The Chinese Orange Mystery

The Ellery Queen Mysteries 1934

By: Ellery Queen

Narrated by: Richard Waterhouse

A puzzling publishing murder attracts the eye of Ellery Queen.

Mandarin Press is a premier publishing house for foreign literature, but to those at the top of this enterprise, there is little more beautiful than a rare stamp. As Donald Kirk, publisher and philatelist, prepares his office for a banquet, an unfamiliar man comes to call. No one recognizes him, but Kirk’s staff is used to strange characters visiting their boss, so Kirk’s secretary asks him to wait in the anteroom. Within an hour, the mysterious visitor is dead on the floor, head bashed in with a fireplace poker, and everything in the anteroom has been quite literally turned upside down. The rug is backwards; the furniture is backwards; even the dead man’s clothes have been put on front-to-back.

As debonair detective Ellery Queen pries into the secrets of Mandarin Press, every clue he finds is topsy-turvy. The great sleuth must tread lightly, for walking backwards is a surefire way to step off a cliff.

©1934 Ellery Queen (P)2013 AudioGO

Good One To Ponder

Enjoyable entry into the E Q Mystery Series. You have an unusual crime with Ellery and his father working the case. One could tell that this was an older case because of the way the detectives talk. I highly recommend. Very satisfying and yet challenging, too.

definitely not one of Ellery Queen's best

this is the fifth or sixth book that I have read out of the series, and so far this is the only one that I and again, they changed the narrator, so it is terrible... When you have a series of books, you should same narrator book after book after book, because when you listen to an audible book, The narrator's Voice becomes the character... When there is a different narrator for each book, you never get gay vision in your mind what the character looks like and acts like and sounds like... Not allowing you 2 Grow to like or love the character

Ellery Queen.

I liked the narrator and storyline. It was a convoluted story and I loved it.

Classic detective series, awful narrator

As most people who read detective stories and mysteries know, the Ellery Queen novels are splendid examples of their time and of the locked room/impossible crime genre. This book is no exception. But be forewarned: the narrator leaves everything to be desired. he is stiff, awkward, artificial. His attempts at characterization through accents are laughable. He makes listening a continuous challenge. To me, he reads the book as if he were reading it to a group of beginning English-language learners, who were following along with the printed text.

Too much

Far too complicated, too many characters of no importance, too long, very little information for us. Ellery's attempt to explain the whole thing at the end was too evolved with a scheme for this poor simple murderer to have dreamed up in the time he available. No, I know it was an example of making something simple complicated.