Ellery Queen Detective Скачать все книги 16 Количество книг

THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY is superlatively “different.” It accomplishes the difficult task of combining provocative clues, thought-compelling logic and an amazing and inexorable mathematical solution with sheer story — the story of a bewildered group of people isolated on a mountain-top by a forest fire below... menaced by a murderer within and a flaming death without — truly caught between two fires. Mr. Queen handles his story elements — the growth of fear, the interplay of emotion, the delineation of common people helpless before an uncommon situation — equally as superbly as he docs his mystery and detective elements, in the concoction and treatment of which he is a past master.

Dane McKell, millionaire socialite, was planning an exhilarating summer when he discovered to his horror that his father was having an affair with another woman. The McKells were not only very, very rich, they were also very, very respectable, and Dane’s mother was a gentle and lovely lady.

Dane forced a meeting with the woman in the case with the full intent of breaking up his father’s relationship. Then, helplessly, he himself fell in love with her. After that — murder.

This is the basic situation, a brilliantly plotted detective story that only the old master, Queen, could devise, and that only Ellery, working with his father, Inspector Queen, could solve.

As always with classic Queens, the reader will have it solved three times before he discovers that he has been outwitted as usual.

Something entirely new in the field — a Wild West mystery in the heart of NYC. Ellery Queen's now-famous and much-imitated analytico-deductive method of solving crimes is brought to the acme of its development. Through logical reasoning and brilliare deduction, Mr. Queen narrows the field from literally thousands of potential suspects to the one and only possible murderer — the ultra-clever plotter who performed the seeming miracle of causing a gun to vanish before the eyes of twenty-thousand spectators!

Ellery Queen’s subtle attack on his longest and most complicated ease to dale developed out of a baffling series of murders in New York City. Victim followed victim with no apparent connection except that each was found strangled by a cord of India silk. The city’s tension mounted to mob hysteria. First in a cartoonist’s drawing, then in the feverish minds of the citizens, especially in that of Ellery himself, stalked the adding a new tail with each new murder, brandishing also a huge question mark — who would be the next victim?

Clues were nonexistent. Ellery had to employ all his canny skill and play every hunch before he could find even a hopeful direction in which to move. Then he opened the throttle, using the police, the mayor, the psychiatrists, even the enamored heirs of two of the victims, to speed into a climax as astounding as it is incontrovertible.

At crowded noon, in front of Fifth Avenue's most fashionable department store, while hundreds of sidewalk onlookers watch a demonstration of modernistic furniture in the window, the demonstrator touches a button regulating a concealed wall-bed — the bed swings out of the wall — and from its dark recesses tumbles the distorted, crumpled corpse of a beautiful woman... Ellery Queen moves vitally and refreshingly through his own story — a slender, cynical young man with a genius for piercing the veil of commonplaces and arriving at foolproof conclusions. Old Inspector Queen, his father, again takes you through the complicated process of a police investigation, although it is Ellery who is responsible for the solution of one of the most stimulating and baffling detective stories ever written. And the denouement is surprising and yet inevitable.

JOHN MARCO, the dashing and handsome Spaniard, the great lover, despoiler and betrayer of women, sat quietly on the beach terrace of Spanish Cape that ghostly night, apparently musing on his many iniquities, on the hold he had over the frantic desperate women in the house above him. Hat on head, hand on stick, long black opera cloak draped about his virile figure... that is the way they found him the next morning — dead, strangled, murdered... and when they removed the opera cloak they found him without shoes or socks, without trousers or coat or shirt or necktie or underwear — completely nude! Daring, clever, extraordinarily exciting, here is Ellery Queen at his best. And, as you might expect, again a stunning surprise at the end!

