Ellery Queen: Double Double

[Craig Herbertson]

Two euros at the only book shop in town

Not read it because crime's not particularly my thing but covers like this can't be passed...

Well, I read it because I couldn't be bothered rereading Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse and I exhausted myself on the Brothers Karamazov after about thirty pages. In essence I was completely bored with both although I had enjoyed Hesse when I was young and I think Dostoevsky seems to be a good writer.

It got me thinking about genre novels. I find I only enjoy Fantasy, SF, Horror and westerns - and although I can read history, anthropology and philosophy with some interest I don't go out of my way to keep up.

So what's wrong with Crime? Ellery Queen is one of the biggies and this is clearly a good effort.

I won't go into the plot too much because its crime and can be summarised as - some people got killed, no-one knows who did it, a person discovered who did it and you didn't know who it was until he explains it at the end.

The writing style was concise, funny, quite literate and elevated at some points. All in all an extremely slick, well written book with those fifties Americanisms that seem to add glamour to anything and remind you of the things you like generally about that era.

Perhaps I don't like crime because short of saying 'he did it!' after every new character is introduced I have no chance of identifying the killer. I'm never clever enough to solve the puzzle.

Perhaps its because its obviously not real - in this one a man is killing people on the basis of a nursery rhyme. Basically an improbable idea. But then Horror is full of improbabilities and that doesn't put me off.

It doesn't help if you set it in space as in Asimov's hard science puzzles, or in the past like the novels about that monk by Umberto Eco. It would make it doubly worse if you tucked it into some talking dragon world and I would laugh if it involved cowboys.

It doesn't help that the murders are gory and terrible - they set off no reaction in me at all. I have no empathy with any of the victims. They are all cardboard cutouts and you can do what you like with them.

So why reject Crime? I've no idea really except perhaps that it has something to do with greater boundaries being crossed in horror. If anyone else has any ideas why please say.