The Last Woman in His Life

Ellery Queen Detective #33

by Ellery Queen

Used book

Genres: Mystery, Detective, Fiction, Crime, Suspense

185 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

aka Barnaby Ross.
(Pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee)
"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 used his spare time to assist his police inspector father 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.

Several of the later "Ellery Queen" books were written by other authors, including Jack Vance, Avram Davidson, and Theodore Sturgeon.

Reviews

[Nathanael Booth · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I got halfway through this book and thought I was imagining things; the whole novel seemed very very gay—jokes about Ellery’s sexuality…a victim with a string of arranged marriages (purportedly as a workaround for an inheritance, but looking very much like a series of beards)…a man referred to as a “confirmed bachelor”…. I thought I was going slash-crazy and reading stuff into the book that didn't exist.

But I wasn’t. Turns out, this was an “issues” novel, with a well-meaning but somewhat lurid backstory for the murder—Al Marsh, with his controlling mother who wanted a girl, etc etc etc. It’s an interesting glimpse at early-seventies “progressive” views of homosexuality—mingling pity and condescension. It reminds me of the Sinatra movie "The Detective" in that way, especially with this bit:

"If only people stopped regarding us as some sort of monsters…let us live our lives out as we’re constituted, in decent privacy and without prejudice, I don’t believe this would have happened. It would have been possible for me to propose, and Johnny to reject, without disgust and vitriol on his part or panic on mine. He wouldn’t have castigated or threatened me. I wouldn’t have lost my head. We might even have remained friends. Certainly he’d still be alive."

On the nose? Certainly—compare the “A man was murdered because he was homosexual” speech in "The Detective." But also remarkably forward-thinking. There’s no contempt here for Marsh, even though it does confuse homosexuality and transvestism. He emerges as a tragic figure (more so because it seems clear to me that Johnny is a repressed homosexual himself—witness the string of marriages, etc etc etc).

The solution to the dying clue is ingenious, but I’m not sure it bears much weight. On the whole, this is low-grade Queen at best...certainly not up to the level of his great works.

[Dave · Rating 1 out of 5]

This Queen novel has a deservedly bad reputation. Its understanding of transvestism and homosexuality (among other things) is puerile. And unfortunately, this dominates from page 162 on. It distracts you from the fact that the detection and solution are also terrible.

Which is all sad, because up until the solution, I was quite enjoying this for its Wrightsville setting, the Queen badinage, and the very forties-feeling characters. But it was written in 1969!

Suggested alternative: Joseph Hansen’s first Dave Brandstetter mystery, Fadeout, written in 1970 and from a different world.

[Simone Saberhagen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t find it as bad as someone as said before. But it doesn’t mean i think it’s good… no, i just think it’s on of the best.
This book is definitely not the best book from Ellery Queen and it took me a while to finished - 3 months, never happened before for an Ellery Queen book! At start, the book is really enjoyable and fast, it’s almost like you are eating the pages but after the murder of our infamous and wealthy corrupted Johnny, the book becomes slower! But why…? Because also Ellery Queen is slow in the case. Matter of fact, our detective seems unable to solve the mystery till he sees that small statue of the two brides on the cake, which is almost at the end of the book. The slowness of the pages and the description makes you think it’s boring, but actually it’s just to give time and make you feel the time that Ellery is taking to solve the crime. Pretty smart from the authors (or at least, that’s what I’m thinking and I can be totally wrong!). I liked the idea that the book was set away from the ugual location used in his books, I enjoyed this country side book as much as I did for the origin of evil because I always appreciated when books are settled in different locations every now and then.
The idea was really good. It touched a really heavy topic for someone like the authors- they were born the 1905 and this book was published the 1970! - and yeah, homosexuality, cross dressing were really something that men back then were disgusted. But if you think that this is a homophobic book, then you are wrong; then you have to go back, think about someone that lived in the 70s and was born in the 05 and you will change your mind. Because this book isn’t just about this, this book has a deeper story behind that people are so blind by the way that the author wrote a gay character to see what happened there: we have a good lawyer, Al Marsh, who’s really famous… but had a really mentally sick mother. His mother repressed his nature, she dressed him like a girl, she made him act and behave like a girl and she called him… with a girl name. His mother’s mental illness made Al Marsh question since he was younger his sexuality… which is fine, everyone does that… but not when you are a small kid who should play with toy and you ask yourself why your mom makes you act like a small girl.
This book is so powerful and interesting that seeing this, people that say: it’s disgusting, it’s homophobic. No it’s not. Read again the book but keep in mind to be a man in the ‘70 in New York! I think that the authors here tried their best, going against each others idea: you can see that they joke about Ellery’s sexuality even though a good reader knows that he likes women and always takes a good look and give a good comment to a stunning woman; and they made the old Queen as a confused man, almost not understanding what’s wrong with Al Marsh and not actually accepting his behavior while Ellery is more chill about that, he’s more relaxed and collected almost like as if he doesn’t see a problem with it. There you go, the duality of a beautiful book: two ideas that would predominate the 70’s were gay people were coming out slowly and two different ideas came out - tolerant and intolerant.
Al Marsh speech at the end, before he takes his own life, makes you understand how deep the book is and how the authors really tried their best for this book: his love for another man, the fact that he had to be secret and undercover just to have some intimacy with other man, his frustration for a society that doesn’t accept anything different beside a heterosexual man, the man’s stereotypes that everyone was forced to follow to not be seen as homosexual… I mean, am I wrong or this is something that a homosexual man was actually living back in the days?
I’m still really shocked about how the author were able to pull out all this meaning a book, and I would recommend it. It’s something fresh, something different from the usual Ellery Queen’s book.
But the absence of the last Star? Why, since I am just loving this book? Because, again, it was slow and really repetitive. I wanted to really jump in the book and solve the mystery for Ellery. But besides that, everything was really great.

