Wed 23 Sep 2009
A Review by Mike Grost: ELLERY QUEEN – The Origin of Evil.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[13] Comments
ELLERY QUEEN – The Origin of Evil. Little Brown, hardcover, 1951. Reprinted many times. Paperback editions include: Pocket 926, 1953; Pocket 2926, 3rd printing, 1956 (both shown). Signet, 1972; Perennial, 1992.
Years after his first two Hollywood books, Ellery Queen returned to Hollywood for a third novel, The Origin of Evil (1951). Once again, like The Devil to Pay, it deals with businessmen in L.A., not the movie industry. The central conceit of the story, “the household under siege from an avenger from the past”, is right out of the Sherlock Holmes tales.
Mystery
The Origin of Evil has an abundance of mystery plot. There are many separate mystery puzzle ideas:
● A separate clue to the killer (solved in Chapter 15).
● Secrets of various characters: that of Delia (set forth in Chapter 1, solved in Chapter 9), that of Crowe Macgowan (set forth in Chapters 4 and 5, solved in Chapter 16).
● A puzzle about the past of the victims (start of Chapter 9, solved in Chapter 14). Its set-up (Chapter 9) is an example of the intensive police investigations into characters’ backgrounds that run through EQ. This look into the past of the business partners recalls a similar search into the past of the business associates (Chapter 5) in The Egyptian Cross Mystery. The solution reverses plot ideas found in “The Needle’s Eye”.
Early on, there is a nice if small example of an EQ specialty: an Impossible Disappearance (Chapter 4). It is solved right away. The disappearance plot is of a different, and perhaps simpler, structure, than those in many other EQ works. Instead, it shares a broad resemblance to another impossible crime involving footprints, the radio play “The Adventure of the Haunted Cave” (1939). Both tales have different puzzles and solutions, though.
This multitude of mystery is good. However, many of the individual ideas are fairly simple. They are solid, but not at the peak of EQ’s ingenuity. The Origin of Evil is somewhere in the middle rank of Ellery Queen’s achievement: a decent book, but not a classic. Still, it is a pleasure to read a book focused so strongly on mystery and detection.
The Finishing Stroke (1958) will also be an EQ novel with a major mystery in the Ten Days’ Wonder “find the pattern in a series” mode, and an “impossible disappearance of a person” subplot. The impossible disappearance will play a larger role in The Finishing Stroke than in The Origin of Evil, however.
Some of the characters turn amateur detective in the middle of the book, recalling the amateur sleuths who assist Ellery in Cat of Many Tails. These sections involve some decent detective work, tracking down the origins of objects used in the attacks on the house (Chapters 6,8).
Themes
The book expresses pessimism over the arms race, and describes Yugoslavia and Iran and Korea as possible places where war could break out: 50 years later this seems frighteningly prophetic. The Origin of Evil shows the start of the Korean War on the US home-front, just as Calamity Town did for the beginning of World War II. One suspects that EQ chose the Los Angeles setting largely for these aspects of the novel.
In addition to the arms race, there are two depictions of high tech environments in The Origin of Evil.
The Origin of Evil is blunt in its depiction of sexuality, like some other later EQ novels. Mickey Spillane was dominating the best seller lists at this time, and EQ was clearly writing in tune with the zeitgeist.
The Origin of Evil, like Ten Days’ Wonder, has a younger man in love with the beautiful wife of a powerful paternal figure of a man. In The Origin of Evil, the young man in love with the wife is Ellery himself. In both novels, the romantic triangle has undertones of an Oedipal conflict.
These books, along with Cat of Many Tails, are the main products of EQ’s Freudian psychoanalytic period (1948-1951). One suspects that such Oedipal symbolism was consciously intended by the author. I confess I don’t believe in Freudian psychology at all, and don’t see the artistic value of such imagery in the novels.
Characters
I did like the young hero. His name, Crowe Macgowan, seems to be inspired by Cro-Magnon Man, suggesting he is an evolutionary throwback. Crowe Macgowan is one of the eccentric, non-conformist characters, that often make Golden Age mystery fiction so interesting. Such characters have almost disappeared from most contemporary English-language crime novels, which instead glorify conformity.
