The Egyptian Cross Mystery

Rating:
Summary: Ankhs For the Memories
Review: Are the bizarre murders, beginning with a decapitation in an obscure West Virginia village, the acts of an ages-old religious cult or a revenge plot festering for decades? Ellery Queen travels thousands of miles, trying to anticipate the killer, until his quarry makes one final slip...

Rating:
Summary: Ankhs For the Memories
Review: Are the bizarre murders, beginning with a decapitation in an obscure West Virginia village, the acts of an ages-old religious cult or a revenge plot festering for decades? Ellery Queen travels thousands of miles, trying to anticipate the killer, until his quarry makes one final slip...

Rating:
Summary: Vintage Ellery Queen - Good Plot and Eccentric Characters
Review: I quite enjoyed The Egyptian Cross Mystery. I developed several plausible solutions, but none which I could clearly prove through a sequence of logical deductions. I had possibilities, I had partial solutions, and I had pieces of evidence, but I was unable to establish an irrefutable chain of logic. And as fans of Ellery Queen know, deduction requires the application of impeccable logic. For the record: none of my possibilities, nor partial solutions, were correct. I was surprised by the solution.

The Egyptian Cross Mystery offers a fast-paced unpredictable plot, a plethora of eccentric characters, and brilliant deductions by Ellery himself. I give it five stars.

The Egyptian Cross Mystery is a good introduction to Ellery Queen. In this fifth novel the young Ellery Queen can still be insufferable on occasion, although the presence of his college professor, Dr. Yardley, checks his impulse to exhibit his erudition. Ellery remains baffled by the bizarre murders as does the reader. A final clue hidden among detail suddenly provides Ellery, and the particularly observant reader (not me, however), the key to the mystery. Stay alert for the final clue, despite deliberate distractions and misdirection.

Ellery Queen's investigations take him on long, tiring road trips in his beloved Duesenberg. Each destination is a gruesome murder site. A decapitated victim is found lashed to a post. A capital letter T is scrawled in blood nearby. Using more guesswork than logic, Ellery senses some obscure connection to ancient Egyptian myth.

I always enjoy the early Ellery Queen stories, those mysteries dating from 1929 through 1939. My other early favorites, for comparison purposes, include The Greek Coffin Mystery, The Siamese Twin Mystery, The Spanish Cape Mystery, and two Drury Lane mysteries, The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y.