As soon as we received our invitations to take part in the 2024 edition of Reprint of the Year over at Kate’s blog, Cross-Examining Crime, I knew that one of my books had to be Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails! I’m sure most of you know that “Ellery Queen” is the alias of cousins Frederick Dannay (the plotter) and Manfred B. Lee (the writer), that they used this alias as the name for both the author and the hero of a long series of novels and short stories, and that while one could argue that they began their partnership under the sway of then leading light S.S. Van Dine, over the course of forty-three years the Queen dynasty evolved in exciting ways. 

Indeed, the novels and stories can be divided into fairly distinct periods. The First Period is the most “Van Dine-ian”, comprising the nine “Nationality” novels (ten, if you agree that Halfway House could just as easily have been called The Swedish Match Mystery.) I cut my teeth on Queen with the fourth, and arguably the best, of these: The Greek Coffin Mystery. These books were complex puzzles with notable settings, light on character but heavy on clues and twists, and all of them included a formal Challenge to the Reader to underscore how Queen was attempting to “play fair” with his audience. 

Then, like most of his contemporaries, Queen began to experiment in the late 1930’s, placing less emphasis on the pure puzzle form and more on character and theme. While Lee looked for a more naturalistic tone in his prose, influenced by the great American novelists of the day, Dannay’s plots emphasized the moral consequences of murder and reconceptualized their detective-hero from a Golden Age eccentric and purveyor of truth to a sensitive and flawed man. 

Whereas the cousins had written seventeen novels during the 30’s, they produced only five full-length mysteries in the 40’s. (Not to say they weren’t busy: the Ellery Queen radio program began in 1939 and ran through 1948. Another set of short stories appeared, and in 1941 Fred Dannay began Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, an industry that eighty-three years later is still going strong.) Three of the five titles – Calamity Town, The Murderer Is a Fox, and Ten Days Wonder – take place in Wrightsville, a Thornton Wilder-esque New England town that provided a deceptively prosaic backdrop for Ellery’s transformation. People who are partial to early puzzle-centric Queen will argue, not without reason, that these three titles work less well as mysteries than as novels with crime in them. I can’t fault these folks for their opinion, but I see this trilogy as something special: the murder mystery as American tragedy. 

The other two 40’s novels are special in and of themselves: There Was an Old Woman is a hybrid, a throwback to early Queen, with its dysfunctional family straight out of Alice in Wonderland and its triple-pronged twist ending and a distinctly screwball sensibility that might remind some of Stuart Palmer or Craig Rice. And Cat of Many Tails . . . well, that’s what we’re here to discuss today.

We are all grateful to Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Press which, since the inception of the American Mystery Classics series, has regularly included the work of Ellery Queen in its catalogue. Penzler has focused on the First Period, producing six of the Nationality titles, as well as the early short story collection The Adventures of Ellery Queen. But in September, AMC released Cat of Many Tails, one of the best serial killer mysteries and New York-set  mysteries of all time. This new release includes an introduction by Richard Dannay, Fred’s son, who talks about the novel’s importance in the canon (having studied law in Cambridge during the awful reign of the Boston Strangler, Richard assures us that the book gets the atmosphere of fear and panic just right) and about his father’s importance to the genre. 

As for the book itself, it’s a corker! Right at the start, Queen drops us into a maelstrom of tension affecting the Five Boroughs and, especially, two of its denizens closely associated with crime-solving: “The strangling of Archibald Dudley Abernathy was the first scene in a nine-act tragedy whose locale was the City of New York. Which misbehaved. Seven and a half million persons inhabiting an area of over three hundred square miles lost their multiple heads all at once.”

It’s summer in the city, and it’s mighty hot. The residents of Manhattan are fleeing their apartments and packing the thoroughfares in an attempt to escape to the beach or merely catch a passing breeze. People are riding busses or the subway, hoping to find “a violent displacement of the tunnel, air, hellish, but a wind.” They crowd Central Park at night, as well as the movie theatres and Ebbets Field, desperate for some relief from the grinding heat. But these citizens, who have recently survived the Armageddon of World War II, have a new enemy – a serial killer whom the press has dubbed The Cat. The papers and the radio start to churn up the horror because it sells, and people are inundated with the fact that the Cat seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, that he strangles his victims with silk cord, and that there seems to be no rhyme or reason in terms of the killer’s choice of victims. 

The papers have even crafted the titular image of the killer, “one of the great monsters of cartoonical time. The man should get the Pulitzer Prize for Satanism. ‘How Many Tails Has The Cat?’ asks the caption.” As the novel begins, five tails represent the number who have fallen victim: a reclusive mama’s boy, a prostitute, a hard-working family man, an aging debutante, and a paralyzed woman. (Even though we never meet them, Queen brings each of these poor souls to vivid life.) To all outward appearances, these people have no connections with, or resemblance to, each other, and no stand-out qualities make them more or less likely to attract the attentions of a monster like the Cat. 

