#20booksofsummer23 is a reading challenge started by 746 Books where participants attempt to read 10, 15, or 20 books off of their TBR and review them between June 1 – September 1, 2023. I am trying to read and review 6-7 books that I picked per month. You can see my complete reading list here
Plot Summary
Ellery Queen is overworked and tired from his previous cases, so when his friend, Judge Macklin, invites him to stay at his rented summer cottage by Spanish Cape, Ellery hesitantly accepts. They drive feverishly through the night, only stopping to collect food and provisions for the cottage. However, their plans of fishing and resting are soon dashed when they arrive at the cabin. There’s an abandoned car in the driveway, and the door is busted off its hinges. They cautiously enter the house, believing a break-in in the night. They are shocked to find a young woman tied to a chair, bleeding from a head wound, and unconscious on the concrete floor.
24 hours earlier, Rosa Godfrey and her maternal uncle, David Kummer, are kidnapped by a giant one-eyed man, a cyclops, from the grounds of Rosa’s home Spanish Cape. They are forced into a car, and David is made to drive the threesome to a holiday cottage that is currently unoccupied. During the kidnapping, the Cyclops repeatedly calls, David Kummer, John Marco, another guest staying at Spanish Cape,
John Marco is a known giggilo and philanderer; he has a romantic understanding with Rosa Godfrey and possibly other women visiting Spanish Cape. He is well known for his flamboyant white dinner dress; however, David Kummer also wears an all-white dinner outfit and is mistakenly kidnapped in Marco’s stead.
The Cyclops believes Rosa Godfrey’s and David Kummer’s assertions that he is not John Marco to be a ruse. David Kummer attempts to fight the Cyclops on the beach but is knocked unconscious. Rosa Godfrey is manhandled into the empty house and tied to a chair.
The Cyclops locks her in a bedroom and then makes a phone call to an accomplice. Rosa has managed to crabwalk to the door to listen but can make out very little. She then watches the Cyclops hoist David Kummer into a skip and sail out into the cape to drown “John Marco.”
Overwrought, she faints until she is wakened by Ellery Queen and Judge Macklin. When they return Rosa Godfrey to Spanish Cape, they find the estate crawling with police. A hysterical Mrs. Godfrey tearfully tells Rosa that John Marco was killed the previous evening. In the early morning, he was found dead, naked under a long black cape. Totally bewildered, Rosa Godfrey begs Ellery Queen to help unravel what happened to John Marco, and just like that, Ellery Queen is on another case.
Not to toot my own horn, but from the setup, I immediately figured out how John Marco was killed. Unlike Agatha Christie, who subtly drops clues in casual conversation, Ellery Queen (the author) basically puts up neon signs with the introductory quote: “Nudaque Veritas,” which is Latin for Naked Truth, and the characters repeatedly mentions David Kummer’s white suit. Since this is my first Ellery Queen mystery, I am unsure if the clueing is always this obtuse, but it made me laugh.
Since I figured out the mysteries of who killed John Marco and how it was done early on, I was afraid the book would be a bit of a slog. Still, it was thoroughly enjoyable because Spanish Cape hosts a cast of entirely random characters. There’s Earle Corte, Rosa’s on-again, off-again lover, who follows her around like a lost dog, a plain, middle-aged woman named Laura Constable, who says she is friends with Mrs. Godfrey, but upon further probing, doesn’t appear to know her or her husband at all. The house party is rounded out by Mrs. Cecelia Munn, actress, gold digger, and married to the shady Mr. Joseph Munn, who has amassed his vast fortune by a litany of dishonest means. When Inspector Morely or Ellery Queen tries to discern how such disparate people have come together under the roof of the Spanish Cape, Mrs. Godfrey lamely explains that she likes to invite interesting people to stay with her.
Adding to the mysteries of who killed John Marco and why, what happened to David Kummer, Ellery Queen, and Inspector Morely must explain why all these people are vacationing together. Again, I could think of only one explanation: blackmail, which was the answer.
