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15. The Dutch Shoe Mystery by Ellery Queen

This is one of the very earliest EQ novels (1931) and another well-written book. It’s clearly from another time – “clue” is spelled “clew,” “today” is spelled “to-day,” and umlauts are used in words like “cooperation” and “reexamination.” There’s a difference between the EQ books of the 1930s and the ones from the 1950s and 1960s. The later books aim to shock, titillate, and amuse you, while the early ones actually have semi-serious literary pretensions.

This one concerns the murder of an elderly woman in a hospital, just moments before her surgery. The circumstances seem to indicate that the murderer took way too many risks during the killing. The hospital is crowded, people are moving about, and there seems to have been almost zero margin for error. Yet the killer went ahead and did it anyway. A floor plan of the hospital is provided at the beginning of the book (which you’ll need.)

On page 177, there is a CHALLENGE TO THE READER which you can safely ignore, despite the following statement: “By the exercise of strict logic and irrefutable deductions from given data, it should be simple for the reader to name at this point the murderer.” Simple, my foot! You have to be Stephen Hawking to figure this one out. The solution is so “simple” that it takes Ellery almost 23 pages to explain what happened.

Despite this, I was riveted from start to finish and read the entire book in one afternoon and evening. About the only complaint I have is that there are too many characters to keep straight in your head (the manifest at the beginning of the book lists 47 characters) and the book is a little too long at 214 pages.