Dr. Harry Brown is a competent, respectable practitioner of the time-honored art of medicine until the day old man Gresham, with his millions of dollars, failing heart, and young spouse, hires him. Suddenly it s money, luxury, and love. But what happens to a doctor when someone slips a corpse into his locked apartment? What can a man say when he finds himself a member of an organized crime ring? How can Harry tell his richest patient that he s having an affair with a man s wife? It s enough to give a man a heart attack but which man?"
aka Barnaby Ross. (Pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee) "Ellery Queen" was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty two years writing, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age "fair play" mystery.
Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen's first appearance came in 1928 when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who used his spare time to assist his police inspector father in solving baffling crimes. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired Queen upon Lee's death.
Several of the later "Ellery Queen" books were written by other authors, including Jack Vance, Avram Davidson, and Theodore Sturgeon.
I wanted to read more classical Ellery Queen stories (the ones where you get to solve the murder at one point) and by accident I found his only independent story - but I did not regret it at all! This is a unique and intriguing story with many twists that is hard to put down.
A sophisticated mystery about a doctor entrapped into a criminal enterprise and a murder plot by love and greed, and the twist that allows him to escape without committing a criminal act.