The King Is Dead

 The King Is Dead (1952) by Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay & Manfred Lee)

Ellery Queen and his father Inspector Queen are practically kidnapped from their New York apartment. Abel Bendigo, brother to multimillionaire and weapons broker King Bendigo, arrives with armed bodyguards and insists on the pair accompanying him to his brother's secret island. The Queens are none too happy to have their home invaded and told what to do. But he comes bearing a letter from an unnamed person in Washington (but it's obviously the President) and Ellery gets interested. It seems that King has been receiving progressive threating notes. That is--the message becomes progressively longer. The first reads "You are going to be murdered--." The second reads "You are going to be murdered on Thursday--." The implication being that the next note will tell him just which specific Thursday is doomsday. Possibly followed by one that will tell the exact time.

But when the Queens arrive on the island, they find that the investigation isn't going to be simple. King Bendigo thinks that the messages are from a crank and doesn't take them seriously. They're told they can go anywhere on the island except areas marked "restricted" but they still run into difficulty searching where they need to and talking to those involved. Ellery still manages to discover who is behind the notes--it's the third (middle) brother Judah. Judah isn't bothered by being found out. He readily admits that's he's the one. That he's definitely going to kill his brother on "Thursday, June 21, at exactly twelve o'clock midnight." He even shows Ellery the gun he's going to use. 

It seems that brother Judah is tired of the way King uses his wealth and his influence to manipulate the officials of the world. Buying and selling loyalty like a high-powered car dealer. Providing weapons to certain parties to increase the need for more weapons. It's rumored he even managed to help Hitler get bold enough to start a war that made Bendigo the number one provider of military armaments. Judah doesn't think anyone--not even his brother--should have that much power and believes the only way to stop him is to kill him.

On the night in question, King and his wife Karla are locked in Bendigo's conference room--a room specially built to be impregnable. It has no windows. It has only one door. It has an air conditioning system that can't be fiddled with. The Queens thoroughly search the room before allowing the couple to work in the room. They search it three times to make sure there is nowhere a man could hide; there is nowhere a booby-trap could be disguised. Inspector Queen and King's security force guard the door to the room. Ellery takes the gun that Judah says he will use and empties it of all cartridges--handing them to his father. He then searches Judah's room to be sure there are no extra cartridges hidden. Ellery and King's personal guard stand over Judah all evening. At two minutes to midnight Judah stands up, picks up the empty gun, and stretches his hand towards the wall facing the conference room. At exactly midnight he squeezes the trigger and nothing happens. But...

When Ellery and his father unlock the conference room. King is slumped in his chair with a bullet hole in his breast. Karla is lying on the floor in a faint. And there is no one else in the room--and no weapon. Somehow Judah managed to shoot his brother with an empty gun--and he did so through two walls, one of which is three feet of solid concrete!

So...on the one hand, this is a very clever locked room mystery. And even though by this point the authors had dropped the "intermission" where they told us that we had all the clues and should be able to solve the mystery--we do have all the clues needed to determine how King was killed and what happened with the gun. I enjoyed that part of the story very much. What I had trouble with was the megalomaniac character King Bendigo and the way this man supposedly pulled all the strings behind every major political thing going on anywhere. The whole evil mastermind trope doesn't really fit with the Ellery Queen style (or in very many of the Golden Age stories--I like few of the Christie capers with such people, for instance). I also had a bit of trouble with big reveal scene with King. [spoiler encoded in ROT13]  V svaq vg uneq gb oryvrir gung whfg snyyvat va gur cbby (n frpbaq gvzr!) pbhyq punatr guvf cbjreshy, tvnag bs n zna gb fnttvat, qebbcvat byq zna. Lrf, Ryyrel sbhaq bhg uvf frperg--gung ur pna'g fjvz, ohg guvf vf n zna jub ercrngrqyl jerfgyrq jvgu uvf obqlthneq naq znaunaqyrq uvz. Snyyvat va gur jngre jbexf yvxr xelcgbavgr qbrf ba Fhcrezna?

If we ignore the evil mastermind thing, then this is an interesting and satisfying mystery. Lots of clues spread around so transparently that, if you're like me, you'll look right through them and not even know they're there. Motive is a bit more dicey--you have to wait for Ellery to go dig that up--but motive is not the key ingredient here. It's all about how what happened could possibly have happened. ★★★ and 1/2.

[If you'd like to decode the spoiler, then copy the coded portion, follow the link, and paste the the code into the box for decoding.]

Fist line: The invasion of the Queen apartment occurred at 8:08 of an ordinary June morning, with West 87th Street just washed down three stories below by the City sprinkler truck and Arsene Lupin in grand possession of the east ledge, breakfasting on bread crumbs intended for a dozen other pigions of the the neighborhood.

Last line: "I do," said Judah.

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Deaths = 5 (four natural; one shot)