The Roman Hat Mystery

The Roman Hat Mystery, published in 1929, is the novel that introduced Ellery Queen, the amateur detective who would become one of the most popular sleuths of the golden age of crime fiction. A man is found poisoned in a crowded New York theatre during a performance, and the one puzzle that will not resolve is the whereabouts of the dead man’s missing top hat. Ellery Queen, working alongside his father, Inspector Richard Queen of the police, treats the case as a pure problem in deduction, laying every clue before the reader before the solution is revealed. It is a classic closed-circle mystery, fair, ingenious, and coolly logical. This free PDF and EPUB offers the complete first Ellery Queen novel.