Halfway House (novel)

Infobox Book |
name = Halfway House
image_caption = No image available.
author = Ellery Queen
country = United States
language = English
series = Ellery Queen mysteries
genre = Mystery novel / Whodunnit
publisher = Stokes (1st edition, USA, 1936); Gollancz (1st edition, UK, 1936)
release_date = 1936 (1st edition)
media_type = Print
isbn =
preceded_by = The Lamp of God
followed_by = The Door Between

"Halfway House" is a novel that was written in 1936 by Ellery Queen. It is a mystery novel primarily set in rural New Jersey, USA.

Plot summary

Joe Wilson was a poor itinerant salesman of trinkets with a pretty young wife in Philadelphia. Joseph Kent Gimball was a wealthy and socially-prominent New Yorker with an elegant and aristocratic wife. And "Halfway House", a lonely little shack in rural New Jersey, was the place where the one man who was both Joe and Joseph switched from one identity to the other -- and where he was stabbed. He lives just long enough to gasp to Joe Wilson's brother-in-law that he was murdered by an unknown woman in a heavy veil. When the brother-in-law asks Ellery Queen to investigate, a vital question that must be answered is "Who was murdered -- Joe or Joseph?" Ellery performs an extended feat of logical deduction from the tiny clue of six burnt matches and creates a list of the murderer's attributes that fits only one person in the case.

Literary significance & criticism

(See Ellery Queen.) 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 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. Both the "nationality title" and the "Challenge to the Reader" disappear from the novels at this point, 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. ISBN 0-14003794-2]

References

External links

* [http://neptune.spaceports.com/~queen/ Ellery Queen - a website on deduction]