The most important point both Inspector Queen and Ellery immediately detect is that the dead man does not have a hat with him. Several other audience members appear to have a connection to the man and naturally they all fall under suspicion for the murder, as do several other people who were nowhere near the theatre that night. I think that would be impossible to guess since nothing about it is revealed to readers until the murderer has been caught, but I identified who it had to be.Īnd what specifically is the murder under investigation in this book? A disreputable lawyer named Monte Field is found dead from poisoning in the packed Roman Theatre, part way through a performance of a play.

Despite this, I took up the challenge and I did solve the murder.

It is a bit ingenuous because you don’t actually have all of the information, since at times the Queen's speak together in low voices and what they say is not shared with the reader. Apparently this challenge is standard in Ellery Queen novels. Although most of the book is written in the third person, this chapter has allegedly been inserted by that friend from the introduction who speaks directly to readers with some fourth wall breaking, telling them that they have all the information that is available to Ellery and inviting them to solve the case. Near the end of this book there was a chapter headed “Challenge to the Reader”. The books are said to be classics of the fair play school of detective fiction, where the reader is given all of the clues necessary to solve the crime. The story is that this first book in the series was published when a family friend, who writes the introduction to the book, persuades Ellery to allow its publication. The books maintain the conceit that they are written by Ellery based on his true life experience investigating crimes with his father. As well as being the ‘author’, Ellery Queen is also the main character, a young detective fiction writer who assists his father, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Department, to solve crimes. The Ellery Queen franchise eventually extended to a radio series, several television series, movies, plays, comic books, board games and jigsaw puzzles, and even a magazine which is still published today. This is the first Ellery Queen novel of thirty six written by the cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, who between them created the Ellery Queen pseudonym, and forty four other novels written by ghost writers (including eleven juvenile novels as Ellery Queen Jr).

The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen