The Roman Hat Mystery
A Broadway Theater Murder, a Missing Silk Hat, and a Fair-Play Puzzle of Deductive Crime SolvingBy Ellery Queen
Length11h 4m
About this audiobook
Ellery Queen's The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) inaugurates the celebrated series featuring the amateur detective Ellery Queen and his police-official father, Inspector Richard Queen. Set largely within a crowded Broadway theater, the novel begins with the murder of a notorious lawyer during a performance, while the apparent weapon mysteriously disappears. Its central puzzle—how a killer could act amid spectators and leave no revolver behind—develops through questions of disguise, opportunity, and theatrical misdirection, with a hat serving as a seemingly ordinary but crucial piece of evidence. The book exemplifies the Golden Age "fair-play" detective story: clues are carefully planted, suspects are methodically examined, and the reader is invited to match wits with the investigator before the final solution. Its metropolitan setting and self-conscious use of performance also give the mystery a distinctly theatrical literary texture. Ellery Queen was the shared pen name of Daniel Nathan and Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky, American cousins who created the character after entering a mystery-writing contest. Their collaboration combined Nathan's editorial and literary interests with Lepofsky's practical engagement with popular fiction, producing a detective series that balanced rigorous puzzle construction with accessible narrative suspense. The novel reflects the period's fascination with urban modernity, celebrity, and the closed-circle crime, while establishing the formal principles that would define the Queens' later work. This book is especially recommended to readers interested in the origins of American Golden Age detective fiction, ingenious locked-room-style problems, and the history of the fair-play mystery. It offers both a satisfying intellectual challenge and an illuminating portrait of theatrical New York, making it valuable to general mystery readers and students of genre literature alike.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 3.8 (12.2K)
Includes StoryGraph, Goodreads, Amazon, LibraryThing
GenreMystery and Thriller
Length11 hrs 4 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJan 1, 2025
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1The Man in Lower Ten (Annotated)
2The Roman Hat Mystery
3FOREWORD
4PART ONE
51 In Which Are Introduced a Theatre Audience and a Corpse
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62 In Which One Queen Works and Another Queen Watches
73 In Which A ‘Parson’ Came To Grief
84 In Which Many Are Called And Two Are Chosen
95 In Which Inspector Queen Conducts Some Legal Conversations
106 In Which the District Attorney Turns Biographer
117 The Queens Take Stock
12PART TWO
138 In Which the Queens Meet Mr. Field’s Very Best Friend
149 In Which the Mysterious Mr. Michaels Appears
1510 In Which Mr. Field’s Tophats Begin to Assume Proportions
1611 In Which the Past Casts a Shadow
1712 In Which the Queens Invade Society
1813 Queen to Queen
19PART THREE
2014 In Which the Hat Grows
2115 In Which an Accusation Is Made
2216 In Which the Queens Go to the Theatre
2317 In Which More Hats Grow
2418 Stalemate
25INTERLUDE: IN WHICH THE READER’S ATTENTION IS RESPECTFULLY REQUESTED
26PART FOUR
2719 In Which Inspector Queen Conducts More Legal Conversations
2820 In Which Mr. Michaels Writes a Lecture
2921 In Which Inspector Queen Makes a Capture
3022 — and Explains
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