Mad, I tell you! Mad!

I bought this copy of Ellery Queen's The Madman Theory (1966) at the Campbell-Neumann estate sale a couple of months ago for 10 cents. How could I possibly not buy it? Crazy stretched out 2-D mirror guy with a hole in his head? Yes. That is something I would like to read.

I didn't know much about Ellery Queen, who it turns out is not actually a person but a mystery novel character who writes his own books through the power of his creators, cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay. Except not this one, and not many of Queen's later books, which were ghost-written, in this case by science fiction writer Jack Vance early on in his career.

The premise of this book is a nice one -- a group of men go out backpacking in the mountains. One of them gets his head blown off in front of the other four. Everyone sort of has a motive, but no one really does, and the only available solution is that some crazy guy is running around in the woods shooting at peoples' heads. Or is it?

That's where our detective hero Omar Collins comes in. Through a lot of hard, old-fashioned police work (none of this CSI technology stuff, just lots of phone calls, leg work, and thinking). He, naturally, figures it out. I was pretty sure who it was by the end of the book, but not sure enough to bet any money on it. A very nice little detective story, and completely worth at least ten cents.