“A Problem in Adultery” might aptly be the subtitle of Ellery’s latest case. Who is pretty Mrs. Lawrence’s lover? And how can the young, rich Broadway producer be saved from the folly of her infidelity and the fury of her husband Dirk, the unsuccessful author who cannot control his morbid attacks of jealousy? These are Ellery’s major problems. Beginning with a night rendezvous in the park and a punch in the jaw from Irate Husband, Ellery finds himself hot on the trail of an unknown Casanova... suspected lover, home-wrecker, and likely target for a .45. And making the trail all over the jungle of New York City — from Chinatown and The Bowery to the upper reaches of Bronx Park — are the tantalizing Scarlet Letters, an alphabetical puzzle that keeps Ellery — and the reader — cudgeling his wits to the very end. Ellery has a special surprise for you in a case as sensational as the front page of tomorrow’s tabloid — the first appearance in a Queen novel of Nikki Porter as Ellery’s Girl Friday, that fiery, faithful, and long-suffering secretary of the Queen radio and short-story adventures. But THE SCARLET LETTERS is full of surprises, not the least of them the astounding pay-off of as exciting and clever a mystery as Ellery has ever gone a-hunting.

A STATEMENT TO THE PUBLIC Since 1929 we have the exclusive privilege of publishing the detective stories of Ellery Queen in the United States. In our years publishing Queen’s thirteen books we have refrained from the usual and monotonously extravagant publishers’ claims, preferring to let the books speak for themselves. They have spoken so eloquently — each has been an instant best-seller here and abroad — that Queen is now recognized by the world’s press and public as one of the greatest writers of detective stories. Now, with our publication of Ellery Queen’s fourteenth book and latest novel, THE FOUR OF HEARTS, we feel compelled to break our silence. We honestly believe that THE FOUR OF HEARTS is not only Ellery Queen’s finest novel to date, but is destined to be ranked as a classic by those familiar with this type of fiction. We ask you to compare it mercilessly, point for point — in plot, in characterization, in atmosphere, in style, in ingenuity, in excitement and bafflement and as a source of sheer reading pleasure — with any detective story you have ever read. We ask you to judge for yourself whether our claim is even slightly overmagnified. We feel confident that your judgement will substantiate our opinion.

Ellery Queen has now opened his own detective agency, Ellery Queen, Inc., on Times Square, New York, and his very first case develops into a complex and spell-binding tale of crime, intrigue, and extraordinary deduction. In its telling, the author has returned to the style and method of such earlier great successes as THE DUTCH SHOE MYSTERY, THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY, etc. Here again we meet Inspector Queen, Sergeant Velie and other earlier favorites and again Ellery Queen applies his analytical deductive methods to one of the most puzzling murder plots ever uncovered in the annals of crime. Six months after paying Ellery a handsome retainer, a retired munitions magnate, worth many millions, dies on his yacht in the Caribbean. Peculiar circumstances! An important man is quickly buried at sea with no medical certificate and no autopsy! Crew quickly dispersed before they can be questioned! Only Ellery’s diamond sharp wits could cut through the web of tangled events and arrive at the dramatic solution.

The green wig belonged to a redheaded Vegas show girl. The sequined gown had highlighted the bouncy silhouette of a blonde off-Broadway actress. The long evening gloves were the property of a bosomy smalltown nurse. These were more than an inventory of ladies’ wear. For they were found on the scene of a brutal crime during a hideaway weekend, near the body of an internationally known jet-setter notorious for his pursuit of beautiful women. What did they mean? The question plagues Ellery and Inspector Queen — and it will plague you — throughout the Queens’ newest murder case, most of which takes place in Queen fans’ favorite New England town, Wrightsville. But it is far from the only missing piece of the puzzle. There is the victim’s dying message. There is the mysterious woman to whom the trail is long and difficult. Above all there is the question: Who was THE LAST WOMAN IN HIS LIFE? Follow Ellery as he works his way through a typically labyrinthine Queen maze, from one surprise to another, with the most stunning surprise of all waiting for you at the end.

At last another full-length mystery story by Ellery Queen — his first in three years.

Observe Queen, detective, as he realizes that a murder is to be committed, as he watches the supposed murderer before the crime, as be sees the death but even then isn’t sure of the who and the why. Follow the intensely dramatic trial scene, then unravel with Queen the solution which bring happiness to those who should be happy and punishment to those who deserve it.

