UBC #8: The Four Johns

[truepenny]

UBC #8
Queen, Ellery. [Jack Vance.] The Four Johns. 1964. Signet Double Mysteries: The Four Johns and Blow Hot, Blow Cold. New York: Signet-New American Library, 1978.

I am both fond of Ellery Queen (in propria persona as Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) and fascinated by the phenomenon of the EQ ghost-writers, who include Theodore Sturgeon, Avram Davidson, and Jack Vance.

The Four Johns is one of Jack Vance's. It's fine up until he has to explain the murder, at which point everything goes galley-west. It's always easier to create mystery than to solve it--which I say not as a cheap sneer, but as the truth. I don't think I could do better.

Comments

[sovay]

the EQ ghost-writers, who include Theodore Sturgeon, Avram Davidson, and Jack Vance.

. . . Whoa.

I'm sure they were written to the style of Ellery Queen, and therefore nowhere near as weird as I would hope, but I still want to know what on earth the Sturgeon and Davidson stories looked like.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Davidson and Sturgeon both ghost-wrote actual Ellery Queen novels.* The Player on the Other Side is Sturgeon's; Davidson wrote On the Eighth Day and The Fourth Side of the Triangle.

Of the three, the only one I'd recommend to someone who isn't already an EQ fan is On the Eighth Day, which is weird and allegorical and quite deliberately out of the context of the series.

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*Ellery Queen is both the pseudonym of Dannay and Lee and the name of their protagonist/detective. Who is a mystery writer. Although they mercifully dropped the conceit that Ellery himself wrote the novels about him (in the 3rd person--and yes, the first three or four are unbelievably twee), they did publish novels supposed to be by Ellery the character rather than Ellery the pseudonym. Those novels are standard in-genre potboilers, with no recurring detectives and nothing particularly to recommend them unless you're interested in one of the ghost-writers (i.e., Jack Vance) for other reasons.