Room to Die in (July, 1965)

How could a man have been murdered when he was found alone in his study, a gun in his hand, and the door locked from the inside? It had to be suicide, the police figured, for although there was no suicide note there was a letter proving conclusively that Roland Nelson, over the last several months, was being blackmailed. But to his daughter, Ann, whom he had seen only spasmodically since he had left her mother when Ann was a baby, there were unanswered questions. She was convinced that her father could never have killed himself. Before she found the answers, two people were brutally garroted with a wire, one of them in her own apartment. Could she fins all the answers before the killer silenced her, too?

Boucher’s review (September 12, 1965) was mixed. “ 'A Room To Die In' . . . at least resembles hardcover Queen novels in presenting a bona-fide puzzle: a locked room, no less, and a clever one. But the writing is flat and the construction surprisingly amateurish.” Mike Nevins found that certainly the motivation for the murder and some of the killer’s subsequent ploys are not too well thought out, but with its superbly constructed puzzle and the tricky but fair clue that leads to its solution, this novel came much closer than the vast majority of the Queen paperbacks to true-blue EQ.

It was ghostwritten by Jack Vance. Vance specialist Richard Chandler asked himself if there were any clues in the novels themselves that gave away their true owner. He starts off by saying that all three stories Vance wrote for Queen are set in California with a very strong sense of place. He goes on finding A Room to Die in another decent mystery with interesting and unusual characters, some of whom remind me somewhat of ones in Strange People, Queer Notions.
The Vancian feel here is most telling in the strong female main character, decidedly not common in mystery fiction of the 1960’s. The dead giveaway though, is the following. Ann is driving and comes across the sign:

PLEASANT VALLEY ESTATES
Top Value for Discriminating Home Buyers
A MARTIN JONES Development

Surely, Vance has inserted a subtle announcement of his two Joe Bain mysteries, The Fox Valley Murders and The Pleasant Grove Murders. These were published in 1966 and 1967. ("The Case of the Missing Vance", Richard Chandler in Cosmopolis N° 37, April 2003)

More recently the manuscripts of the three Vance Queens were partially recovered. They were restored and made available. This story was published under its original title Death of a Solitary Chess Player as a supplemental volume to the Vance Integral Edition in 2006. Evidently one of 400 copies printed. Sources report only 100 copies of this volume were printed which explains why it's a really rare find offered at prices ranging from $45 to $122,5