The final volume collecting Ellery Queen's short stories contains a varied bunch of tales. All except the very last one are from the 60s and 70s. There's a mix of "fun and games" stories and longer novellas. The collection is rounded out by the only short story that doesn't feature Ellery as its problem solver. This story is from the mid 50s and is somewhat similar in style to the concurrent novel "The Glass Village" (which didn't feature Ellery either).
"Abraham Lincoln's Clue" is a moving story where Ellery needs to figure out a hiding place indicated by Abraham Lincoln in a letter. But is the letter real or a forgery?
Ellery draws several fine conclusions in this tale, which is among the better ones here.
"Mum is the Word" is the longest story here, and it brings us back to Wrightsville, where we yet again find ourselves in a family mansion where the pater familias is murdered.
The reader might find it hard to stomach certain things - particularly why a witness for no reason at all refuses to reveal things. The story would have been several pages shorter if she'd only said something. However, the setting is beautifully rendered, and the story is still well above average.
The final story featuring Wrightsville is "Wedding Anniversary", where Ellery one final time needs to solve a murder when the husband's liqueur is poisoned.
The solution is not the authors' best (surely it's all a bit far-fetched, no?), but their love for Wrightsville still elevates the story into an enjoyable level.
After these three initial, somewhat longer stories, we return to "fun and games". Similarly to the stories in the fourth volume, the five next tales are very short. The authors have produced an overarching theme in the form of a mystery club where Ellery Queen becomes a member. Together, the members try to create puzzles to fool each other. Of course Ellery is too clever to be fooled. Another welcome return in these Mystery Club stories is the challenge to the reader, who gets to match his wits with Ellery.
In "The Little Spy", Ellery has to prove that he is worthy of becoming a member of the club by finding out exactly where a spy has hidden certain wartime plans. And when "The President Regrets" he cannot attend, Ellery needs to come up with a story on his own to bamboozle his fellow members.
In "The Three Students", we find ourselves in a classic Queen situation where we need to find out which one of three persons is different from the others (though I think the reader needs more than just an ordinary amount of general knowledge to get this one), and in "The Odd Man" we get a similar problem, though with three different working solutions! The fifth and final story is "The Honest Swindler" where the solution is so prosaic the cleverest of readers might find himself fooled.
After these stories about the Mystery Club, another three short short stories follow, all with a challenge to the reader. First of these is "Uncle from Australia", where the titular uncle is murdered, and Ellery needs to find out which of his three heirs did it. This might be the easiest problem to solve in all Ellery Queen stories.
"The Case of His Headless Highness" is somewhat of a curiosity in this context. Originally, it was a text published together with a jigsaw puzzle, and you had to finish the jigsaw in order to get the solution in the form of a picture. This is actually an impossible story, and the solution is pretty good.
"The Reindeer Clue" is the final story published as Ellery Queen. In contrast to the others, short story writer Edward D. Hoch wrote it (though the idea was provided to him by Frederic Dannay), and it was published three years after Manfred B. Lee's death in 1972. This is a pretty clever little story, featuring a variation of the dying message.
The final story, "Terror Town", doesn't feature Ellery, as mentioned previously. This is a longer, more atmospheric story where murder after murder takes place in a small town. The atmosphere and the exciting resolution makes this tale a highlight of this volume, though it's not a fair play mystery.
Conclusion
As usual with these Ellery Queen collections, the content is a bit varied - though the quality of the stories is probably the most consistent. To be honest, there's nothing outright bad here, in contrast with some of the earlier volumes, but on the other hand, there's also nothing that is awesomely great here.The "fun and games" stories are just that, fun (but feel a bit like empty calories), while all the longer stories are worthwhile, but don't really provide any fireworks.
There's one impossible crime here, which is all right, nothing more. I do not intend to use it for my project, both because of its quality and because the format makes it a bit hard to include...
"The Case Against Carroll," also included here, is less a classical mystery than it is a crime story a la Scott Turow. It also reminds me of the Raymond Chandler classic "Red Wind," in which Marlowe goes to great lengths for a woman who has saved his life to allow her to retain her illusions about a former lover who was a criminal and a cheat -- "another four-flusher." Ellery does something similar here for Carroll's family.
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