  ho Spies, Who Kills?
(1966)
 The horribly crushed body that crashed onto the Manhattan pavement has at least two names, several passports, and an address book full of important friends -- among them, a millionaire roué; his exotic, deadly mistress; and his coolly beautiful wife -- all of whom seem to have forgotten him very abruptly when he became a corpse. No one is talking, so it is up to Captain Corrigan, the man with the eye patch and a way with crime, to solve a violent puzzle of lust, greed, high espionage -- and the worst kind of murder. Corrigan didn't make a sound. He sneaked towards some poplars when barking made his hair stand to an end. With a catlike jump he turned. It was a German shepherd. The dog came running towards him. In the moonlight the animal looked like a bear. His yellow eyes lit up and his teeth glistened. Corrigan knew right away his opponent was a killer. |
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| The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee -
"Spy Stories Gain Ground", Joseph Haas - July 3. 1966 Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the writing team that uses the pen name of Ellery Queen, has entered the spy lists with Capt. Tim Corrigan of the N.Y. Police Main Office Squadron in Who Spies, Who Kills?, the ex-boss cop with the black eye patch must solve the mystery of the murder - disguised - as - suicide of an East German defector to the United States. Unlike the milieu of Queen, generally civilized and reliant more upon ingenious plotting than tough tactics, Corrigan's world is brutal, sexy and a bit overblown. The Queen of pros is deft at padding a short-story plot into paperback novel length, but at times the verbiage is showing. |
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| Captain Tim and the bullish Baer have a messy problem in
more ways than one when an East German defector with a politically hot reel
of film to sell is dropped out of a nineteenth floor hotel window into
Manhattan traffic. As the sleuths follow the trail to the spoiled members of
a newsmagazine dynasty, Corrigan sets a world record for reasoning by
baseless hunches. This second entry in the Corrigan series was also ghost-written by Talmage Powell. It was while Powell was working on this one that he had his bitter dispute with Manny Lee and resolved to quit playing Queen’s ghost. Nevins suspects that the book is so flatly written and characterized, so abysmally structured and padded, so rabidly right-wing in its politics explicitly to get Lee irked. And not only Lee: Boucher’s review (August 7, 1966) dismissed the second Corrigan novel as “hasty and just barely competent in plot and telling. . . .” |
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