The Four of Hearts (1938) is Ellery Queen at his most Hollywood. The ingredients sound as though they have come straight from a studio script: the spectacular wedding of two movie superstars after a scandal-filled courtship, a wild flight by private plane to an exclusive hideaway, and a pair of deaths caused by drug overdoses. But these victims are not play-acting. They are genuinely dead, and Ellery Queen once again finds himself cast in the role of master detective in a world where almost nothing is what it seems, except sudden and violent death.

Following The Devil to Pay, The Four of Hearts is Queen's second Hollywood novel, but it takes the setting much further. This time the story unfolds within the movie industry itself, among film stars, moguls, studio executives, journalists, and the colorful hangers-on who inhabit the never-never land of moviedom. The result is a lively and often uproarious mystery, packed with Hollywood patter, feuds, romance, liquor, wisecracks, and constant action. As one contemporary reviewer put it, "something is happening all the time" (Pocket Books edition).

At the center of the story are Jack Royle and Blythe Stuart, two feuding members of Hollywood's rival first families. Their children, Ty Royle and Bonnie Stuart, unexpectedly decide to marry, bringing their families' long-standing hostility into the spotlight. When the newlyweds disappear and the situation takes a deadly turn, Ellery is drawn into a case in which the murderer must overcome seemingly impossible obstacles. The killer has to beat the clock, conceal a motive that would be obvious if discovered, and ultimately deal with an unexpected change in the intended victim list (The Daily Telegraph, Mar 25. 1938).

Queen constructs the mystery with considerable ingenuity. The murderer sends bizarre warnings in the form of playing cards, creating a strange code whose meanings become part of the puzzle. Contemporary readers were apparently intrigued by this device, with one reviewer gleefully explaining some of the meanings, including the Jack of Hearts for "a preacher," the Jack of Clubs for "a law breaker," the Queen of Spades for "a strange woman," and the Seven of Clubs for "prison" (The Daily Telegraph, Mar 25. 1938). The playing-card motif adds an unusual layer to an already elaborate plot, and Queen uses it to turn what should be the murderer's greatest liability into his strongest alibi.

The solution is the book's greatest strength. The plot is intricate, carefully constructed, and, at its best, remarkably tight. The clues are there for the reader to decipher, in keeping with Queen's familiar challenge to the armchair detective. The mystery ultimately develops into what one later assessment called "an extremely clever yarn," with enough momentum to carry the reader through to its final revelations (Sunday Sun and Guardian Magazine, Apr 30. 1939). There is also an additional twist at the end, producing the kind of surprising and thrilling finish that Queen's readers had come to expect.

The Hollywood atmosphere, however, is likely to divide readers. Queen himself  clearly had mixed feelings about the film capital, and he makes his attitude unmistakable from the opening sentence: "It is a well-known fact that any one exposed to Hollywood longer than six weeks goes suddenly and incurably mad." The novel is filled with slang and Hollywood wisecracks, sometimes exuberantly and sometimes rather heavily. One contemporary reviewer complained that the first sixty pages amounted to an unpleasant display of Queen's own crime-solving abilities mixed with clumsy Hollywood slang (Sunday Sun and Guardian Magazine, Apr 30. 1939). Another reviewer was even more severe, calling the novel Queen's weakest and blaming Hollywood itself for what he regarded as a decline in quality (The Charlotte Observer, Oct 9. 1938).

Not everyone agreed. The Brooklyn Eagle found The Four of Hearts "a neatly turned mystery story" with well-fed characters and suitably flip dialogue, praising the presence of Ellery's "humorous acuteness" throughout the story (Walter Sidney, The Brooklyn Eagle, October 16, 1938). The same reviewer thought the book deserved the Stokes Company's boast that it was "destined to be ranked as a classic," even while joking about Queen's title and the numerous playing cards that seem more important to the story than its four hearts.

There are certainly moments when the novel asks the reader to accept a little too much. One particularly glaring example, noted by The Daily Telegraph, concerns the sensational newspaper coverage surrounding the planned airplane wedding and the threat of kidnapping. The reviewer considered it almost impossible to believe that a Hollywood newspaper promoting such an event would bury a potentially explosive front-page story inside a feature column on the eve of the wedding (The Daily Telegraph, Mar 25. 1938). Such improbabilities are part of the price Queen sometimes asks the reader to pay for his elaborate plotting.

Yet The Four of Hearts has an important place among the Queen novels because it combines the traditional Golden Age mystery with the artificial, exaggerated world of Hollywood. Compared with the relatively restrained approach of The Devil to Pay, this is a much more elaborate construction, with the plot deliberately tangled around the characters, their relationships, and the machinery of the movie business. Even Agatha Christie and S.S. Van Dine are mentioned in the opening chapter, while Queen introduces the amusing fictional mystery writer Ellery Van Christie, making the author's literary ancestry quite clear (Cosmopolitan, October 1938).

Below right: Page in Cosmopolitan October 1938: first publication of this story. Click for cover.

The novel was first published in Cosmopolitan in October 1938, and its Hollywood setting gives Queen an opportunity to poke fun at both the movie industry and the conventions of the detective story. At the same time, he allows Ellery to become more human than usual. The appearance of the Eight of Hearts, representing "thoughts of marriage," leads to a final development that one contemporary reviewer regarded with alarm: Ellery Queen falls in love and apparently faces marriage. The reviewer concluded that "Marriage and detection don't mix" (The Daily Telegraph, Mar 25. 1938).

That reaction is perhaps part of the fun. The Four of Hearts is not the most restrained or realistic Ellery Queen mystery, but it is one of his most colorful. It offers an ingenious murder mechanism, an unusually complicated plot, a memorable cast of Hollywood personalities, and an abundance of period atmosphere. Beneath all the studio glamour, romantic complications, playing cards, private planes, and wisecracks lies a carefully engineered Golden Age puzzle. For readers willing to accept Queen's extravagant Hollywood world on its own terms, The Four of Hearts is a clever, entertaining, and distinctly characteristic Ellery Queen mystery.