[Tommy Verhaegen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een typische Queen met vader en zoon die samen een gezellige visvakantie zullen doorbrengen. Als Ellery hoort waar gaan bij hem de alarmbellen al direct af: Wrightsville, het stadje waar hij van houdt maar waar hij nooit kan komen zonder dat er een moord gebeurt.
Huiseigenaar en vriend Johnny komt op bezoek met advocaat en 3 ex-en. Dat is uiteraard om moeilijkheden vagen.
Van bij het begin gaat hem om verdrongen seksualiteit en erotiek, al ligt het er niet al te dik bovenop. 3 exen, model amozone voor een rijke playboy model onderdeurtje. Een gefrustreerde secretaresse met heel mooie benen... Een onvindbare nieuwe liefde. Een toneelstuk met naakt.
Het thema is een dwaalspoor: de miljoenenerfenis die naar een onverwachte winnaar gaat en de frustraties bij de exen.
Meerdere pistes die niks opleveren, enkele onverwache ontwikkelingen en een extra moord.
En uiteindelijk Ellery die schijnbaar uit het niets een geweldige deductie doet om tot een erg trieste oplossing van de moord te komen.
Conclusie: in onze iets meer verlichte tijden (zeg maar compleet naar de andere kant doorgeslagen) zou je denken dat dit niet meer kan voorkomen, maar, helaas...
Ik heb wel de indruk dat Ellery Queen (of dan toch de twee neven die er achter schuilgaan) die pogrom en ongenuanceerde veroordeling van homoseksualiteit en travestie zelf aan de kaak stellen als schandalig. Destijds best een gewaagd standpunt, toen het nog in de meeste landen in de strafwet stond.

[Emanuela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sicuramente un libro che oggi avrebbe fatto scalpore, probabilmente sarebbe stato sviluppato in altro modo … è pur sempre un giallo scritto quasi 40 anni fa!!!

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

According to Wikipedia, this Ellery novel was, despite its lateness in the canon, written by Dannay/Lee rather than being among the ghostwritten ones. It's also, I'd say, one of the weakest; I bought it on the basis it must be that rara avis, an Ellery novel I hadn't read, then halfway through realized I had read it, and not in fact all that many years ago. That's more or less a literary judgement in itself.

John Benedict invites his three ex-wives to a weekend at his country retreat, where he breaks it to them that in future they're not going to enjoy the same financial benefits from him as heretofore; not surprisingly, he gets bumped off before too many hours have passed. Luckily he'd also invited Ellery and the Inspector to join the party, and so we know the solution to the mystery can't be too very far away. The trouble is that the first of the mystery's two solutions is a rebarbative piece of contrivance (it depends on how a combination of the three women's names could be misheard) and the second -- genuine -- solution relies on a piece of social prejudice that happily most of us regard as history . . . as would the majority of enlightened readers in 1969, I'd have thought. So, while the writing has the trademark zip of the Ellery novels, whoever wrote them, the setup seems artificial and the mystery more-or-less likewise. Not the Queens' finest hour.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic Who-done-it

The murder of Queen’s old college chum, a multimillionaire with three disgruntled ex-wives as suspects is solved it typical Ellery Queen style. A great mystery that keeps you guessing til the end.