As is usual in times like these in the Queen-verse, responsibility for solving the case is placed on the bird-like shoulders of Inspector Richard Queen, head of Homicide. In fact, Queen has just been appointed as head of a task force addressing the threat the Cat poses to the city, although the reasons for this are manifold. You see, the canny police commissioner realizes what we fans have long known: while the Inspector is sharp, dogged and perfectly capable of taking on the stresses of a mammoth problem like a serial killer, he also possesses a secret weapon in the form of a brilliant crime-solving son who is sure to lay the Cat’s crime spress to rest.

Except, as the novel begins, the secret weapon is out of commission: Ellery is in a state of self-imposed retirement from crime-solving, due to the emotional repercussions of his last adventure in Wrightsville (Ten Days Wonder). Yet, as worried as the Inspector is over his son’s tormented soul, he worries that the reign of the Cat is “a special deal . . . a race against citywide collapse.” And so father attempts to lure son into consultation, but even as Ellery begins to make certain deductions about the Cat’s modus operandi, he remains ambivalent about getting involved – until the police commissioner himself shows up at their door with news of the latest victim.

Serial killers are a favored device in modern crime fiction, and there are several examples I love. Pronzini and Malzberg’s The Running of Beasts, Stephen Dobyn’s The Church of Dead Girls, and W. Edward Blain’s Passion Play all come to mind (and will be re-read and reviewed here some day!) Still, I prefer the classic variety, sporadic though they may be in appearance, because they tend to rely less on the numbing gore that modern authors favor and focus more on the psychological effect of these butchers on a community. Agatha Christie wrote several of my favorites during the 1930’s, including The A.B.C. Murders, Murder Is Easy and And Then There Were None, and each of them tackles the concept in a wholly different way. And let’s not forget Francis Beeding’s Death Walks in Eastrepps, Philip McDonald’s Murder Gone Mad, or Knock, Murderer, Knock, the grand debut of the sadly short mystery-writing career of Harriet Rutland. 

Cat of Many Tails pays its own homage to these past examples. In fact, early on Ellery refers to “the ABC theory” of serial killing (and thereby spoils the central conceit of Christie’s novel!) What sets Cat apart from the others is its epic scope and sense of realism. When a fresh victim appears and turns out to be Black, one reporter quips that the Cat seems to be “a firm believer in civil rights.” But it is Inspector Queen who puts it most strongly. As Ellery seeks patterns in an attempt to beat the Cat to the punch, his father counters with his own opinion: 

“Ellery, this is killing for the sake of killing. The Cat’s enemies are the human race. Anybody on two legs will do. If you ask me, that’s what’s really cooking in New York. And unless we clamp the lid on this – this homicide, it’s going to boil over.”

With all of New York as its setting, this is no closed circle mystery; the glossary of names at the end of the book lists ninety-six characters, not including the Queens or series regular Sergeant Velie. Indeed, this is not really a puzzle mystery at all, but a full-on procedural. Ellery does some deducing at the start, but most of the breaks in the case come about as a result of dogged investigation and sheer luck. Most of those on the massive character list are merely mentioned in passing, but Queen gives life to a great number of these folks, from the beleaguered Mayor and Police Commissioner (referred to only as “Jack” and “Barney”) to various witnesses and suspects, and to the victims themselves and their kin. Similar to The A.B.C. Murders, three of these family members join an unofficial investigative group that forms around Ellery: Celeste Phillips, a model, and Jimmy McKell, a reporter, who, in both losing their sisters, find each other, and Dr. Edward Cazalis, a noted psychiatrist who in losing his niece becomes both Ellery’s helper and competitor in crime-solving.

Halfway through the novel, the case takes a sharp twist, and becomes, as you might guess, a gripping game of cat and mouse, only with the Cat becoming the Mouse. In true Queenian fashion, the grand climax comes, and the author saves the most emotional twist for last, sending Ellery on a grueling trip to Vienna to find it. The emotional maelstrom that our hero discovers there helps elevate the book from a “mere” genre exercise into a moving novel with a large dollop of murder on the side. To quote Manny Lee in a letter he wrote to his cousin: “I am convinced that this will be considered, from every standpoint – both plot and writing – the very finest Queen novel to date, by just about a million miles. I think it has a good chance of being considered a sort of classic, at least among the cognoscenti.” As Richard Dannay tells us, his father was humbler: in presenting a copy of the book to a Queen book collector, Fred added this note: “To John – This book was almost all we hoped to make it.”

Having just re-read it for a third time, I tend to side with Manny here. This early mining of what would become a common trope in crime fiction remains easily one of the best examples of its kind, both as a detective story and as a novel irrespective of genre. Those of you who haven’t read it yet are in for a treat. And I fervently hope that those of you who love Cat of Many Tails as much as I do will vote for it as 2024 Reprint of the Year!