The Dutch Shoe Mystery

This book has dated badly, since I first read it, maybe fifty odd years ago. I liked these a lot then, and found them pretty fair in giving you all you need to solve them. The first chapter of this book reads a bit off, as if someone started to update it, I must see if I can find my copy.

Ingenious like all Ellery Queen novels but not his best

As with other Ellery Queen books, the reasoning to identify the murderer is tortuous and even contrived; but the progression of the plot holds the attention, and the setting of 1930s New York engaging.

Published in 1931, The Dutch Shoe Mystery is the third book in the Ellery Queen series, jointly written by cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, under the pen-name of Ellery Queen. The series was considered one of the finest examples of a ‘fair play’ mysteries, with the reader presented with all of the clues available to the fictional detective so that they might solve it for themselves. Indeed, the book includes a ‘challenge to the reader’ page inserted near the end of the book, prior to the denouement, that asks them to try and identify the killer based on the clues revealed in the plot. The Dutch Shoe Mystery is a variation on the locked room mystery in that one of the workers, patients or visitors within the vicinity of the pre-op room must have perpetrated the crime and was almost certainly still present on its discovery. And the investigation soon reveals plenty of people present with the motive to murder the victim. The strength of the story is the intricate plot, which charts the detective’s investigation and reasoning. However, this offset somewhat by the dryness of the read, the fact that Ellery Queen is quite a difficult character to warm to, being somewhat aloof, snobbish and self-obsessed, and the fact that whole premise felt somewhat contrived in order to produce the puzzle. Nonetheless, an interesting read for the puzzle and challenge of solving it.

One of a deservedly successful series of pre-WWII detective stories from `Ellery Queen' (American co-authors Daniel Nathan and Manfred Bennington Lee) who was/are and is arguably the most important American(s) of crime and detective story writing. The story features Ellery Queen, a somewhat snobbish Harvard-educated intellectual of independent wealth who investigated crimes because he found them stimulating, and his father, Inspector Richard Queen.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 and performs an extended piece of logical deduction based on the shoes, plus other 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. Ellery's extended piece of logical reasoning on the state of the hospital shoes is truly wonderful!The story is noted for its complex series of clues and the "Challenge to the Reader", a single page near the end of the book declaring that the reader had seen all the same clues Ellery had, and that only one solution was possible. This claim is accurate, as it is in all Queen stories, in that this is a problem in deduction that really does allow only one answer.The plan of the hospital floor is worth studying and helps to solve the mystery.This is an essential addition to a Golden Age detective story collection. I really do rate the early (1929-1940-ish) EQ stories of which this is an excellent example.