[Michael Verderosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vintage Queen.

[Mircah Foxwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book packed an unexpected punch at the end.

The first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat mystery, was published in 1929 and contains all colour and cringe-worthiness of the time. I recently read it, and a few of the other first novels.

Then I jumped to The Last Woman in His Life, published in 1970 - and my first thought was that Ellery Queen and his father Inspector Queen were still carrying on 40 years later, as if they had never aged. Inspector Queen is an old grey man in 1929, and he is still so in 1970, and continues to be an inspector in the police department. I mean, he'd have to be getting close to 100 if he was old in 1929! And Ellery, though no clear age disclosed, still seems to be a youngish man. But it was so disorienting to have read about them in the first novel, living in a 1920's apartment with a black servant boy, then suddenly have them using a dishwasher and watching a colour tv in the 1970s in this novel. It was like a weird, unintentional time travel.

That aside - I read this book for the usual pulp fiction thrill, and mostly I found it. I did enjoy the description of the fashions the women were wearing, the references to hippies and pot, and all the 1960's-70's culture. The women are two-dimensional and not taken seriously. There's a lot of alcohol floating around. I was enjoying it as a light, retro read.

Then I came to the ending. If you haven't already read this book and don't want a spoiler, don't read any further.

***

When it was revealed that the killer was actually a transvestite, the story took a very dark turn for me. The long monologue while Al Marsh explains about his secret double life as a gay man (maybe today he would identify as trans) was so incredibly sad. The book became an unexpected mouthpiece for the plight of the homosexual male in the 1960s, who was often viewed with horror and revulsion. Marsh laments that the world would be a better place if gay men were not looked on as abominations, but could just be accepted as regular people. I mean, yeah. It's heartbreaking.

Of course, he blames his homosexuality as the result of his mother secretly wishing he was a girl and clothing him in dresses as a child - a modern reader wouldn't need that sort of rationalization for his sexuality. But I found myself incredibly moved by Marsh's confessions, and his insistence that he had to kill the man he secretly loved because of fear of exposure. It was unbelievably sad and impossible to read with the usual flippancy I apply to these sorts of novel.

Thankfully, at the very end, the book returned to some degree of absurdity. I enjoyed the nonsense about how the stuttering Johnny was unable, in his last moments, to clearly name his killer because if he said 'Al' it might be mistaken for 'Alice', but if 'Marsh' it might be mistaken for 'Marcia' -- but that's not all! Aubrey might be Audrey, Attorney might be Tierney, Lawyer might be Laura, and even Man might be the first syllable of Laura's last name. How ridiculous! Would a dying man really have time to sort his way through all these absurd coincidences? Dying Johnny finally settles on what Ellery hears as "home" but ultimately realizes is the first syllable of homosexual. Just nonsense. At least that lightened the heaviness for me a bit.

All in all, I enjoyed most of the book for the usual reasons - the kitschy setting and characters, and the challenge to figure out the mystery before it is revealed. But the ending surprised me more for the emotional impact I felt wrt to Al Marsh's plight, than for the fact that he was the killer. I don't know how much the authors had intended for this book to be a sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality and a call for social change, but I certainly felt some aspect of that it in, reading it some fifty years later.

