A Fine and Private Place

By Ellery Queen

1971

First Published

3.55

Average Rating

192

Number of Pages

5H51M

Audio Length

Part of Series

Ellery Queen Detective

Series · 35 books

By Ellery Queen

An ordinary day in Gloucestershire holds a half century of secrets and lies in this crafty and well-crafted mystery, when a skeleton turns up in a field outside the old village of Tolland. A dogtag beside it in the earth bears the name Ben Gordheimer, a young American soldier who disappeared—and was dishonorably discharged for desertion—during the war fifty years before. To complicate matters for the police team of Keith Tyrell, the adept and ambitious Detective Inspector sent to Tolland, the investigation into the G.I.'s death unearths a second, much more recent corpse whose identity and identification as a blackmailer sets the entire village even more on edge. While Tyrell discovers the killer, long dead, of the G.I. quickly enough, the village of Tolland itself proves to be a harder case to crack. The repercussions of the old murder continue to haunt the memories and disturb the souls of Tolland's inhabitants, while the fact that another killer is dwelling in their midst troubles the placidity of their closely knit daily lives. Their distrust of Tyrell's inquiry and of the avid press only reinforces their tight-lipped secrecy. Tyrell has problems of his own as well, with the envy and betrayals of internal politics among the members of his police team increasingly impeding the progress of the investigation. Neither the village nor Tyrell realizes, though, just how quickly time is running out for them in this case. Then a third dead body further rouses once-sleepy Tolland and confronts the beleaguered Tyrell with another nasty case of murder.

Avg Rating

3.55

Number of Ratings

304

5 STARS

19%

4 STARS

29%

3 STARS

41%

2 STARS

11%

1 STARS

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Author

Ellery Queen

Author · 99 books

aka Barnaby Ross. "Ellery Queen" was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty two years writing, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age "fair play" mystery. Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen's first appearance came in 1928 when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who used his spare time to assist his police inspector father in solving baffling crimes. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired Queen upon Lee's death. Several of the later "Ellery Queen" books were written by other authors, including Jack Vance, Avram Davidson, and Theodore Sturgeon.