A great series of short stories

Classic Ellery deducing clues from a series of mysteries based on the months of the year. This series exemplifies what makes the Queen stories so enjoyable -- readable, intelligent, without using the same canned deductive techniques. It is great fun to match wits with Ellery Queen!

4 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Fun stories, irritating narration

Always fun in plot twists, but the narration suffers from poor pronunciations, awkwardly choppy cadences, and a nasal quality to the narrator's voice that grows tiresome at best and deeply irritating at worst.

2 persone l'hanno trovata utile

Fairly lame

Possibly dozens or even a couple of hundred short stories, books, magazines. etc out of this brand, and the quality shows. Definitely pulp, and not even the best pulp.

1 persona l'ha trovata utile

The Art of Decorous Deduction

Even in novel form, Ellery Queen tends to decorum, to detection as a sort of mental parlor game. And it's just so in these stories; when passions arise, they serve as the motivation for a crime rather than a subject for extended analysis or a means of mitigating guilt. But don't assume the decorum mitigates the enjoyment; if anything, unburdened by psychological complexities and higher literary pretensions, we revel in the unalloyed pleasure of straight-ahead whodunnits.

From full-length shorts to 10-to-12-minute teasers, the stories in this collection present us with criminals who aren’t anti-heroes, and a protagonist who hates being called a detective, and whose wide reading and rational mind—the quod erat demonstrandum of the title—catches them unerringly. It’s all a great deal of fun, made even more so by Traber Burns' faultless performance.

1 persona l'ha trovata utile

okay

The Ellery Queen stories I liked
The character voices were good, some very good
But the narrator’s own reading voice is rather stentorian (like Ted Baxter reading the news) - I found it too difficult to get past this and just enter into the story.

1 persona l'ha trovata utile

Quick Hits of Queen

Collection of 1950s-60s mystery shorts. Nothing superb, as they hinge on a little thi g here or there, and a few rather poor (the tobacconist is a groaner), but still quite fun

Pretty good stories

This is a collection of short stories. Most are pretty good. A couple bored me, so I moved to the next one.