[Conni Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so torn about this book. I really enjoyed Ellery being Ellery. This is one of the most Ellery books in the series lately, and I love the beginning, when Ellery is so downtrodden (following directly after Face to Face) and his father wanted to give him a break, a little vacation, and instead Ellery was chomping at the bit for any mystery whatsoever-- that was my lil guy. That was so hilariously Ellery. I loved it.
But.
The murderer being a closeted gay man/drag queen [called a "transvestite" by Ellery in the text], when written about during this time period, made me feel... weird. I want to say that the authors did what they could with their contemporary knowledge about LGBTQ issues, but I wasn't alive when this book was written and so I just... I have a hard time judging it. Ellery seems vaguely respectful to the concept of drag queens and homosexuality, though of course, there are multiple other characters who more outwardly despise Al for his homosexuality. Al's description on how he became a gay man, or a transvestite/drag queen, was extremely wild to read/listen to (audiobook) [That his mother always wanted a girl and so raised him in dresses and gave him dolls to play with until he was school-age], but it's also the kind of balderdash I was seeing written as recently as 20 years ago, 10 years ago even. So, maybe for the 60s (1970) this was actually very up-to-date? I just don't know.
Of course, I hate that the murder victim tried to warn who the murderer was by just saying the word "hom-, hom-" [because he couldn't stand to say the word "Homosexual" because that makes me crazy. It's explained why he couldn't say Al (what if he was trying to say Alice?), Marsh (what if he was trying to say Marcia?), Aubrey (what if he was trying to say Audrey?), and Lawyer (what if he was trying to say Laura) [which, side note, is that really how the writers chose literally everybody's name in this book? I stg]. But still, a man's dying words over the phone, when asked who his murderer was, being "Homo, homo," makes me want to throw something.
I, however, do like that Ellery considered Al Marsh the "last woman" in Benedict's life... maybe. I don't know. If Al was actually (what we would today consider) a transgender woman, than I support this take. We'll never know, because the Authors Ellery didn't know to use the kind of specifying language that would be used 50 years after the book was published.
So, like I said, I feel torn. But it was an interesting read for sure.

[Eileen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the first, and will be the last, Ellery Queen mystery I ever read. I know these are well known standards but honestly the story was stale, the writing uninspired, and there was not one single character I was interested in, including Ellery Queen or his police inspector father.

The story centers around a wealthy philandering serial wedder, who marries a succession of Amazonian, crass women only to divorce them in short order. He does it to get around a loophole in his father's will that denied him the principal of the estate and only granted him a modest, if you can call $300,000 modest, yearly amount but gave him $5 million upon marriage. So he kept getting married to get a payoff. But he gave each wife a decent alimony and a promise of $1 million in his will.

Then he makes such an utterly stupid mistake, so stupid you just know what's coming, that it's totally unbelievable. Each character acts in a predictable manner and baring the only reveal at the end, which is just a headshaker and artifically accounts for the victim's taste in women because without it this book had no finish, it's just plain boring.

As I said earlier there is not one redeeming character in the book. I've never before read a book without one person with whom I could sympathize. This is a first. I'm not even going to go into the weirdness of a book where the fictional "hero" (I am being decidedly sarcastic) and the author are the same, but is referred to in the third person. Good thing this was one of the freebies from Audible, because if this one is supposed to suck you into buying more it missed the mark. It just sucks.

There are so many books on my real and virtual shelves to read I won't give this one another thought. 1 star, because - well just because there was one unexpected thing in it.

[Cande · Rating 3 out of 5]

Español
Desconocía completamente todo el universo de Ellery Queen y sus novelas policiales y, aunque me agradó el final, dudo que vuelva a leer una novela de esta saga. Me costó muchísimo adentrarme en la historia, más que nada por sus incesantes descripciones sin motivación alguna. Porque, salvo por lo de la ropa, veremos que se devana en descripciones de lugares y escenarios que no sólo no retoma más adelante, si no que tienen relevancia nula en la historia. Saltando esto, que sería mi principal crítica, el policial en sí está bien llevado. Tiene un misterio interesante, sus personajes demuestran ser parte de un universo común y las revelaciones, una vez que arrancan, no paran de sorprender. Sinceramente, lo que más me gustó fueron su desenlace y algunas de las interacciones padre e hijo entre el Inspector y Ellery, pero no creo que volvamos a vernos.

English
I was completely unaware of the entire Ellery Queen universe and his detective novels, and although I liked the ending, I doubt I'll read another novel in this series. I had a really hard time getting into the story, mostly because of its endless, unmotivated descriptions. Except for the clothing issue, we'll see that it rambles on about places and settings that not only aren't brought up later, but also have zero relevance to the story. Aside from this, which would be my main criticism, the detective story itself is well-crafted. It has an interesting mystery, its characters prove to be part of a shared universe, and the revelations, once they get going, never cease to surprise. Honestly, what I liked the most was the ending and some of the father-son interactions between the Inspector and Ellery, but I don't think we'll see each other again.

