he Roman Hat Mystery (1929)

The drama at the Roman Theatre was the most popular show in town that season. It was called Gunplay and was filled with the violence and action and noises of gang warfare - a bit raw, a bit nasty and obviously pleasing to the audience. Shortly after the curtain rose on Act II, there was a slight commotion in the theatre. At first only a few noticed. Then there was a scream and the lights snapped on. Near a closed exit, a large policeman stood holding a slight, nervous man by the arm."Don't get out of your seat, any of you!" The audience laughed, thinking it was part of the play. But when a squad of bluecoats, headed by a tall man in plain clothes, marched down the aisle, pandemonium broke out. "What's up, Doyle?"
"Look's like this man's been murdered, Sergeant."

Suit, cape and gloves worn with a whisky flair...everything but the top hat. And he was dead. With a characteristic display of intemperance, Monte Field had succumbed during the Act II of the Broadway hit 'Gunplay'.
"Foul play!" cried the local constabulary. It was clearly a case for the Queens - father and son. A case of shadowy death, an unsavory victim, and a lengthy list of suspects whose tarnished pasts has made them prime targets for blackmail.
Someone had enacted the performance of the year: the perfect murder.

The admiration Frederic Dannay had for Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin surfaces and the more I look into this, the more I tend to believe that Ellery always has been more of a new Lupin than a new Sherlock Holmes as some covers tend to suggest.

Rufus King's first Lt. Valcour novel, Murder by the Clock, had a simple plot idea involving men's hats. It was apparently serialized in magazines in 1928, before its book publication in 1929. It is possible that EQ used King's work as a jumping off point and subsequent works. One wonders if the name "Rufus King" affected EQ's choice of the pseudonym Ellery Queen." (Michael E.Grost) 

Dannay recalled, "...Van Dine influenced us because he made so much money; and then, the kind of thing he did appealed to us in those days. It was complex, logical, deductive, almost entirely intellectual..." (Nevins).  When the cousins entered the McClure contest Van Dine was at his peak of success. The influence their idol had is obvious. As JJMcC pointed out Ellery Queen retires to Italy: exactly where Van Dine had said Philo Vance had retired. Ellery Queen is a pseudonym to conceal the real identity of the sleuth as was Philo Vance. They both like to use pompous literary references. Vance got access to the crimes through his friend Markham while Ellery's connection to the investigation was given by his father. Sergeant Velie, Doc Prouty and even Djuna all had a counterpart in the Van Dine novels as respectively Sergeant Heath, Dr. Doremus and the butler Currie. 

Clever plot development, but with several points too difficult to swallow. EQ is rather a stuffed shirt. It is clearly very much in the same pattern as the works to follow. Although a pretty ordinary mystery, it contains a number of things that laid a foundation for later Queen novels: it creates most of the continuing characters of the EQ books. We get to know Ellery as a stiff shirt wearing his lorgnette and falconer, a gray costume and walking stick. He addresses his father "My dear Watson". Richard appears for the first time and uses a snuffbox. We even meet some other new friends in the gypsy boy Djuna, brigadier Velie, detective Flint, police officers Doyle, Hesse, Pigott, Ritter and Hagstrom. Henry Sampson makes his first appearance with the substitute Timothy Cronin.

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