The American Gun Mystery

 The American Gun Mystery (1933) by Ellery Queen

It's rodeo time in the Big Apple. Wild Bill Grant has brought his cowboys and horses, sharpshooters and bronco busters to town and they're all set to give New York a taste of the wild and woolly west. As an added bonus, real life cowboy and former Western movie star, Buck Horne is on tap to appear. But the show has barely begun before there is bloodshed. As Buck leads a posse of 40 cowboys on a wild ride around the arena, someone takes a bead on the lead rider and Buck falls to the ground, dead. He's been shot straight through the heart and then trampled by the horses in the gang that followed him.

Inspector Queen and his detective son Ellery are in the stands and the Inspector's quick thinking closes down the arena before anyone can leave. Now all they have to do is find the gun. The police force shows up in droves, manages to search every person in the arena as well as every inch of the Colosseum and yet no gun is found. After no progress is made, the Commissioner (under pressure from various sources) declares the venue open for business and Wild Bill starts up his rodeo again. With the same result--his lead cowboy, One-Arm Woody, takes Buck's place at the head of the 40-man posse and sets off around the  arena. And falls dead in the same spot from another gunshot. 

On the spot each time was a camera crew filming the event for the newsreels. Ellery gets hold of the complete film (including portions cut from the film to make the newsreel more compact) and spots the clue that tells him who did it and where the gun was stashed after the first murder. He then challenges the reader to use the clues to find the same answer.

This is not one of the best Queen novels. The setting is clever--a Western rodeo in the middle of New York City. Populating the Big Apple with cowboys and ranch hands and bronco busters and contrasting that with the city slickers, hard-bitten journalists, and steely-eyed members of Inspector Queen's police force works well. What doesn't work well is the mystery itself. Supposedly, we have all the clues we need to reach the same conclusion as Ellery. Well--if you count vague little references, I suppose so. But, quite frankly, the hiding place for the gun is ridiculous and I doubt that anyone having actually noticed the brief little notation that (spoiler in apparent blank space--highlight if curious) the horse refused to drink any water after the shooting really came up with that solution. Add the fact that Ellery is really quite insufferable in this episode--announcing after the first murder that he knows who did it....except he doesn't know who did it. His poor father must have been ready to boot him from the case. I know I was. ★★

First line: "To me," said Ellery Queen, "a wheel is not a wheel unless it turns."

Last line: A silence appropriately enough, that was Buck Horne's epitaph.

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Deaths = three shot