The Murderer Is a Fox Summary
Ellery Queen

The Murderer Is a Fox Summary

The Murderer Is a Fox belongs to the middle period of Queen's detective fiction. Beginning with Halfway House (1936), Queen abandoned his use of a nationality in the title of his works and began to lessen his emphasis on the puzzle element in his novels, but it was not until 1942 and the publication of Calamity Town that a clear change in Queen's work was apparent. Calamity Town is subtitled a "novel," not "a problem in deduction" as had been the earlier works, and this fact alone signals Queen's movement away from the restrictions of the pure puzzle format.

Calamity Town is also the first Queen novel set in Wrightsville, a small new England town which serves as a microcosm of middle American society.

While Calamity Town does contain a puzzle to be solved, this element is played down sufficiently to allow for commentary on other...

(read more from the Short Guide)