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The King Is Dead (Ellery Queen Mysteries) Audio CD – Audiobook, July 1, 2014
Ellery Queen's latest case finds him completely stumped and in need of some quick thinking.
Armed men invade the Queen apartment, led by Abel Bendigo, brother of one of the world's most powerful men. King Bendigo of Bodigen Arms is an industrial monster whose tentacles embrace the planet. Someone is threatening to kill the King, and Ellery must take on the task of saving his hated life. Virtual prisoners, Ellery and his father are whisked away to an island ''somewhere in the Atlantic.'' In a frightening atmosphere of industrial slavery and brute militarism, Ellery comes to grips with a baffling murderer who calmly announces the exact moment of the assassination. The trouble is, Ellery is with the confessed murderer at the time of the crime - so how could he have possibly done it?
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAudioGO and Blackstone Audio
- Publication dateJuly 1, 2014
- Dimensions5 x 0.5 x 5.5 inches
- ISBN-101482969459
- ISBN-13978-1482969450
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Product details
- Publisher : AudioGO and Blackstone Audio; Unabridged edition (July 1, 2014)
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 1482969459
- ISBN-13 : 978-1482969450
- Item Weight : 5.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.5 x 5.5 inches
- Customer Reviews:
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, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age "fair play" mystery. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded 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 Queen upon Lee's death in 1971.
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The King (the person's first name too) is shot and almost dies in a locked room par excellence. The basic means, for all the words and angst spent over it, is not that difficult to figure out, but some of the exact details and motives are. The psychology--and this is one of EQ's later works that focuses on psychology--is doubtful by today's standards and given in a report form. There's a tie-in to Wrightsville that seems unnecessary. Three-and-a-half stars for me: I spent several hours happily reading it (skimming parts), but I wouldn't read it again.
Top reviews from other countries
Before we get there, however, we must first endure what feels like a lampoon of a Roger Moore Bond, with Queen father and son taken to a reclusive, overweening oligarch’s secluded secret island, confronted by his immeasurable power, influence and wealth, his gorgeous trophy woman and his frank indifference to their mission of discovering who is threatening his life. What’s weird is that Bond himself was just a gleam in his author’s eye when this was published, with Casino Royale a year or so away still, so this setup is probably more original than the intervening years imply. It’s also a pretty fun context for an Ellery Queen detective novel, which is why it’s a shame there’s so little actual detection in it.
The vox populi would have it that (author) Ellery Queen can do no wrong but, while (detective) Ellery’s acumen once again comes to the fore and solves the underlying mysteries, this is really rather turgid once the detection begins (confined largely to one hideously over-long chapter, high on verisimilitude but low on narrative spice). The solution to the impossible shooting is also unfortunately rather tame, one that I had hoped would be a deliberate ploy before the fireworks began, and also slightly unusual in that it seems to regard such things as actual proof to be rather superfluous – surely an EQ first! The bigger mystery is how it takes Ellery and his father weeks and weeks to actually solve the thing...hardly demonstrating the precocious genius on show previously.
The King is Dead isn’t the most successful attempt at a locked room mystery, then, though many may prefer its understated directness to the histrionics of say John Dickson Carr’s grand guignol characters and tone (not me, though; Carr is a master). Remains a footnote in the history of impossible crime, and a weird one given its rightly-adored provenance; for completists only.