'A fine craftsman' Ellery Queen

A cryptic telegram; a dead man; two ingenious and quite different sets of clues; and each one of the half-dozen suspects is something of an imposter . . .

It was a case that staggered the imagination of everyone involved. Until detective Fergus O'Breen began to sift through the facts. And discovered that what appeared to be fact was really fiction . . . and that the real truth lay behind a whimsical legend - and another dead body.


Rocket to the Morgue

by Anthony Boucher

Published 31 December 1988

'A fine craftsman' Ellery Queen

A deadly net of danger tightens around Hilary Foulkes as an unseen enemy makes constant, bizarre attempts on his life. Detective Terry Marshall and his unusual assistant, the inquisitive nun Sister Ursula, work desperately against the clock to break the case - for Foulkes's luck is due to run out at any moment . . .

Rocket to the Morgue is the novel in which Anthony Boucher's two interests, crime and SF, collide. As well as being a classic locked-room mystery, it is also considered something of an SF roman a clef, featuring thinly disguised versions of such luminaries of the Southern California science fiction culture of the 1940s as Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard.


'A fine craftsman' Ellery Queen

The man in the yellow robe had put the ancient curse of the Nine Times Nine on Wolfe Harrigan. And when Matt Duncan looked up from the croquet lawn that afternoon, he saw the man in the yellow robe in Wolfe Harrigan's study.

When Matt got there, all the doors and windows were locked from the inside. But when the door was broken down, there was no man in a yellow robe in the room, and Wolfe Harrigan lay murdered on the floor. But at the time of the murder the man in the yellow robe was nowhere near the room.

Who better to explain this miracle than Sister Ursula, a nun, whose childhood ambition was to become a policewoman?


'A fine craftsman' Ellery Queen

When a Swiss professor is found dead on a California university campus only a few feet away from the home of a student he was visiting, Dr Ashwin, a professor of Sanskrit, and Martin Lamb, a graduate student, join forces to find the killer.

The dead man was struck by a blunt instrument but the weapon cannot be found. The only clue is a scrap of paper on which has been drawn an obscure symbol known as the Seven of Cavalry.