Ellery Queen is a fictional character: a mystery writer who helps his police inspector father solve crimes. He was thought up by two cousins- Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee- in the 1920's. They co-wrote a novel featuring the character, then decided to confuse everyone by adopting the name Ellery Queen as their pseudonym as well, so the novels and short stories are written by the author(s) Ellery Queen and feature the writer/sleuth Ellery Queen. Their stories became very popular and were eventually adapted for radio and later for television. As mentioned, I'd heard the occasional episode of the radio program as a youngster but I'd never seen any episodes of the television show, which ran through most of the 1950's. I decided to watch one last night, however: an episode from 1951 entitled Murder To Music.
In Murder To Music, Ellery Queen visits the home of a famous conductor- Anton Rouselle- with his friend who is the doctor of Rouselle's wife; she is confined to a wheelchair due to severe arthritis. When they arrive, Rouselle's prodigy Miss Grove is playing Brahms' Concerto No. 1 and Rouselle tells them that she is debuting as a soloist playing that piece with his orchestra the following week. The occasion becomes awkward when Mrs. Rouselle bluntly tells Miss Grove that she's not good enough to play with the orchestra and implies that her husband is giving her the chance to do so only because the two of them are fooling around. Whatever the truth about her ability to play the concerto, it soon becomes clear that Miss Grove is indeed engaged in performing the horizontal hokey pokey with Rouselle. Tsk, tsk. Rouselle rolls his wife's chair into her bedroom and the doctor gives her something to calm her down... the stress and excitement aren't good for her heart which is already under strain. While they're out of the room, Miss Grove tells Ellery Queen- as a concerned friend, of course- that Mrs. Rouselle has been becoming increasingly unhinged and a few days previously threw a heavy iron paperweight at his head.
Later that night, feeling guilty about everything, Rouselle breaks things off with Grove and tells her that she won't be playing the concerto. After he leaves the room, she filches a dagger from a display on the wall and puts it in her purse. She visits Ellery Queen and his father the following day, showing them the dagger and telling them that she found it under Mrs. Rouselle's pillow. She asks Queen senior if there's anyway to have Mrs. Rouselle committed so she won't be a danger to anyone but he tells her that Mr. Rouselle would have to be party to that. She leaves disappointed and later visits Mrs. Rouselle to tell her that she's leaving town to go home to Chicago. Mrs. Rouselle apologises for being rude the other night and Grove asks her to have a drink with her; Mrs. Rouselle agrees and doesn't notice when Grove pours a powder into her cup. Mr. Rouselle arrives home and helps his wife, who is suddenly not feeling well, to the bedroom. When he returns, Grove tells him she's leaving and says she's going to play the concerto for him once more, for old time's sake. Her playing covers up the sound of Mrs. Rouselle struggling to get help as she collapses on the floor and dies.
Later that week, the doctor is talking to Ellery Queen and mentions that Mrs. Rouselle has died of a heart attack, saying that her illness had put a lot of strain on her heart. Queen remarks that it apparently put a lot of strain on her mental health as well, telling the doctor about the hurled paperweight and the dagger. The doctor says that that's impossible; for the last few years Mrs. Rouselle's arthritis was so bad that she could barely lift her arms at all, let alone throw something or reach a dagger which was hanging high up on the wall. Now suspicious, the doctor performs an autopsy and it turns out that Mrs. Rouselle ingested a drug which induced her heart attack. When he gives his findings to Mr. Rouselle, the poor dope is convinced that his wife committed suicide because of the terrible pain she was in. Ellery Queen is sceptical though, especially when he finds that Miss Grove has stayed in town to "comfort" the grieving widower and, oh yeah, her solo in the concert is back on. The question is, how can he prove that Miss Grove is a murderer as well as a floozy? It all goes down the night of the concert, at the hall.
Murder To Music is... okay. It's not much of a whodunnit, because we're shown exactly who has, er, 'dun' it: crazy ol' Miss Grove. The only real question is how Queen is going to prove that she did it, and even that gets wrapped up pretty quickly. The problem is the short run time- a half hour, with commercial breaks- which doesn't give enough time to develop the plot sufficiently. There is some good character work in this, however, and it was good to see veteran character actor Jerome Cowan (The Maltese Falcon, Miracle on 34th Street, etc) in the role of Mr. Rouselle. All in all, not as good as the radio program (as I recall) but a not unpleasant way to spend half an hour. Also, the old car commercials are a hoot.