This makes me want to go read some of those books again. I think I read Cat of Many Tails, but it would have been when I was a teenager and I would probably get more out of it now. I remember my favorites, about ten years ago, were The Siamese Twin Mystery and The Devil to Pay, because the former had a peculiarly intense atmosphere for a country-house mystery, what with the fire closing in, and the latter was, as I recall, rather lighter in tone than some of the others and made me laugh. Also, I didn't realize exactly why the later ones were different, though I had noticed how in some of them Ellery was completely wrong in his ideas for most of the book, whereas in a few he was barely there at all and suddenly turned up at the end to solve the case (in Fourth Side of the Triangle he was recovering from a broken leg in a hospital or something, and in The House of Brass his father kept trying to solve the case and Ellery showed up at the very end and made him look like an idiot, which was annoying.) Anyway, very interesting post, thank you. :)
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2010-10-01 03:12 am (UTC)