Cat of Many Tails

Cat of Many Tails is Ellery Queen at his best. Written in 1949, this suspenseful story, as much a thriller as a mystery, sits almost exactly midway in the Ellery Queen canon.

Cat of Many Tales illustrates the willingness of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee to take risks by deviating from their highly successful formula, that of the Ellery Queen deductive puzzler. In this story Dannay and Lee focus more on the victims as actual individuals, and not simply as pieces in a puzzle. Each victim is realistically described; these vignettes add a strong emotional dimension to the story.

The middle chapters examine New York City itself, not the geographical entity, but the living, breathing metropolis of seven and one-half million people. Dannay and Lee offer a fascinating sociological study of collective fear as thousands of individuals become terrorized by the actions of a single, unknown assailant. Contrastingly, the later chapters shift focus from mass psychology to the motivation and psychology of a single, disturbed individual.

Despite this somewhat atypical structure, Cat Of Many Tails is a solid example of Ellery Queen's remarkable deductive skills. Without giving too much away, Cat of Many Tails is an example of one of Ellery Queen's challenging solutions within a solution, a multi-layered conclusion.

Cat of Many Tails ranks among the best Ellery Queen mysteries, worthy of five stars.