The Dragon's Teeth

Ellery Queen

Jul 2015 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

The Golden Age gumshoe investigates a millionaire’s murder—“Superior reading, with red, red herrings turned pale, pale pink by Ellery Queen” (Kirkus Reviews).

After the death of his longtime friend Inspector Rummell, Ellery Queen drops in on Rummell’s son, a struggling lawyer named Beau. Before their meal is through, Queen and young Rummell are partners in a newly minted company: Ellery Queen, Confidential Investigations. Rummell promises not to burden Queen with any of the work—he only wants to capitalize on the name of the world-famous amateur sleuth. But when they are hired by an eccentric millionaire who refuses to say just why he wants their services, Rummell has no choice but to turn to Queen for help. And when their client dies at sea, they discover that the wealthy old man had countless enemies who might have put him out of his misery—most of them within his own family.
 

Ratings and reviews

I first read this book when I was a teenager. This was the book that made me fall in love with mystery. To this day, I still recall this book with delight and eagerness to read it again.

About the author

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 was later published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who uses his spare time to assist his police inspector uncle 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.