The Chinese Orange Mystery

A topsy-turvy crime scene sends a detective on a puzzling quest for the truth

The offices of foreign literature publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk are often host to strange activities, but the most recent occurrence is unlike any that have come before. Some time after an unknown caller is sent into the anteroom to wait for the return of Mr. Kirk, he is discovered dead on the floor. Nobody, it seems, entered or exited the room, and yet the crime scene clearly has been manipulated: everything in the room–including the furniture, the picture frames, and even the man’s clothing–has been turned backwards and upside down. Stuck through the back of the corpse’s shirt are two long spears and a tangerine is missing from the fruit bowl. Enter master detective Ellery Queen who, coincidentally, was invited for a banquet at the offices, arriving just in time to witness the discovery of the body. In this complex crime, no detail or clue is too minor or too glaring to be considered carefully, and it will require all of Queen’s deductive skills to uncover the culprit.

Reprinted for the first time in over thirty years, The Chinese Orange Mystery is an early Ellery Queen novel revered to this day for its challenging conceit and inventive solution. That being said, the book is a “fair-play” mystery in which readers have all the clues needed to solve the crime themselves. In 1981, the novel was selected as one of the top ten locked room mysteries of all time by a panel of mystery-world luminaries that included Julian Symons, Edward D. Hoch, Howard Haycraft, and Otto Penzler.

A new Ellery Queen book has always been something to look forward to for many years now.”
—Agatha Christie

Ellery Queen is the American detective story.”
—Anthony Boucher, author of Nine Times Nine

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 the greatest puzzle-mysteries of their time, gaining the duo 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 uses his spare time to assist his police inspector father in solving baffling crimes. Besides co-writing the Queen novels, Dannay founded 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 the fictional Queen upon Lee’s death.

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