The Chinese Orange Mystery

by Ellery Queen, Otto Penzler (Introduction)

Overview

A topsy-turvy crime scene sends a detective on a puzzling quest for the truth.

The offices of foreign literature publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk are often host to strange activities, but the most recent occurrence­—the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty waiting room—is unlike any that has come before. Nobody, it seems, entered or exited the room, and yet the crime scene clearly has been manipulated, leaving everything in the room turned backwards and upside down. Stuck through the back of the corpse’s shirt are two long spears—and a tangerine is missing from the fruit bowl. Enter amateur sleuth Ellery Queen, who arrives just in time to witness the discovery of the body, only to be immediately drawn into a complex case in which no clue is too minor or too glaring to warrant careful consideration.

Reprinted for the first time in over thirty years, The Chinese Orange Mystery is revered to this day for its challenging conceit and inventive solution. The book is a “fair-play” mystery in which readers have all the clues needed to solve the crime. In 1981, the novel was selected as one of the top ten locked room mysteries of all time by a panel of mystery-world luminaries that included Julian Symons, Edward D. Hoch, Howard Haycraft, and Otto Penzler.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613161067
Publisher:	Penzler Publishers
Publication date:	10/02/2018
Series:	Ellery Queen Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	459,837
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing the greatest puzzle-mysteries of their time, gaining the duo a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery. Eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1929 when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Besides co-writing the Queen novels, Dannay founded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired the fictional Queen upon Lee’s death.

Otto Penzler, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of The Mysterious Press (1975); MysteriousPress.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; and New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from NoirCon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 70 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/13/2018
One of the most bizarre puzzles in crime fiction distinguishes this mystery, first published in 1934, from Queen, the pseudonym for Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, as well as the name of their gifted amateur sleuth. Book publisher Donald Kirk invites Ellery Queen to meet at Manhattan’s Hotel Chancellor, where Kirk maintains an office. On their arrival, Kirk learns that a stranger is in his waiting room. Since the door between Kirk’s office and the waiting room is locked from the inside, Queen and Kirk must use the door from the corridor to gain access. Inside they find the man bludgeoned to death and wearing all his clothes backwards. Furthermore, all the furniture in the room has been rearranged to face backward, and two African spears have been inserted under the dead man’s coat. No one in Kirk’s circle has any idea as to the corpse’s identity, let alone a motive for the unusual killing. The solution is a perfect, fairly clued match for the setup. If this creates a new audience for a genre giant, Penzler, editor of the American Mystery Classics series, will have done yet another service for whodunit lovers. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Without doubt the best of the Queen stories."

The New York Times Book Review

"Ellery Queen is the American detective story."

Anthony Boucher

2018-07-31

Imperishable anthologist Otto Penzler kicks off his newest publishing venture, a reprint series of American Mystery Classics, with this 1934 brainteaser involving perhaps the strangest crime scene in all fiction.

When millionaire publisher/philatelist/gem collector Donald Kirk and his acquaintance Ellery Queen (The Adventure of the Murdered Moths, 2005, etc.) stop just before dinner at Kirk's office, on the 22nd floor of New York's Hotel Chancellor, they step inside to find everything in the waiting room—framed pictures, bookcases, furniture, rugs—turned backward and an unknown caller who'd told Kirk's secretary, James Osborne, that he was here to see Mr. Kirk on a matter of great importance beaten to death and wearing all his clothes backward as well. Why would someone, presumably the killer, have taken the trouble to create such a baffling scene? That's one of the greatest riddles in Golden Age detective fiction, and it's a shame that nothing in between the opening sequence and the two concluding chapters that follow Queen's signature Challenge to the Reader remotely measures up to it. Since the corpse remains unidentified and there's precious little evidence beyond the bizarre state of the murder room, Queen, whom this early case finds at his most mannered ("I don't feel in the donative mood this morning"), spends his time chatting up the forgettable suspects—Kirk's cantankerous father; his sister, Marcella; his partner, Felix Berne; his friend Glenn Macgowan; and the two women in his life, perceptive Jo Temple and seductive Irene Llewes—and alternately unearthing and dismissing red herrings. Penzler's introduction, which focuses on the cousins who created the Queen pseudonym, is brief but informative.

It's easy to see why Queen's exercise in deduction has dated badly: Everything about it is creaky and artificial, from the incredible logistics of the murder to the alleged passions of the characters. After all these years, though, the unbridled ingenuity of its central puzzle has never been surpassed.

Kirkus Reviews