The French Powder Mystery

The French Powder Mystery is one of the older cases from the Queens’ files — an actual case, as I have said, and one in which Ellery exhibited scintillating proofs of his unique talents. He kept notes of this case during the French investigation — one of his few practical habits. Subsequently, with the unmasking of the murderer, he wrote a book around the real-life plot, developing and embroidering the facts to fit a literary pattern.

I induced him to polish up the manuscript and have it published as the second novel under his pen-name — and this at a time when I was under his sacred roof in the Queens’ Italian villa. For it will be recalled that Ellery, having renounced his old profession utterly, now that he is married and domesticated, has hidden his old cases in the depths of a filing-cabinet and nothing less than the detonation of a presumptuous friend’s exhortations has been able to make him consent to a revivification of the mellowed manuscripts.

It should be borne in mind, in all fairness to Inspector Queen, that the old sleuth’s comparatively small rôle in the French case was due to the enormous press of official business during that hectic season, and in no small degree to the heckling he was subjected to by the newly appointed civilian, Scott Welles, to the post of Commissioner of Police.

In closing, it might be pleasant to point out that the Queens are at this writing still in their tiny mountain-home in Italy; that Ellery’s son has learned to toddle and say with innocent gravity, “gramps”; that Djuna is in perfect health and has recently undergone the stress of a cosmic love-affair with a little witch of a country girl; that the Inspector is still writing monographs for German magazines and making occasional tours of inspection through the Continental police departments; that Mrs. Ellery Queen has happily recovered from her recent illness; and finally that Ellery himself, after his visit last fall to New York, has returned to that “gem-encrusted” Roman scenery with gratitude in his heart and, he says (but I doubt it), no regrets for the distractions of the West Side.

Which leaves me little else to write but a most sincere hope that you will enjoy the reading of The French Powder Mystery fully as much as I did.

J. J. McC.