Through all the monotony of six of those interminable ten days, —the same Judges and others on the bench, the same Murderer in the dock, the same lawyers at the table, the same tones of question and answer rising to the roof of the Court, the same scratching of the Judge’s pen, the same ushers going in and out, the same lights kindled at the same hour when there had been any natural light of day, the same foggy curtain outside the great windows when it was foggy, the same rain pattering and dripping when it was rainy, the same footmarks of turnkeys and prisoner day after day on the same sawdust, the same keys locking and unlocking the same heavy doors, —through all the wearisome monotony which made me feel as if I had been Foreman of the Jury for a vast period of time, and Piccadilly had flourished coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost one trace of his distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less distinct than anybody else. I must not omit, as a matter of fact, that I never once saw the Appearance which I call by the name of the murdered man look at the Murderer. Again and again I wondered, “Why does he not?” But he never did.
Nor did he look at me, after the production of the miniature, until the last closing minutes of the trial arrived. We retired to consider, at seven minutes before ten at night. The idiotic vestryman and his two parochial parasites gave us so much trouble that we twice returned into Court to beg to have certain extracts from the Judges notes re-read. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believe, had any one in the Court; the dunderhead triumvirate, however, having no idea but obstruction, disputed them for that very reason. At length we prevailed, and finally the Jury returned into Court at ten minutes past twelve.
The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the Jury-box, on the other side of the Court. As I took my place, his eyes rested on me with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. As I gave in our verdict, “Guilty,” the veil collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty.
The Murderer, being asked by the Judge, according to usage, whether he had anything to say before sentence of Death should be passed upon him, indistinctly muttered something which was described in the leading newspapers of the following day as “a few rambling, incoherent, and half-audible words, in which he was understood to complain that he had not had a fair trial, because the Foreman of the Jury was prepossessed against him.” The remarkable declaration that he really made was this: “My Lord, I knew I was a doomed man, when the Foreman of my Jury came into the box. My Lord, I knew he would never let me off, because, before I was taken, he somehow got to my bedside in the night, woke me, and put a rope round my neck.”
Chief Inspector Doob of Scotland Yard arrived at Farnsworth Hall moments after the call had come in. It had been a drizzly Christmas Eve, and he had been nursing a head cold.
In the well-appointed sitting room of the home, he found Lord Carstairs, the wealthy industrialist, sprawled out across the floor, quite dead at the foot of an undecorated Christmas tree, blood still oozing from an ugly gash across the back of his bald head.
On a Victorian settee nearby, Vivian Carstairs, his attractive widow sat sobbing into a lace handkerchief.
"I'm sorry to trouble you, Lady Carstairs," said Doob in his most solicitous voice, "but I'm afraid I'm going to need some kind of statement."
"Yes, Inspector," she said, composing herself. "I understand.”
"As I told the constable, we were both upstairs in bed, when Arthur woke me, and said he thought he heard a burglar downstairs. The servants are all away, so he went downstairs to investigate.”
"After a bit, when he didn't return, I decided to go downstairs myself. I took the poker from the bedroom fireplace just in case. It was dark downstairs. None of the lights seemed to be working.”
"I thought I heard someone call to me from the sitting room. I went in to investigate, and something suddenly came toward me. I suppose I panicked and just swung at it. When I was able to get some light, I found poor Arthur, like that."
"I see," said Doob, considerately. "I wonder if it was possible that your husband had meant to do you some harm?"
"But, whatever for? I can think of no reason."
"My men say someone had tampered with the fuse box. And, what of your husband's recent attachment to a Miss Trixie Latouche?" continued Doob, removing a scented letter from the pocket of the dead man's dressing gown.
"The Duchess of Claymore? Tabloid stuff, I can assure you, Inspector. There was nothing to it," said the widow staunchly.
"Perhaps," conceded Doob, "but I think you had better come with us to police headquarters. The charge is premeditated murder."
WHAT MADE INSPECTOR DOOB SUSPICIOUS OF VIVIAN CARSTAIRS'S STORY?
