The Door Between

Infobox Book |
name = The Door Between
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, 1937); Gollancz (1st edition, UK, 1937)
release_date = 1937 (1st edition)
media_type = Print
isbn =
preceded_by = Halfway House
followed_by = The Devil To Pay

"The Door Between" is a novel that was published in 1937 by Ellery Queen. It is a mystery novel primarily set in New York City, United States.

Plot summary

Karen Leith is an award-winning novelist whose fictional life and works bear a resemblance to Pearl S. Buck -- she has been raised in Japan and writes novels that are set there, but lives in Manhattan surrounded by Japanese customs, art and furnishings. She is engaged to marry cancer researcher Dr. John MacClure (who is said off-handedly to have refused the Nobel Prize). His daughter Eva is engaged to marry society heart-throb doctor Richard Scott. When Karen is found dead in her tiny Greenwich Village home by Eva, with her throat pierced by half of a pair of unusual scissors, Eva becomes involved not only with Ellery Queen's murder investigation but with private investigator Terry Ring. The investigation turns up evidence of a long-vanished relative who had had a much longer life than anyone suspected, and of the involvement of a thieving jay that Karen Leith kept as a house pet. Ellery Queen pierces the veil of circumstantial evidence and finds out not only the method of the crime but, most importantly, its motivation.

Literary significance & criticism

(See Ellery Queen.) After ten 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 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" have disappeared from the novels at this point. "(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]