However, the slow crumbling of alibis and the erratic and dangerous personalities staying at the Spanish Cape made reading the book fun. Everyone was so exaggerated and over the top, in a Hammer Horror movie way, that I got into the book. I also enjoyed Ellery Queen’s writing style; there were long, discursive, lyrical paragraphs about the landscape punctuated by short choppy sentences. It took me a while to get used to Ellery Queen’s writing style, I appreciated that it read more like a novel, but I only really started to get into the groove of it by reading it aloud to myself for the first 100 pages or so. It’s not the most accessible writing with sentences that run on and are binding together with many dependent clauses. It’s easy to lose a train of thought.
Ellery Queen’s descriptive writing is complicated by Ellery Queen, the character’s nonsequitur, and allusions to classical literature, Latin, and popular culture. He is a contemporary of S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance, who he mentions several times. Ellery Queen’s constant nattering on about how the thing at hand reminds him of some obscure poem by Ovid or something can grate, and it grates on his sidekick, Judge Macklin, who repeatedly tells him to stop being such a silly ass and pay attention to what’s at hand- which I found hilarious. I understood many of the references as someone who studied Latin and philosophy. Still, I think it makes Ellery Queen a more inaccessible character, coupled with the novelistic writing- I know why this book would not be popular.
All of that to say, Ellery Queen is a fascinating investigator. He can verbally cut to the quick, so there are no extended, pedantic interviews; he often calls out lies in real-time and can get people to tell the truth. An astute study of human nature, he is not easily fooled and suffers none. It was refreshing to see an investigator get annoyed or angry at people for telling lies or withholding information- he is not as ready to play the inscrutable ass as Philo Vance. Many of his admirable qualities are on display in Spanish Cape because he is effectively on his own- he doesn’t have any police allies, and everyone in the household is hiding terrible secrets, which are exciting and sad revelations throughout the book.
The fantastical setup of The Spanish Cape, the many mysteries, and the likable nature of Ellery Queen are undercut my two main flaws: you don’t get to know anything about the other people staying in Spanish Cape until like two-thirds of the way through the story- which is too late! Even when we do get a bit of character development, it is immediately eschewed to focus on another baffling mystery. A good mystery should have exciting puzzles, but I also need to care about all the characters or at least know all their names. The second major flaw of the book is that it’s not well-plotted. Why do none of the characters care about what happened to David Kummer? Why are the police not combing the shore looking for his remains? Why was there not more of the story focused on the various people at Spanish Cape trying to pretend they are all great friends and the reader slowly being able to pick apart that there’s no way that’s true. A dinner party where they are all pretending to be acquaintances for Ellery Queen’s benefit would have been hilarious.
Lots of plotting is undercut by the author’s preoccupation with creating a totally over-the-top, clever mystery, and in fact, this is baked into the book; we are supposed to be thinking about Ellery Queen, the author because the author asks the reader in large print if they have solved the crime before the solution is explained. I’ve never read another mystery author so obsessed with knowing if the reader has figured out the answer to the book more than the author Ellery Queen. I liked the brazen challenge by the author, but I don’t think this will be universally loved.
The Spanish Cape Mystery was a unique reading experience because there was a lot of stated authorial intent, and the book’s primary function was to be a complex puzzle, not an entertaining mystery with fleshed-out characters. I think Ellery Queen did well on his intended aims, but the book never really came together. There’s too little character development besides that of Ellery Queen, the detective, and too little thought about making the story hang together; all of the characters move and act like chess pieces moving to forward the puzzle and not their own agendas or internal desires. I am intrigued enough by the merits of the mysteries of The Spanish Cape Mystery to read more about Ellery Queen, but I understand why others wouldn’t.
The Spanish Cape Mystery Reviews
In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel
#20booksofsummer23 Reviews
Golden Age of Detective Fiction 
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