[Molly Fiddler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Αυτή η ιστορία είναι η πρώτη που διαβάζω (ή που θυμάμαι να διαβάζω) γραμμένη από το δίδυμο Ellery Queen, με πρωταγωνιστή τον Ellery Queen, και απ' όσο διαβάζω στην wikipedia είναι το προ-τελευταίο που έγραψαν.

Δεν είναι το καλύτερο αστυνομικό που έχω διαβάσει και δεν είναι και το χειρότερο*. Η λύση του μυστηρίου και η ταυτότητα του δολοφόνου δεν θα είχαν κανένα ενδιαφέρον αν δεν είχε ενδιαφέρον ο λόγος για τον οποίο έγινε ο φόνος και είχε ενδιαφέρον μόνο γιατί έδειχνε το πώς έβλεπε και αντιμετώπιζε κάποια πράγματα η τότε κοινωνία. Παρόλο που κάποιοι ίσως το βρουν κουραστικό, μου άρεσε που κάπου στην μέση έκανε κοιλιά απλά επειδή οι ίδιοι οι πρωταγωνιστές είχαν έρθει σε τέλμα και δεν είχαν στοιχεία να προχωρήσουν.

Πάντως αν τυχαίνει να είστε πανέμορφοι, πανέξυπνοι και παν-πλούσιοι, ακόμα κι αν είστε απλοί και καταδεχτικοί όπως ο Τζόνυ Μπι, προσέχτε λίγο γιατί μπορεί να το φάτε το κεφάλι σας. Ή να σας το φάνε.

*το χειρότερο μέχρι στιγμής (που θυμάμαι) είναι αυτό: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

[Mirrordance · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ho dovuto controllare l'anno in cui è stato pubblicato per la prima volta e con stupore ho scoperto che è datato 1970 ma leggendo avevo l'idea che fosse ambientato molto più indietro nel tempo, tra gli anni 40 e 50 con il suo carico di pregiudizi e stereotipi. Una trama fiacca e una narrazione poco vivace e stimolante. Uno stile piatto e personaggi senza spessore oltre ad una presenza abbastanza inspiegabile dei due Queen nell'indagine.

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A millionaire playboy brings together his three ex-wives to announce he's found true love and is changing his will to their detriment--that night he winds up killed. The mystery portion is loose and meandering, but includes some fun similes and metaphors that feel very if its time. Some of the politics of its time do not age as well.

[Betty Torma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great Ellery Queen

This was a fun book to read. The characters were a bit stereotypical. However given the time period, this was expected. What I like about books from this time period is that even though a murder was committed, it was not gory. I can visualize it myself without having to have it detailed out. Good to read even if you've read it before.

[Scott Drake · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic Queen mystery. All of the clues are there. The solution ties in early comments and actions that seem modestly irrelevant, as a great mystery should. It's always a delight to "guess right" and even more so when the deductions are correct leading to the murderer. This is one where you can deduce all of that and still find something surprising to enjoy.

[John R. Goyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great fun and a nice mystery. The resolution and explanation at the end was original and ridiculously difficult to believe - though fun. Just get past a dying man's last moments of speech and the thinking he ends up doing rather than just talking...

[Gypsi · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this 1970 mystery, a millionaire is murdered and his three ex-wives are suspects. This dated novel was not fully believable, but still was mostly entertaining.

[Menia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ο Ελλερυ Κουίν αρχίζει να γίνεται από τους αγαπημένους μου ντετέκτιβ! Πολυσύνθετη ιστορία με ριζοσπαστικό και απρόβλεπτο τέλος!

[Tasosk · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5/5 *

[Jan Yarnot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I had the murderer pegged, perhaps because I’m getting wise to “Queen’s” ways, but not the motive. I hadn’t realized how much has changed in 50 years!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is everything you would expect from a 1970’s detective story. Great mystery, characters and a twist about sexuality that is way ahead of the time.

[Stavroula · Rating 3 out of 5]

ενδιαφέρουσα ιστορία αλλά όχι συναρπαστική.

[Lisa T. Ungerer]

Not worthy of the Queen moniker

Weak plot, plodding until the sad, homophobic ending. While other books in the series are worthwhile, do not bother with this one.

[Babete · Rating 3 out of 5]

( Caçador de Beldades )

[Berna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a while since I have read it but I still remember its surprising ending.

[Yosef Shapiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is a bit dated.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice whodunit.