The Chinese Orange Mystery (1979) - Plot & Excerpts
Rich publisher Don Kirk, owner of the Mandarin Press, maintains an extra office next to the suite occupied by the Kirk family in the Hotel Chancellor, for meeting authors and, more importantly, for conducting transactions related to his passionately indulged hobby of stamp collecting. One day a fat little guy arrives and, declining to give his name to Don's assistant, says it's important he should see the man himself. He's put into the adjacent waiting room and essentially forgotten about.An hour or so later, after Don's return -- accompanied by his casual friend Ellery Queen -- the door into the waiting room is found to have been bolted from the far side. There is, however, an alternative entrance to the room. When it's opened, everything within is discovered to be in disarray: pictures and furniture and bookcases reversed to face the walls, a fruit bowl inverted, the carpet turned upside-down, and the anonymous man on the floor with his head bashed in. Oddest of all, the dead man's clothes have been removed and then replaced back to front, so that (for example) his shirt buttons run up his spine. In addition, two ceremonial spears have been removed from the wall and run up the man's trouser legs to his shoulders.At moments like this, it's handy to have Ellery Queen as your visitor. Such scenes are all in a day's work for him.As the investigation proceeds, Ellery finds more and more things that are backwards about it -- from (at least in Western eyes) Chinese script to various Chinese social customs -- as well as more and more things related to Chineseness and orangeness, such as a couple of rare misprinted Chinese stamps that happen to be orange . . . and of course the name of Don's publishing house! Then again, Don and his business partner Felix Berne are being visited by the lovely Jo Temple, freshly arrived in NYC from China, whose manuscript -- based on her youth in that country -- Don is keen to publish.Ellery -- with the help of his dad, Inspector Richard Queen, and the redoubtable Sergeant Velie -- unearths a plethora of secrets surrounding the Kirk family, all of which give rise to speculations about possible motives for both the killing and the extraordinary manipulation of the crime scene. Just about all the principals involved had the opportunity. But every hypothesis of Ellery's is doomed to come to naught unless and until the identity of the victim can be discovered: the man's clothes were stripped of all identification and none of the hotels in New York City know of a guest of his description having gone missing. (Hm. There are plenty of "hotels" in NYC who wouldn't tell the cops even if a guest had disappeared. But let's ignore that!)In the end, of course, Ellery manages to nail the murderer and motive, deduce the reason for the "everything backwards" stage management, and work out the modus operandi for the semi-locked room trick.Alas, I wasn't startled by the revelation of the murderer (I got my clue from a bit of very clumsy misdirection early on) and I just couldn't buy into the necessity for the "backwards" staging and the business with the spears; the murderer could have achieved the same subterfuge using far, far less elaborate means. Of course, implausible scenarios are hardly unusual in Golden Age mysteries like The Chinese Orange Mystery (which I kept thinking of as The Clockwork Orange Mystery!), but this one seemed a stretch too far.Aside from that, though, I very much enjoyed the novel. The Queens' style was always immensely fluent and readable, full of witty observations and asides. Ellery himself is still in the process of evolving away from precursors like S.S. Van Dyne's Philo Vance and Jacques Futrelle's Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen; the latter is directly invoked in the book's Foreword, by the fictitious "J.J. McC.": "Ellery, who is in many ways a thinking machine, is no respecter of friendships when logic points an accusing finger." He still wears a pince nez, is still a bundle of foppish affectations, and once or twice comes out with gratuitous insults and snobberies; but in places, too, he comes across as a human being -- he's definitively responsive to a couple of the women in the cast.He's also aware of the gulf that exists between the style of detective fiction from which he was born and the hardboiled style that was beginning to make itself felt, initially through the pulps and now even in proper hardcovered books:"Shows you that it never pays to use strong-arm methods, father dear. You've been reading too much Hammett. I've always said that if there's one class who should be excluded from the reading of contemporary blood-and-thunder of the so-called realistic school of fiction it's our worthy police force."And again, when a female cast member suggests he might be bought off in the traditional way, he reacts thus:Ellery sighed and hastily retreated a step. "Ah, the Mae West influence. Dear, dear! And I've always said that the Hammetts and the Whitfields are wrong in their demonstrated belief that a detective has countless opportunities for indulging his sex appeal. Another credo blasted . . ."This is by no means my favorite of the Ellery Queens, but it's well worth reading for all that; it's really only the denouement that, I think, lets it down. Certainly I have no regrets for the time I spent reading it.*=======*In strct point of fact, re-reading it. But, since the last reading must have been at least thirty and probably more like forty years ago, I hardly think it counts!=======This is a contribution toward Rich Westwood’s “Crimes of the Century” feature on his Past Offences blog. The year chosen for consideration in June 2015 is 1934.