Solution:
Vivian Carstairs said she struck out with the poker as the person was coming towards her. Yet Lord Carstairs had been killed by a blow to the back of his head.
She was subsequently convicted. Doob later married the Duchess of Claymore, after breaking her down during intensive interrogation.
The Adventure of The Dauphin’s Doll - Ellery Queen
The name Ellery Queen is synonymous with the American mystery story. As editor, author, collector, teacher, critic, lecturer, and anthologist, he has had a profound influence on the course of mystery writing.
Actually Queen is two people. Frederic Dannay and his cousin, the late Manfred B. Lee. (The fictional hero of most of their stories was also named Ellery Queen.) Queen the detective first appeared in The Roman Hat Mystery in 1929, and has since turned up in just about every form of mass communication ever devised, including television, radio and films.
The hallmark of an Ellery Queen story is its ingenuity. A classic Queen mystery takes a murder, proposes a number of different plausible solutions, then arrives at the correct one, usually the shrewdest of all.
In 1941, Lee and Dannay expanded their endeavors to a new monthly publication, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which became the keeper of the flame during the dark years when large publishing houses were turning away from mystery fiction in general and short stories in particular. It continues to dominate the field today.
With Lee’s death, the Ellery Queen stories ceased, but Dannay continues his work as editor-in-chief of the magazine, a latter-day Dr. Johnson in a field he has so tirelessly and effectively championed.
There is a law among story-tellers, originally passed by Editors at the cries (they say) of their constituents, which states that stories about Christmas shall have children in them. This Christmas story is no exception; indeed, misopedists will complain that we have overdone it. And we confess in advance that this is also a story about Dolls, and that Santa Claus comes into it, and even a Thief; though as to this last, whoever he was—and that was one of the questions—he was certainly not Barabbas, even parabolically.
Another section of the statute governing Christmas stories provides that they shall incline towards Sweetness and Light. The first arises, of course, from the orphans and the never-souring savor of the annual Miracle; as for Light, it will be provided at the end, as usual, by that luminous prodigy, Ellery Queen. The reader of gloomier temper will also find a large measure of Darkness, in the person and works of one who, at least in Inspector Queen’s harassed view, was surely the winged Prince of that region. His name, by the way, was not Satan, it was Comus; and this is paradox enow, since the original Comus, as everyone knows, was the god of festive joy and mirth, emotions not commonly associated with the Underworld. As Ellery struggled to embrace his phantom foe, he puzzled over this non sequitur in vain; in vain, that is, until Nikki Porter, no scorner of the obvious, suggested that he might seek the answer where any ordinary mortal would go at once. And there, to the great man’s mortification, it was indeed to be found: On page 262b of Volume 6, Coleb to Damasci, of the 175th Anniversary edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A French conjuror of that name —Comus—performing in London
in the year 1789 caused his wife to vanish from the top of a table—the very first time, it appeared, that this feat, uxorial or otherwise, had been accomplished without the aid of mirrors. To track his dark adversary’s nom de nuit to its historic lair gave Ellery his only glint of satisfaction until that blessed moment when light burst all around him and exorcised the darkness, Prince and all.
But this is chaos.
Our story properly begins not with our invisible character but with our dead one.
Miss Ypson had not always been dead; au contraire. She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most of them breathing hard. As her father used to remark, “She was a very active little verb.” Miss Ypson’s father was a professor of Greek at a small Midwestern university. He had conjugated his daughter with the rather bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier students, an Iowa poultry heiress.
Professor Ypson was a man of distinction. Unlike most professors of Greek, he was a Greek professor of Greek, having been born Gerasymos Aghamos Ypsilonomon in Polykhnitos, on the island of Mytilini, “where,” he was fond of recalling on certain occasions, “burning Sappho loved and sung”—a quotation he found unfailingly useful in his extracurricular activities; and, the Hellenic ideal notwithstanding, Professor Ypson believed wholeheartedly in immoderation in all things. This hereditary and cultural background explains the professor’s interest in fatherhood—to his wife’s chagrin, for Mrs. Ypson’s own breeding prowess was confined to the barnyards on which her income was based—a fact of which her husband sympathetically reminded her whenever he happened to sire another wayward chick; he held their daughter to be nothing less than a biological miracle.
