father and son.

The Chinese Orange Mystery

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