Of course, Ellery Queen didn’t want to get into all this trouble, for the went to the small town of Wrightsville under a pseudonym to write a novel. Neither did he intend to fall for Patricia nor did he want to get in the middle of malicious gossip with wicked results in a town turned topsy-turvy by a murder.

“Calamity Town” has action, excitement, novelty, atmosphere. With some security, the publisher queries: “Will this be considered a minor classic in the field of the American mystery novel?”

Armed men invade the Queen apartment. At their head is Abel Bendigo, brother of one of the world’s most powerful men, King Bendigo of Bodigen Arms, industrial monster whose tentacles embrace the planet. Someone is threatening to kill King Bendigo, and Ellery must undertake to save that hated life! Virtual prisoners, the Queens are rocketed a sealed plane to the headquarters of the Bendigo empire — a mysterious island believed to be “somewhere in the Atlantic.” On Bendigo Island — in a frightening atmosphere of concentration camp, industrial slavery, and brute militarism — Ellery comes to grips with a baffling murderer who calmly announces not only the exact date of the assassination, but the exact hour and minute as well! He finds himself matching wits with the fascinating American-born King, handsome, cynical, an absolute monarch; with King’s disturbing wife Karla, from a European royal family; Abel, King’s Prime Minister, of acute intelligence; and Judah, the saturnine little third brother with an inexhaustible thirst for $50-a-bottle cognac. Ellery solves a difficult locked-room puzzle with classic brilliance and at the same time grapples with the life-and-death problem of the democratic world today — how to deal with the violent threat of totalitarian power.

An eccentric millionairess is lying in a diabetic coma on a hospital bed in an anteroom of the surgical suite of the Dutch Memorial Hospital, which she founded, awaiting the removal of her gall bladder. When the surgery is about to begin, the patient is found to have been strangled with picture wire. Although the hospital is crowded, it is well guarded, and only a limited number of people had the opportunity to have murdered her, including members of her family and a small number of the medical personnel. The apparent murderer is a member of the surgical staff who was actually seen in the victim’s vicinity, but his limp makes him easy to impersonate. Ellery Queen examines a pair of hospital shoes, one of which has a broken lace that has been mended with surgical tape. He performs an extended piece of logical deduction based on the shoe, plus such slight clues as the position of a filing cabinet, and creates a list of necessary characteristics of the murderer that narrows the field of suspects down to a single surprising possibility.

An exotic movie actress, the swivel-hipped blonde, Winni Moon, and her scented chimpanzee; a murder which, already precious, became a managing editor’s dream; Pink, who came from Flatbush, Brooklyn; Solly Spaeth who was spawned in New York... These are only some slight hints of what you will find in THE DEVIL TO PAY and it is fair to say that here again is evidence that for ingenuity, surprise and original setting no mystery writer today can equal Ellery Queen. He never has failed to play fair with his reader. The amazing deductions of his stories are always in accord with the science of the streamlined murder. If crime is the subject of reader interest no mystery fan can commit a greater crime than to neglect the two-to-three-hour revel which THE DEVIL TO PAY provides.

In THE DOOR BETWEEN Ellery Queen again achieves this apparently impossible and produces something entirely new in the mystery field. The weapon he was in the most deadly, most universal and the head known among all the wide variety of weapons ever employed by criminals and murderers. The subject and the theme of THE DOOR BETWEEN give the thousands of Queen readers yet another kind of trill. The skill and brilliance Queen’s writing show in each succeeding Queen novel the steady growth of a master hand.

The Egyptian Cross Mystery has been characterized as “Ellery Queen’s weirdest adventure.” The shuddery, breathless plot plus Ellery Queen’s brilliantly logical solution mark the peak of Mr. Queen’s new famous “analytico-deductive” method. Ellery Queen has pitted his brain against many murdered but nowhere in his career has be applied his diamond-keen with to a murder as eerie and as puzzling as the crime which open The Egyptian Cross Mystery.