There Was an Old Woman (novel)

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There Was an Old Woman (also published as The Quick and the Dead)
ThereWasAnOldWoman.JPG
First US edition
Author Ellery Queen
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Series Ellery Queen mysteries
Genre Mystery
Publisher Little, Brown (US)
Gollancz (UK)
Publication date
1943 (US)
1944 (UK)
Media typePrint (hardcover and paperback)
Preceded by Calamity Town  
Followed by The Murderer is a Fox  

There Was an Old Woman is a novel published in 1943 by Ellery Queen, byname of American writers Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay. It is a mystery novel primarily set in New York City, US. [1] [2]

Contents

Plot summary

Mrs. Cornelia Potts is the elderly matriarch of the Potts family, and their large fortune was earned by the manufacture of shoes, so when a murder mystery takes place at their New York estate, it's not surprising that the newspapers refer frequently to "the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe". Cornelia has had two husbands—one deceased, one living in the household—and three children by each. Her children by her first husband are all extremely eccentric. Thurlow Potts engages in dozens of lawsuits to protect the family honor; Louella believes herself to be a great chemist and inventor, a sentiment shared by no one else; and Horatio, an adult, is determined to live the lifestyle of a child of six. By contrast, her other three children by her second husband are relatively sane—the twins Robert and Maclyn, who run the business, and the beautiful Sheila. Thurlow's lawyer Charley Paxton is engaged to Sheila and invites Ellery Queen to dinner at the Potts mansion to meet the family. Thurlow challenges Robert to a duel, using revolvers from which the bullets have been carefully extracted but, when the duel is fought, Robert is shot dead because the bullets have been returned to the gun. Next, his twin Maclyn is shot in his bed, and the body is found with whip marks on his face next to a dish of broth. As Ellery postulates that the murders are somehow tied to the nursery rhyme, the next death is that of the Old Woman herself. She dies of heart failure and leaves behind a confession to the first two murders. It is only at the marriage of Charley and Sheila that Ellery finally realizes the truth of the bizarre events and unmasks the real criminal.

Literary significance and criticism

After many popular mystery novels, a radio program and a number of movies, the character of Ellery Queen was at this point firmly established. This novel returns to the unrealistic puzzle-mystery format of earlier years, in which realism in characterization and plotting is sacrificed to the need to make events fit into the nursery-rhyme format. At the end of the novel, Sheila announces that, in order to escape the stigma associated with her heritage, she is changing her name to "Nikki Porter"; Nikki Porter is Ellery's romantic interest that was developed in radio and film but not seen in novels before this time.

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Ellery Queen is a pseudonym created in 1928 by the American detective fiction writers Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred Bennington Lee (1905-1971). It is also the name of their main fictional detective, a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve baffling murder mysteries. Dannay and Lee wrote most of the novels and short story collections in which Ellery Queen appears as a character, and these books were among the most popular American mysteries published between 1929 and 1971. Under the pseudonym Ellery Queen, they also edited more than thirty anthologies of crime fiction and true crime. Dannay founded, and for many years edited, the crime fiction magazine Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has been published continuously from 1941 to the present. From 1961 onwards, Dannay and Lee commissioned other authors to write thrillers using the pseudonym Ellery Queen, but not featuring Ellery Queen as a character; some such novels were juvenile and were credited to Ellery Queen Jr. They also wrote four mysteries under the pseudonym Barnaby Ross, which featured the detective Drury Lane.

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"There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" is a popular English language nursery rhyme, with a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19132. Debates over its meaning and origin have largely centered on attempts to match the old woman with historical female figures who have had large families, although King George II (1683–1760) has also been proposed as the rhyme's subject.

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References

  1. Anderson, Isaac (1943-03-28). "THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN. By Ellery Queen. 321 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $2". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-09-30.
  2. Nevins, Francis M. (2013). Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection. Perfect Crime Books.