The cousins continued to churn out very short short stories for This Week Magazine in the 1950s. These stories, generally, were well written, with interesting characters, but had rather stupid solutions. There were exceptions. The first of these stories, “The Lady Couldn’t Explain,” was published in December, 1949, but was not anthologized until 1968. The next 16 of these stories (and two which originally appeared elsewhere), were collected in Queen’s Bureau of Investigation (1955).
The conceit of QBI was that each mystery fell to a different “department.” For instance, “Murder Without Clues,” which appeared in the January 29,1950 issue of This Week, appeared in QBI as “The Impossible Crime Department: The Three Widows.”
As we have seen in earlier stories and novels, Ellery Queen has interesting culinary tastes: the pigs knuckles of Halfway House come immediately to mind, for instance. This otherwise bland and spiceless tale opens with what could, perhaps, be an explanation: “To the normal palate the taste of murder is unpleasant. But Ellery is an epicure in these matters and certain of his cases, he deposes, possess a flavor which lingers on the tongue.”
Murder and pigs knuckles: two things which linger on the tongue…
As to the plot itself? Nothing much to tell, except that this was a period where the cousins apparently were having serious issues with the medical profession.
Reading Ellery Queen 