Tue 8 Dec 2009
Reviewed by Marvin Lachman: ELLERY QUEEN – The Finishing Stroke.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
by Marvin Lachman
ELLERY QUEEN – The Finishing Stroke. Simon & Schuster, hc, 1958. Paperback reprints include: Cardinal C-343, March 1959; Signet P3142, May 1967; Carroll & Graf, 1988.
Thirty years after the fact, I still recall the anticipation with which I awaited the paperback reprint of Ellery Queen’s The Finishing Stroke. Hardcover reviews had described it as a throwback to the great masterpieces of fair-play deduction of the 1930s.
If it wasn’t quite The Egyptian Cross Mystery or The Tragedy of X, it was nonetheless a fine detective story, and I was not disappointed then, nor should readers of Carroll and Graf’s recent reprint.
Queenian scholar Francis M. Nevins has pointed to the implausibility and stylized nature of The Finishing Stroke, and objectively I can understand his viewpoint. I, however, had little trouble suspending disbelief and relishing a book whose setting is a 1929 Christmas house party with an assorted group of people stranded by that old cliche, the snow storm.
The cast of characters includes the young Ellery Queen, who has just published his first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, and “the Maestro,” as Sgt. Velie used to call him, is in good form solving the bizarre happenings in what I considered the best book in the last two decades of the writing career of Dannay and Lee.
(very slightly revised).
December 8th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
This was the first Ellery Queen novel I read at a fairly tender age and it remains a favorite if only for that. It is a throwback, but with a touch of the more modern Ellery, and though it isn’t the last of the Queen novels I always look on it as the end of the series — perhaps because of the nature of the epilogue.
I don’t know if it is the best book of the last twenty years of the Queen career, but it certainly earns a place with the top tier of the novels — not one of the greats, but still one of the best, and something of a landmark as it is the only book in which we get to see both the original Ellery of the earlier novels and the more mature Ellery of the later books exist together.
And considering how long ago I read it, it is remarkable how much of it has lingered in my mind after all these years.
December 8th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Marv’s review and your comments, David, really make me want to go back and re-read this one. I enjoyed it when it first came out, thanks to the Dollar Mystery Guild (unlike Marv, I didn’t wait for the paperback), but I have a feeling that I’d appreciate it all the more now.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:26 am
This is an entertaining book with some imaginative mystery ideas.
Thanks for a good review!