The American Gun Mystery

The American Gun Mystery (1933) is among the earliest Ellery Queen stories. The murder of Buck Horne, an immensely popular star of early western silent films, occurs in full view of 20,000 rodeo fans in the Colosseum, New York's newest and greatest sports arena. Buck is leading forty cowboys around the arena in full gallop with guns held high firing blanks into the air when he falls from his horse and is trampled. His death is no accident; a small caliber bullet had entered his heart. As guests of the stadium's owner, Ellery and his father Inspector Queen had box office seats almost directly above where Buck Horne died. The setting seemed rather fanciful to me, a huge rodeo in New York in 1932, and yet I have since learned (by way of the Internet) that outdoor rodeos had been held for many years in Madison Square Garden. In 1926 the rodeo was moved indoors into the old Madison Square Garden and was called the World Series Rodeo. And, in the particular year 1932 Woodward Maurice "Tex Ritter" was the featured singer at the Madison Square Garden rodeo. The rodeo setting was indeed more authentic than I had imagined. Regardless, another aspect of The American Gun Mystery does require some suspension of belief. Inspector Queen orders a careful search of all 20,000 attendees for the missing murder weapon. Even Ellery himself comments that the search procedures were getting out of hand; earlier EQ stories had involved searching the patrons in a theatre, shoppers in a department store, and personnel, patients, and visitors in a hospital, but searching 20,000 rodeo fans is simply too much. Despite this Herculean effort, the murder weapon is not found. Two newer 1930s technologies - ballistics analysis and editing of newsreel films - play key roles and warrant separate chapters. The audience search (not to mention that of the cowboys themselves) had recovered more than a hundred weapons, and we learn how the science of ballistics matches a bullet to a particular gun. Likewise, recording live sporting events on celluloid film was still relatively new and the photographic capture of Buck Horne's death was quite a sensation. However, both promising technologies seem to provide only negative results: all the guns are eliminated and the film only details what is already known. Ellery Queen's summation (after his trademark Challenge to the Reader) is logically sound as always, and yet I found a key point, one dependent on a rather unlikely mistake made not by one individual, but by two, to be highly improbable. I do admit to missing entirely the key evidence that pointed Ellery in the right direction, although I did catch a critical secondary clue (and others as well). Nonetheless, once again I was no match for dazzling logic of Ellery Queen. My copy of The American Gun Mystery is a 1975 paperback reprint by Ballantine Books. This story is not easy to find, but fanciful or not, The American Gun Mystery compares favorably to other early Ellery Queen myster