PI Mystery Diary Review: ELLERY QUEEN – Kiss and Kill.

ELLERY QUEEN – Kiss and Kill. PI Barney Burgess. Ghost-written by Charles W. Runyon. Dell, paperback original; 1st printing, April 1969. Cover art by Robert McGinnis. The opening is meant to grab you, and it does A man looks up from his work to find his wife missing from the kitchen, and a search of the neighborhood leads nowhere. The police cannot help, and the man turns to private eye Barney Burgess. The pace then shifts, noticeably so. Events hurtle along, coming faster and faster. There is a villain, one (if I may say so) who crosses the line of reality, and one who is all the more chilling for it. There is also money that corrupts, plus the twist that comes at the end. Barney Burgess is a typical PI as a character, one I think modeled after Humphrey Bogart. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) He may have been more adventurous in this one, but he is who he is. Only minor flashes of the Queen style are present, sorry to say. The beginning, though, could have led to so many…