Talk Back

[edting]

A collection of nine short stories. The first one is The Lamp of God, which you may recall had its own entry a few weeks ago. The Lamp of God is treated as a separate entry by all the fan sites, so I've stuck with the convention. To some extent, your opinion of this book will be strongly influenced by your opinion of The Lamp of God, which takes up fully 92 out of the book's 308 pages.

Of the remaining eight stories, four are regular "The Adventure of..." stories, and the last four are sports stories, all featuring Paula Paris, the pretty gossip writer that Ellery met in The Four of Hearts.

All of the early Ellery Queen books refer to period pop culture and slang, and it's not uncommon for me to lose a few paragraphs of each work, especially in the beginning. I just accept this. In these stories, however, I lost entire chunks of the works. I understood almost none of "The Adventure of the Bleeding Portrait."

I found none of these stories engaging. This is my (so far) nominee for the worst book in the series.