Alfred Wallace is also an unusual character, who seems odder and odder as the novel progresses, and we learn more of his back-story.
The suspect Mr. Collier wanders through The Origin of Evil, making recurring appearances, and sometimes philosophizing about life. A similar recurring philosopher character is the young black man in The Tragedy of Errors.
September 23rd, 2009 at 10:34 pm
I love those Mickey Spillane style, sixties paperback covers. Whoever actually bought “The Origin of Evil” on the basis of that cover must have been gravely disappointed!
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:20 pm
The cover art was always fun in this period. Often little or nothing to do with the contents, but it’s hard to beat a killer with a blazing gun and a beautiful girl in low cut gown — even if the book in question is an R. Austin Freeman Dr. Thorndyke.
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Well, as Mike says, the EQ cousins were following Spillane’s lead when they wrote the book. At the same time, though, when I was posting those cover images, I admit that was wondering myself what Dannay and Lee really might have thought about them.
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:29 pm
David, is this the cover you were thinking of?
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:31 pm
After some of the covers for the Ziff Davis EQ comic books by Norm Saunders with Ellery wielding a .45 automatic while protecting some girl from a killer with a burning poker, this had to be pretty tame.
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Steve
That’s the one. Rudy Belarski cover I think. Must say that’s a nasty place to have a powder burn!
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:39 pm
I know the Ziff-Davis cover you mean. It will take a couple of minutes to get it posted here, but I will. (We’ve overlapped comments here just a tad.)
I owned this comic book once. Why I ever sold it, I’ll never know.
(To have the funds to obtain something else I wanted, I know, but in this case, how foolish I was.)
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Steve
If you want it you can download this one for free from the Net along with some Charlie Chan’s and quite a few others. You can get a free cbr (comic book reader) off the net (I use Sequential Image Reader). There is a site in the UK that has a ton of golden age comics available and at least two issues of this EQ comic are among them.
September 24th, 2009 at 4:34 am
That Freeman pb is hilarious! Who is the guy with the gun supposed to be? That’s quite a man, able to aim his gun with deadly accuracy and fire, while balancing a bedazed blonde bombshell with bountiful bazooms on his bicep.
September 24th, 2009 at 11:42 am
“The Origin of Evil” is actually fairly racy.
Ellery Queen prided himself on keeping up with the times. Most of his books have a strong contemporary feel.
What “The Origin of Evil” doesn’t have is a lot of violence. Instead, it has plot, plot and more plot. Plus a vivid look at California in the early 1950’s.
I read “The Origin of Evil” is a hardback omnibus, bought used and jacketless as a teenager, called “The Hollywood Murders”. This blog is the first chance to see all these fascinating cover pictures. They are really interesting.
This IS the edition in which I read Freeman’s The Jacob Street Mystery / The Unconscious Witness. It’s a startlingly inventive novel. But it is so utterly unlike its hard-boiled cover…
September 24th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Whenever I see that Freeman cover I think of the scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty when Danny Kaye, whose Mitty works at a pulp/paperback publisher, tells the artist of one of their covers it needs more blood.
There is a great pulp cover for a reprint of Carter Dickson’s He Wouldn’t Kill Patience with a girl on the cover cowering from a cobra that more or less falls into the same category. Still, if the covers weren’t always accurate reflections of the contents, they certainly made for an attractive display on the racks at the local drugstore.
Back when books were only 25 cents you didn’t feel all that cheated if you got a great cover and the book didn’t live up to it.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
There’s another great scene with the main character in The Seven Year Itch, a book publisher, where he is explaining to the serious, academic German psychiatrist why they gave his book a racy cover that had no resemblance to the actual case study in the book. I love those covers. And it certainly is suggestive of what publishers thought was selling mysteries after WW2. It wasn’t ratiocination!
July 10th, 2015 at 11:31 pm
A uneven work. There are great things about this novel and other things that are not so great. The entire subplot about Ellery and the guy’s wife went nowhere and seemed pointless. The solution,at least the real solution is fair play and neither it nor the meaning of the gifts are hard to guess if you know about biology and little history of science. Without giving spoilers away the first and fake solution is a bit much. It would have been better with the right solution by is itself.
Feel free to disagree on any of the points above.