The Four Johns

Ellery Queen

ago 2015 · Open Road Media

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A teaching assistant knows that a man named John is out to kill him—but which John is it?

Mervyn Gray sits at the college coffee shop scowling at his notes. The waitress assumes he’s just another overworked Berkeley undergrad, but she is dead wrong. Gray is a teacher’s aide fighting for his life. Two days ago, he was nearly poisoned. Yesterday, a bullet missed him by inches. Unless he can guess who is trying to take him out, and why, Gray will be dead by tomorrow. He has heard that his assailant is named John—but there are too many Johns to choose from.
 
One John is a philandering librarian, another a lustful accountant. One is a disreputable fashion photographer, and the last is a half-baked campus poet. All four are in love with Mary Hazelwood—and she has been missing for a week and a half. All Gray knows is that any of the Johns could be responsible, and he’s the next target on the murderer’s list.

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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.