Prior to reading this, I had only read one volume of the Ellery Queen short stories. Although I enjoyed those immensely, I wasn't sure if a full-length mystery would be just as good. Sadly, writing mysteries as short stories and full-length mystery novels require different sets of talents.Ellery Queen did not disappoint, however. In this, his 8th full-length mystery, re-printed recently in an e-book version by Mysterious Press and Open Road Media, Ellery investigates the death of an unknown man found in mysterious circumstances in the office of Donald Kirk, an acquaintance of Ellery's. When the corpse is discovered, the clothes on the body are on backwards - and all of the furniture in the room has also been turned around so it, too, is backwards! Ellery knows that this must be a significant clue, but what it signifies will take him the whole book to figure out.One aspect of the book that I particularly enjoyed was the challenge to the reader. Once Ellery has solved the crime, but before the big reveal, he issues a challenge to the readers to solve it themselves, stating that all of the clues have been laid before them fairly. This reminded me a bit of the Encyclopedia Brown books, which I enjoyed immensely as a child. I hadn't figured it out, as it happens, but I enjoyed reading the book so much that I did not care.I sincerely enjoyed reading this Ellery Queen novel and am quite pleased that Open Road has published 13 other Ellery Queen titles as well. They are available directly from Open Road or via Amazon.
What do You think about The Chinese Orange Mystery (1979)?
I read lots of Ellery Queen books years ago, and this month I ended up without any other audiobook, so I listened to this one from my personal collection. I like the Ellery Queen books. There comes a point where you really have to pay attention as he unravels the clues and tells us how the murder was done, and eventually, who did it. With all the possible suspects sitting there in the same room, this makes for some drama, and lots of fun!This book is about a stamp collector and his friends in NYC. A stranger appeared and asked to see him. His secretary showed the little man to a waiting room, and after some delay, the man was found murdered, all his clothes were on backward, and all the furniture in the room was also backward. Curious!Ellery Queen, his father, Inspector Richard Queen, and Sergeant Velie work together to the end. Old-fashioned, but still entertaining.
—Julianne
Invited to come early to a dinner party, Ellery Queen walks instead into a bizarre crime scene where everything, from the clothes on the victim's back to the book cases in the room, is backward. Not only that, no one involved in the case seems to know who this victim is. It takes some time for Ellery to figure all of this out, as well as why two spears were added to the victims clothes, making it look like he had giant horns.The solution was a bit convoluted and I'm still not sure I understood, but the character development was interesting and following the action was fun.
—Jessi
The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) is by “Ellery Queen,“ (Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay). Ellery Queen, then, is the nominal author and the main sleuth, and he’s a famous mystery writer in his books, and writes about his own cases, but always writes about himself in the third person. This is a classic “locked room” mystery in the John Dickson Carr mold. I tried to follow it, and I did in fact have a vague idea of who the killer probably was, but the whole thing is rather improbable. The main mystery is that this nameless little man is killed in a locked room. All of his clothes are turned around, all pictures and mirrors turned to the wall, the rug flipped upside down. Everything in the room is “backward.” This book also does what most of his novels seem to do, which is stop and give the reader a chance to consider once they “have all the clues necessary to solve the mystery.” This is enjoyable. Ellery is another transition from the European effete ratiocinative detective epitomized by Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot to the hard boiled American detective. The line is a little hazier here than in Rex Stout, where Nero Wolfe represents one tradition and narrator Archie the newer one. But Ellery Queen’s father is a New York City Police Inspector who deals with real American street crime, so the real word’s dark streets are at least acknowledged here. But Ellery himself still has to go into solution and sit around in his dressing gown thinking until he processes all of the information.
—Jeff
