Calamity Town

Ellery Queen arrives at Wrightsville, USA, in search of inspiration. However, the only available lodging is a building known as the Calamity House. It was built by the Wright family, the head of the town’s social food chain (and the descendants of the founder of Wrightsville), as a wedding present for their middle daughter. But the daughter went mad after she was left at the altar, and when the Wrights tried to sell the house the buyer suddenly dropped dead while touring the home—hence the “Calamity House” moniker. Sensing dark currents underneath the seeming idyllic Wrightsville and Wright family, Ellery happily takes up the abode, and waits.

Calamity Town is a clever, well-crafted book with a massive fault running straight down its center. It largely falls into the same pitfall as The Egyptian Cross Mystery: there is an obvious alternate explanation for all the mysterious events that are occurring, which the characters absolutely refuse to acknowledge and that also happens to actually be the correct solution. I love the way the mystery is set up and plays out in Calamity Town; I just wish it wasn’t so easy to see through it all. The vast majority of the book is structured and clued perfectly. However, the core mysterious element is obvious, and from there the rest of the pieces fall into place without much difficulty.

Even though the mystery was obvious in this respect, the Wright family still helped make this an entertaining read. The middle daughter went mad and the elder daughter has been disowned, so while the Wrights try to present a peaceful facade, in realty they’re quite dysfunctional. And that’s exactly what makes the book fun, especially as tensions rise and relationships strain.

While the Wright family has a nice mix of personalities to achieve the proper level of dysfunction, Ellery felt a bit strange to me. This feeling might be due to the fact that most of the Queen novels I’ve read have been part of the “National” series, where Ellery is simply a New York City bachelor and the books are purportedly written by Ellery’s friend. Calamity Town’s Ellery, who is writing the books himself, feels different. Detectives should have a strong sense of justice—that’s why they pursue murderers with such passion—yet Ellery seems lackadaisical about the murder plot that’s unfolding under his nose. He does try to prevent it (he isn’t that callous), but it feels half-hearted. Ellery also gets involved in one of those awkward, dated love plots that you just can’t seem to escape in Golden Age detective fiction. If I all read the Queen books in order perhaps the change would have been gradual enough that this book wouldn’t have felt so strange, but compared to the early Queen books I felt a noticeable break.

With a title called “Calamity Town,” I think I would be remiss to not discuss the setting. The building in the story is called the “Calamity House,” yet the book is titled “Calamity Town.” Most of the book takes place in the Wright abode, the Calamity House, and, later on, the town courthouse, and mostly involves the Wright family and their social circle. But rest assured, over the course of the novel we do get to witness and experience the town transform into the eponymous Calamity Town.

Calamity Town is a fun book, but an easy mystery. The novel does make an attempt at a classic Queensian-style deduction, but it only ends up explaining the most obvious point of the crime. As a result, Calamity Town’s deduction doesn’t have the same power as the deductions of the early Queen books, since we don’t need Ellery’s deduction to make the obvious conclusion. There’s nothing wrong with reading Calamity Town if you feel like reading Queen, but I’d highly recommend reading one of his earlier novels instead if you haven’t exhausted them yet.