''The Dutch Shoe Mystery'' 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 ...

which was written in 1931 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 the third of the

mysteries.

Plot summary

An eccentric millionairess is lying in a diabetic coma on a hospital bed in an anteroom of the surgical suite of the Dutch Memorial Hospital, which she founded, awaiting the removal of her gall bladder. When the surgery is about to begin, the patient is found to have been strangled with picture wire. Although the hospital is crowded, it is well guarded, and only a limited number of people had the opportunity to have murdered her, including members of her family and a small number of the medical personnel. The apparent murderer is a member of the surgical staff who was actually seen in the victim's vicinity, but his limp makes him easy to impersonate. Ellery Queen examines a pair of hospital shoes, one of which has a broken lace that has been mended with surgical tape. He performs an extended piece of logical deduction based on the shoe, plus such slight clues as the position of a filing cabinet, and creates a list of necessary characteristics of the murderer that narrows the field of suspects down to a single surprising possibility.

Literary significance & criticism

(See

.) The character of Ellery Queen and the more-or-less

locked room mystery The "locked-room" or "impossible crime" mystery is a type of crime seen in crime and detective fiction. The crime in question, typically murder ("locked-room murder"), is committed in circumstances under which it appeared impossible for the perpetr ...

format were probably suggested by the novels featuring detective

Philo Vance Philo Vance is a fictional amateur detective originally featured in 12 crime novels by S. S. Van Dine in the 1920s and 1930s. During that time, Vance was immensely popular in books, films, and radio. He was portrayed as a stylish—even foppish— ...

S.S. Van Dine S. S. Van Dine (also styled S.S. Van Dine) is the pseudonym used by American art critic Willard Huntington Wright (October 15, 1888 – April 11, 1939) when he wrote detective novels. Wright was active in avant-garde cultural circles in pre-Worl ...

, which were very popular at the time. This novel was the third in a long series of novels featuring Ellery Queen, the first nine containing a nationality in the title. The introduction to this novel contained some details which are now not considered part of 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 ...

. For instance, the introduction is written as by the anonymous "J.J. McC.", a friend of the Queens, and speaks of Ellery's marriage and child, and their life in Italy, and that the names of both Ellery Queen and his father are pseudonyms—none of these circumstances survived for long. It also mentions a novel called ''Murder of the Marionettes'' (page 184 of the Signet paperback edition in Chapter 27) which purports to have been written by the detective Ellery Queen, not the writer of the Ellery Queen novels themselves; this novel does not exist and is not mentioned again. The novel, and the other "nationality" mysteries, had the unusual feature of a "Challenge to the Reader" just before the ending is revealed—the novel breaks the

fourth wall The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this ''wall'', the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th cen ...

and speaks directly to the reader. "At this point in the story of ''The Dutch Shoe Mystery'' ... I inject a Challenge to the Reader ... maintaining with perfect sincerity that the reader is now in possession of all the pertinent facts essential to the correct solution of the ... murders." "In spite of great length and unnecessary imitation of Van Dine, a well-reasoned solution of an attractive problem."Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. ''A Catalogue of Crime'' (revised edition) New York: Harper and Row, 1989 (first published 1971).

External links

"Ellery Queen ''is'' the American detective story."The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931)
"Reading Ellery Queen" (blog)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dutch Shoe Mystery, The 1931 American novels Novels by Ellery Queen Novels set in hospitals Frederick A. Stokes Company books