Ellery Queen is determined not to get into the investigation of murder in New York City ever again after his disastrous failure in a recent case that resulted in the death of an innocent man. In his mind the man would still be alive had it not been for his mistakes. However, a serial killer is loose in New York this summer. The killer becomes known as the “CAT” after a newspaper cartoon showing a vicious cat with a tail for each murder victim, one new tail added for each new victim. Five women and two men have been strangled to death, the men with a blue silk cord and the women with a pink silk cord. The strangler is smart and no clues are left behind. The New York Police cannot find anything that the seven victims have in common; nothing at all. The Mayor and Police Commissioner are under increasing and hysterical pressure to do something. The only thing they can think of to do is to put someone else in charge of a special task force to solve the murders, thus taking the pressure off them. Ellery is their man.
So Ellery and his father, Inspector Queen proceed to dissect all the murder scenes and backgrounds of all the victims. They are frustrated at not being able to find anything more than is already known. Ellery gets a glimmer of a clue when he notices that each victim is a few years younger than the one before. When two more murders surface, they fit that pattern. But what does that mean? All are also listed in the New York phone directory. In doing research on the victims they discover that all nine of the victims were birthed by the same doctor, who happened to be a prominent New York Psychiatrist who was also assigned to help find the murderer. Queen gets into the good doctor’s home when he is at a function given by the Mayor and discovers the birth records in an old file. Going through them chronologically Queen is able to work out who the next victim will be.
Ellery and his team of police proceed to set up an elaborate trap to capture the man in his attempt to kill his tenth. They succeed and the man confesses to all of the murders under stiff interrogation. But Ellery learns that the doctor was in Sweden delivering a paper at an international psychiatric convention at the exact time of the very first murder so he could not have been the “CAT”. He works out who the real “CAT” is, in a dramatic second climax to the tale. I won’t spoil the end for you but it is good.
I give “Cat of Many Tails” a 5 of 10 on the Weaver meter.