The professor’s mental processes also tended to confuse Mrs. Ypson. She never ceased to wonder why instead of shortening his name to Ypson, her husband had not sensibly changed it to Jones.
“My dear,” the professor once replied, “you are an Iowa snob.”
“But nobody,” Mrs. Ypson cried, “can spell it or pronounce it!”
“This is a cross,” murmured Professor Ypson, “which we must bear with Ypsilanti.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Ypson.
There was invariably something Sibylline about his conversation. His favorite adjective for his wife was “ypsiliform,” a term, he explained, which referred to the germinal spot at one of the fecundation stages in a ripening egg and which was, therefore, exquisitely à propos. Mrs. Ypson continued to look bewildered; she died at an early age.
And the professor ran off with a Kansas City variety girl of considerable talent, leaving his baptized chick to be reared by an eggish relative of her mother’s, a Presbyterian named Jukes.
The only time Miss Ypson heard from her father—except when he wrote charming and erudite little notes requesting, as he termed it, lucrum— was in the fourth decade of his odyssey, when he sent her a handsome addition to her collection, a terra cotta play doll of Greek origin over three thousand years old which, unhappily, Miss Ypson felt duty-bound to return to the Brooklyn museum from which it had unaccountably vanished. The note accompanying her father’s gift had said, whimsically: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”
There was poetry behind Miss Ypson’s dolls. At her birth the professor, ever harmonious, signalized his devotion to fecundity by naming her Cytherea. This proved the Olympian irony. For, it turned out, her father’s philoprogenitiveness throbbed frustrate in her mother’s stony womb; even though Miss Ypson interred five husbands of quite adequate vigor, she remained infertile to the end of her days. Hence it is classically tragic to find her, when all passion was spent, a sweet little old lady with a vague if eager smile who, under the name of her father, pattered about a vast and echoing New York apartment playing enthusiastically with dolls.
In the beginning they were dolls of common clay: a Billiken, a kewpie, a Kathe Kruse, a Patsy, a Foxy Grandpa, and so forth. But then, as her need increased, Miss Ypson began her fierce sack of the past.
Down into the land of Pharaoh she went for two pieces of thin desiccated board, carved and painted and with hair of strung beads, and legless—so that they might not run away—which any connoisseur will tell you are the most superb specimens of ancient Egyptian paddle doll extant, far superior to those in the British Museum, although this fact will be denied in certain quarters.
Miss Ypson unearthed a foremother of “Letitia Penn,” until her discovery held to be the oldest doll in America, having been brought to Philadelphia from England in 1699 by William Penn as a gift for a playmate of his small daughter’s. Miss Ypson’s find was a wooden-hearted “little lady” in brocade and velvet which had been sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to the first English child born in the New World. Since Virginia Dare had been born in 1587, not even the Smithsonian dared impugn Miss Ypson’s triumph.
On the old lady’s racks, in her plate-glass cases, might be seen the wealth of a thousand childhoods, and some riches—for such is the genetics of dolls—possessed by children grown. Here could be found “fashion babies” from fourteenth century France, sacred dolls of the Orange Free State Fingo tribe, Satsuma paper dolls and court dolls from old Japan, beady-eyed “Kalifa” dolls of the Egyptian Sudan, Swedish birch-bark dolls, “Katcina” dolls of the Hopis, mammoth-tooth dolls of the Eskimos, feather dolls of the Chippewa, tumble dolls of the ancient Chinese, Coptic bone dolls, Roman dolls dedicated to Diana, pantin dolls which had been the street toys of Parisian exquisites before Madame Guillotine swept the boulevards, early Christian dolls in their crèches representing the Holy Family—to specify the merest handful of Miss Ypson’s Briarean collection. She possessed dolls of pasteboard, dolls of animal skin, spool dolls, crab-claw dolls, eggshell dolls, cornhusk dolls, rag dolls, pine-cone dolls with moss hair, stocking dolls, dolls of bisque, dolls of palm leaf, dolls of papier-mâché, even dolls made of seed pods. There were dolls forty inches tall, and there were dolls so little Miss Ypson could hide them in her gold thimble.
