The Tragedy of X

A retired Shakespearean actor plays his new role—amateur sleuth—after a murder in a New York streetcar.

Born during intermission in a seedy New Orleans playhouse, Drury Lane has spent the better part of his life in the theater. A majestic old-fashioned thespian, he made his name in London, where his record-breaking run as Hamlet defined the role for a generation. When hearing loss forces him to retire, he turns his attention to human drama—specifically crime. Using his powers of disguise, knowledge of human nature, and an occasional dash of theatrical combat, Lane is the most fantastic detective of all time—onstage or off.

In The Tragedy of X, a man is poisoned in the middle of a crowded New York streetcar and not one of the dozens of witnesses can provide any useful evidence. The police are stumped until they receive a letter from Lane, claiming to have solved the crime by reading newspaper reports. He knows the killer's name—but now he has to catch him.

Originally published under the Barnaby Ross pen name, The Tragedy of X is one of Ellery Queen's most beloved mysteries; though different in character and style from the Queen mysteries, its mixture of classical detection and an erudite sleuth makes for great Golden Age fare.

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 the greatest puzzle-mysteries of their time, gaining the duo 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 father in solving baffling crimes. Besides co-writing the Queen novels, Dannay founded 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 the fictional Queen upon Lee’s death.

Otto Penzler is the founder and president of Penzler Publishers, which includes The Mysterious Press, Scarlet, American Mystery Classics, Crime Ink, and MysteriousPress.com. He is also the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and is regarded as the world’s foremost authority on crime, mystery and suspense fiction. He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from Noircon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 80 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.