The drama at the Roman Theatre was the most popular show in town that season. It was called Gunplay and was filled with the violence and action and noises of gang warfare - a bit raw, a bit nasty and obviously pleasing to the audience.Shortly after the curtain rose on Act II, there was a slight commotion in the theatre. At first only a few noticed. Then there was a scream and the lights snapped on. Near a closed exit, a large policeman stood holding a slight, nervous man by the arm."Don't get out of your seat, any of you!" The audience laughed, thinking it was part of the play. But when a squad of bluecoats, headed by a tall man in plain clothes, marched down the aisle, pandemonium broke out. "What's up, Doyle?"
"Look's like this man's been murdered, Sergeant."(cover)

Suit, cape and gloves worn with a whisky flair...everything but the top hat. And he was dead. With a characteristic display of intemperance, Monte Field had succumbed during the Act II of the Broadway hit 'Gunplay'.
"Foulplay!" cried the local constabulary. It was clearly a case for the Queens - father and son. A case of shadowy death, an unsavory victim, and a lenghty list of suspects whose tarnished pasts has made them prime targets for blackmail.
Someone had enacted the performance of the year: the perfect murder. (Signet cover)

"Gets our class A rating." -- Chicago Daily News

The first EQ mystery, because they believed it to be in a class by itself, the original publishers of The Roman Hat Mystery chose it from more than 100 selected manuscripts as their contribution to mystery fiction of the year. The subsequent acclaim of the critics -- they called it "brilliant," "ingenious," "fascinating," "intriguing," "swift-moving" -- proved that the publisher's choice was a shrewd one. In 'The Finishing Stroke' Ellery states that 'the Roman Hat Mystery' had been well received by the critics.  Following no hackneyed formula, this mystery offers a fool-proof plot of fascinating complexity, a theatrically romantic setting, and a most ingenious deductive pattern that is plausible, gripping throughout, and wholly original in weave. The essential clue is a missing tophat. On the surface it appears to be of minor significance, yet about this elusive thread the entire amazing tale revolves. Every fact necessary to the solution is given; yet we challenge the most ardent amateur criminologists to deduce the startling dénouement.

"Not only is his story really exciting but he himself plays absolutely fair - a fact which you may discover for yourself if, as you will propably want to do, you turn back after reading the last page and skim through the book again ... a worthy successor to Holmes... At the end too, a delectable 'surprise' is not lacking. The whole thing is most admirably done - the detective story de luxe." - Ralph Straus (Sunday Times)

The admiration Frederic Dannay had for Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin surfaces and the more I look into this, the more I tend to believe that Ellery always has been more of a new Lupin than a new Sherlock Holmes as some covers tend to suggest.
"Rufus King's first Lt. Valcour novel, Murder by the Clock,had a simple plot idea involving men's hats.It was apparently serialized in magazines in 1928, before its book publication in 1929. It is possible that EQ used King's work as a jumping off point and subsequent works. One wonders if the name "Rufus King" affected EQ's choice of the pseudonym Ellery Queen." (Michael E.Grost) 
Dannay recalled, "...Van Dine influenced us because he made so much money; and then, the kind of thing he did appealed to us in those days. It was complex, logical, deductive, almost entirely intellectual..." (Nevins) When the cousins entered the McClure contest Van Dine was at his peak of succes. The influence their idol had is obvious. As JJMcC pointed out Ellery Queen retires to Italy: exactly where Van Dine had said Philo Vance had retired. Ellery Queen is a pseudonym to conceal the real identity of the sleuth as was Philo Vance. They both like to use pompous literary references. Vance got access to the crimes through his friend Markham while Ellery's connection to the investigation was given by his father. Sergeant Velie, Doc Prouty and even Djuna all had a counterpart in the Van Dine novels as respectively Sergeant Heath, Dr. Doremus and the butler Currie. 

Clever plot development, but with several points too difficult to swallow. EQ is rather a stuffed shirt. It is clearly very much in the same pattern as the works to follow. Although a pretty ordinary mystery, it contains a number of things that laid a foundation for later Queen novels: it creates most of the continuing characters of the EQ books. We get to know Ellery as a stiff shirt wearing his lornget and falconer, a gray costume and walkingstick. He addresses his father "My dear Watson". Richard appears for the first time and uses a snuffbox. We even meet some other new friends in the gypsyboy Djuna, brigadier Velie, detective Flint, policeofficers Doyle, Hesse, Pigott, Ritter and Hagstrom. Henry Sampson makes his first appearance with the substitute Timothy Cronin.

The story unvoldes in N.Y. in the Roman Theatre on West 47nd Street. Monte Field, a lawyer, is murdered by drinking poison.
As ever, all references to years have been removed and we only know the story taking place between Monday, September 24. and Wednesday, October 3. We suspect it to be 1928.
"Its early chapters contain the first of the exhaustive searches so prominent in the Queen saga; its finale is of the deductive type, like most of the great Queen works; the deductions include a sequence investigating a large cast of characters, explaining why one and only one could have the properties of the guilty party, similar to later passages in The Dutch Shoe Mystery, Halfway House, and above all The Tragedy of Z. The chief plot idea in the solution is one that will pop up in variations throughout his 1930's works: e.g. The Spanish Cape Mystery..." (Michael E.Grost)