Calendar of Crime: Stories by Queen Ellery

Author:Queen, Ellery [Queen, Ellery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781504016551
Goodreads: 25757557
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 1952-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

THE ADVENTURE OF

The Needle’s Eye

This being a tale of pirates and stolen treasure, it is a gratification to record that it all happened in that season of the year to which the moonstone and the poppy are traditionally dedicated. For the moonstone is a suprisingly moral object. To its lawful owner it brings nothing but good: Held in the mouth at the full of the moon, it reveals the future; it heats the lover and it cools the heated; it cures epilepsy; it fructifies trees; and so on. But rue and blight upon him who lays thievish hands on it, for then it invokes the black side of its nature and brings down upon the thief nothing but evil. Such exact justice is unarguably desirable in a story of piracy which, while boasting no moonstones—although there were buckets of other gems—did reach its apogee in Augustus Caesar’s month, which is the moonstone’s month. And the poppy springs from the blood of the slain, its scarlet blooms growing thickest on battlefields and in places of carnage. So it is a poetic duty to report that there is murder in this August tale, too.

The sea-robber involved was master of the galley Adventure, a Scotsman who was thoroughly hanged in London’s Execution Dock two centuries and a half ago—alas, on a day in May—and whose name ever since has stood for piracy in general. Ellery had tangled with historical characters before, but never with one so exciting as this; and it must be confessed that he embarked on the case of Captain Kidd’s treasure with a relish more suitable to a small boy in his first hot pursuit of Mr. Legrand’s golden scarabaeus than to a weary workman in words and the case-hardened son of a modern New York policeman.

And then there was Eric Ericsson.

Ericsson was that most tragic of men, an explorer in an age when nothing of original note remained on earth to be explored. He had had to content himself with being, not the first in anything, but the farthest, or the highest, or the deepest. Where five channels in the Northwest Passage were known, Ericsson opened a sixth. He found a peak in Sikang Province of western China, in the Amne Machin Range, which was almost a thousand feet higher than Everest, but he lost his instruments and his companions and Mount Everest remained on the books the highest mountain on the planet. Ericsson went farther and wider in the great Juf depression of the Sahara than the Citroën expedition, but this did not salve the nettling fact that other men had blazed the trail. And so it had gone all his life. Now in middle age, broken in health, Ericsson rested on his bitter fame—honorary fellowships and medals from all the proper learned societies, membership and officership in clubs like the Explorers’, Cosmos, Athenaeum—and brooded over his memories in his New York apartment or, occasionally, at the fireside of the old stone house on the island he owned off Montauk Point, Long Island.

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