Inspector Thumm enlists the help of an actor to track down a stolen Shakespearean manuscript and solve a baffling murder in this classic mystery.
Inspector Thumm has never seen such a marvelous beard. It is massive and pointed, a rainbow composed of all the colors of Joseph’s biblical coat. He’s so distracted by the beard that he hardly notices the man it belongs to: a prospective client with mysterious business. This bearded fellow hands over an envelope containing a million-dollar secret—and the key to a matter of life and death. However, Thumm quickly forgets his strange visitor when a rare Shakespearean manuscript is stolen, only to be replaced by a rarer, more valuable one. With the help of the legendary Shakespearean actor Drury Lane, Thumm must locate the missing manuscript and solve an impossible murder—before the curtain comes down forever.
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 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 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.