''Halfway House'' is a

novel A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...

that was written in 1936 by

Ellery Queen Ellery Queen is a pseudonym created in 1929 by American crime fiction writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee and the name of their main fictional character, a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve ...

. It is a

mystery novel Mystery is a fiction genre where the nature of an event, usually a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story. Often within a closed circle of suspects, each suspect is usually provided with a credible motive and a reas ...

primarily set in

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

, United States.

Plot summary

Joe Wilson was a poor, itinerant salesman with a pretty young wife in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

. Joseph Kent Gimball was a wealthy, socially prominent New Yorker with an elegant and aristocratic wife. These two very different men were actually the same man, a bigamist leading a bizarre double life. His deception was revealed to the world after he was murdered in his "halfway house," a riverfront shack outside Trenton, New Jersey, that he used as a hideout to switch identities. But who killed him? Ellery Queen, who is drawn into the investigation to help old friends, is able to look beyond the strange nature of the victim to seek hard facts. He puts his finger on the central question: "Who was murdered -- Joe or Joseph?" Queen performs an extended feat of logical deduction from seemingly insignificant clues, such as a number of burnt matches, and finally develops a profile of the killer that can fit only one person in the case.

Literary significance & criticism

(See

.) After nine popular mystery novels and the first of many movies, the character of Ellery Queen was at this point firmly established. This period in the Ellery Queen

canon Canon or Canons may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Canon (fiction), the conceptual material accepted as official in a fictional universe by its fan base * Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture ** Western ca ...

signals a change in the type of story told, moving away from the intricate puzzle mystery format which had been a hallmark of the nine previous novels, each with a nationality in their title and a "Challenge to the Reader" immediately before the solution was revealed. "Halfway House" is the last novel wherein Queen issues his "Challenge," and it is the first without a "nationality title," although it is remarked in the foreword that the story could have been called ''The Swedish Match Mystery''. "(Ellery Queen) gave up the Challenge and the close analysis of clues, and made Ellery a less omniscient and more human figure, in search of a wider significance and more interesting characterization. ... (The) first ten books represent a peak point in the history of the detective story between the wars."Symons, Julian (revised edition, 1974). ''Bloody Murder -- From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History''. London: Penguin.

References

External links

"Ellery Queen ''is'' the American detective story."
1936 American novels Novels by Ellery Queen Novels set in New Jersey Frederick A. Stokes Company books {{1930s-mystery-novel-stub