The Tragedy of Y

The Tragedy of Y is the second installment of Ellery Queen's Drury Lane tragedy series, published in 1932 under the pen name "Barnaby Ross." The story begins when a deep-sea trawler dredges up a decomposed male body from New York Bay: the dead man is York Hatter, patriarch of the Hatter family, with hydrocyanic acid found in his lungs, and the police rule that he poisoned himself before drowning. The Hatter family is notorious in the neighborhood as a "mad" household—the despotic, tyrannical matriarch Emily Hatter rules with an iron hand while her children each go their own way. After York's death, misfortunes pile up: Emily is struck down in her bedroom by a mandolin, and Louisa, her daughter from her first marriage—a woman deaf, mute, and blind—has already survived two poisoning attempts. Nothing at the crime scene suggests an intruder, yet the clues all point to the long-dead York, and the family's sealed chemistry laboratory is suddenly consumed by fire, destroying key evidence. At his wit's end, the Inspector turns to retired Shakespearean actor Drury Lane. The book follows a four-act play structure, opening with "A Public Letter to the Reader," laying every clue before the reader, and emphasizing "fair-play deduction." The final truth is both rigorously deducible from the logic and leaves the reader pondering where "evil" comes from.