Cytherea Ypson’s collection bestrode the centuries and took tribute of history. There was no greater—not the fabled playthings of Montezuma, or Victoria’s, or Eugene Field’s; not the collection at the Metropolitan, or the South Kensington, or the royal palace in old Bucharest, or anywhere outside the enchantment of little girls’ dreams.
It was made of Iowan eggs and the Attic shore, corn-fed and myrtle-clothed; and it brings us at last to Attorney John Somerset Bondling and his visit to the Queen residence one December twenty-third not so very long ago.
December the twenty-third is ordinarily not a good time to seek the Queens. Inspector Richard Queen likes his Christmas old-fashioned; his turkey stuffing, for instance, calls for twenty-two hours of over-all preparation and some of its ingredients are not readily found at the corner grocer’s. And Ellery is a frustrated gift-wrapper. For a month before Christmas he turns his sleuthing genius to tracking down unusual wrapping papers, fine ribbons, and artistic stickers; and he spends the last two days creating beauty.
So it was that when Attorney John S. Bondling called, Inspector Queen was in his kitchen, swathed in a barbecue apron, up to his elbows in fines herbes, while Ellery, behind the locked door of his study, composed a secret symphony in glittering fuchsia metallic paper, forest-green moiré ribbon, and pine cones.
“It’s almost useless,” shrugged Nikki, studying Attorney Bondling’s card, which was as crackly-looking as Attorney Bondling. “You say you know the Inspector, Mr. Bondling?”
“Just tell him Bondling the estate lawyer,” said Bondling neurotically. “Park Row. He’ll know.”
“Don’t blame me,” said Nikki, “if you wind up in his stuffing. Goodness knows he’s used everything else.” And she went for Inspector Queen.
While she was gone, the study door opened noiselessly for one inch. A suspicious eye reconnoitered from the crack.
“Don’t be alarmed,” said the owner of the eye, slipping through the crack and locking the door hastily behind him. “Can’t trust them, you know. Children, just children.”
&nbs
p; “Children!” Attorney Bondling snarled. “You’re Ellery Queen, aren’t you?”
“Yes?”
“Interested in youth, are you? Christmas? Orphans, dolls, that sort of thing?” Mr. Bondling went on in a remarkably nasty way.
“I suppose so.”
“The more fool you. Ah, here’s your father. Inspector Queen—!”
“Oh, that Bondling,” said the old gentleman absently, shaking his visitor’s hand. “My office called to say someone was coming up. Here, use my handkerchief; that’s a bit of turkey liver. Know my son? His secretary, Miss Porter? What’s on your mind, Mr. Bondling?”
“Inspector, I’m handling the Cytherea Ypson estate, and—”
“Nice meeting you, Mr. Bondling,” said Ellery. “Nikki, the door is locked, so don’t pretend you forgot the way to the bathroom...”
“Cytherea Ypson,” frowned the Inspector. “Oh, yes. She died only recently.”
“Leaving me with the headache,” said Mr. Bondling bitterly, “of disposing of her Dollection.”
“Her what?” asked Ellery, looking up from the key.
“Dolls—collection. Dollection. She coined the word.”
Ellery put the key back in his pocket and strolled over to his armchair.
“Do I take this down?” sighed Nikki.
“Dollection,” said Ellery.
“Spent about thirty years at it. Dolls!”
“Yes, Nikki, take it down.”
“Well, well, Mr. Bondling,” said Inspector Queen. “What’s the problem? Christmas comes but once a year, you know.”
Thomas Godfrey (Ed) Page 35