The Egyptian Cross Mystery by Ellery Queen

A sub series of threads where I talk about Mystery Novels I read and their influences/similarities to Umineko. The thread will contain spoilers about the tricks used, but never the name of the culprit.

#07threads

I had this novel in mind since i saw it the first time in requiem, and i was surprised about how many ideas it contained that were similar to Umineko’s events. Again I will talk vaguely about the tricks used so beware of spoilers for the book or Umineko in general.

First of all, the main method of murder (there are multiple homicides involved and they are all done in the same way) seemed to have a religious implication and there were a lot of religious vandalism at every crime scene, which leads you to think its a religious fanatic at work

The first victim was done in a small country town, so some kind of jury was assembled to ask the residents about their relations to the victim. The main goal of the court was to understand how the motif of the crime can shift easily because of a simple account or a piece of info

A clever trick that had similarities to Banquet was about understanding the victim’s smoking habits, which lead the detective to shift thinking about a lot of topics including the place of the crime, the time of the murder and the culprit in question.

One of the victim’s playing habits in checkers had a big factor in identifying the particular sequence of events in a crime, and the number of people involved. It also relied a lot on photographic memory and the eccentric habits of the victim.

Other smaller tricks include not being able to identify the victim or the time of death, and the psychology of murders themselves in relation to family feuds. Also the timing of finding certain clues played a big part in the execution of the mystery itself.

The main trick depends heavily on having multiple names for the same person, which is not a big spoiler since it's revealed pretty early, but the trick was in how this simple trick is executed, and how far the author took it to trick the readers.

The idea of disguising a crime as another crime was also used clearly as a major playing card, so yeah beware of who you lend your mystery novels to when you are young, because it might come back to bite you later in life.