I want to discuss a few things to think about in this novel and give some explanatory notes.

Piggott appears frequently in Queen’s novels, and readers familiar with Queen will naturally recognize him, though it seems to be in this book that Ellery first calls him “Piggie,” which feels slightly teasing. Officer Zillie, who appears at the same time as Piggott, is supposed to be a newcomer to this book, and Queen’s specific reference to his ” brown wrists” may be an attempt to draw a connection to the tan outfit that Ashton wears in his disguise.
When Ellery comes up with an answer that points to the murderer, he narrows it down to the blackmailer who stole Sheila’s handwritten letter shortly before and after the gunshot. This is when the text mentions:

Someone let out a breath stealthily. The Inspector glanced sharply around, but whoever had done it was again as rigid as the others.

This expression is very subtle, the reader at this point naturally does not know who this “relieved” person is, after reading Ellery’s answer may also think that it is Ramon, and by the end of the text may have forgotten this point, in fact, if you look back again, it is not difficult to see that this person should be Dane, since Ellery deduced that the murderer is the extortionist, then naturally the murderer is not him.

Why was the defense attorney removed halfway through and O’Brien replaced with Barton? Perhaps because of the desire to design another lawyer who does not have much interaction with Ellery, this new lawyer is not too trusting of private investigators, he has his own set of methods, if the second defense is still O’Brien, then he may consult with Ellery all the things in the courtroom, and then the scene turns to Ellery to dominate. We know that the first defense was successful Ellery was happy because he mentioned the clue of the purse that everyone missed and it was up to him to save the day, while the alibi needed for the second defense was not discovered by him and this made him less happy, that’s why the third time when he came up with the answer that Ramon was the murderer he swore or even didn’t think about the implausibility of it, this The pseudo-answer was beautiful, he came up with it himself, and he needed to rely on it to salvage his self-esteem. Perhaps because of this, the lead in the second defense was to be given to the defense attorney, hence the replacement of O’Brien with Patton.

Looking back at Dane’s perspective in the first part, it’s easy to make the connection to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but readers should be aware that Dane’s perspective in the first part of this work is all real, no half-assed disguises, and it’s easy not to even think about what Dane did during that gap between leaving the suite and going home, a familiarity that’s less like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, more like something out of Queens Full. Of course, part one can’t account for Dane’s reentry into the suite; that would take the suspense out of the later chapters. The third part of the story can’t explain Dane’s return to the suite. After the blackmail letter is sent out, we can substitute Dane’s character, at this point, he definitely can’t admit that Sheila was killed by him, just like in the murder mystery game, if you’re the murderer, when other people dumped the evidence pointing to your presence at the scene, and deduced that it’s highly probable that you’ve committed the murder, the probability is that you can only admit that you did go to the scene, but definitely won’t admit that the person was killed by you. But you will never admit that you killed the person. So, putting things in perspective, when discussing this allegation in the hospital, Dane could only possibly admit that he had returned to the door of the suite, but never admit that he had gone back in. But because of this, it’s easy for readers to over-believe Dane’s testimony and end up crying out for injustice when they see the truth, and for this reason, I suspect Queen had to put out the reasons why Dane had cold-cocked Judy ahead of time as a way of reminding readers that Dane was suspect and knew he was suspect himself, and, in turn, in Judy’s point of view, as she realizes that if his parents were truly guilty of betrayal, he would probably come forward, as Dane admits at the end, borrowing evidence against himself to prove that Sheila killed him. This makes it understandable that he would deliberately alienate her. The question of why Dane alienated Judy plagues the reader for dozens of pages. If this explanation had been placed at the end as well, it would have been more abrupt and harder to accept than if it had been placed earlier.

Which leads to another question: when Dane receives the blackmail letter, and after some discussion in the hospital, doesn’t he realize that the blackmailer is Ramon?

He could have known, he should have known, he must have known.

Notice the conclusion Ellery finally deduces:

the murderer of Sheila and the finder of the letter — that is, the blackmailer—are one and the same.

This conclusion can only be reached on the basis that Dane, who reentered the scene, was not the murderer, but Dane knew that he had killed the man, and also knew that Ramon had been at the scene, so in his point of view the conclusion would have to be modified to read that two people had been at Sheila’s suite between 10:00 p.m. or so, after Ashton had left, and Sheila’s murder, one of Sheila’s murderers, and one of the extortionist who had found the letter. The murderer was Dane, so the blackmailer had to be Ramon.

Perhaps he thought Ramon was Sheila’s lover before this, but when he learned that Ashton was also being blackmailed, he should have been able to immediately deduce that the only person capable of knowing that Ashton went to see Sheila in disguise every Wednesday could have been Ashton’s driver. And by extension, he reasoned that Ramon was just the asshole who was blackmailing Sheila, not another of Sheila’s lovers. In other words, by the time Ellery had reasoned this out, Dane had understood everything, and he was the only one in the production who was seeing all the truth at this point.

And Ellery looked at him very hard indeed. “And another thing,” he said. “Ramon denies killing her. Did he say what he was doing up there?”
“Collecting a blackmail payment.”
“What!”
“Ramon was blackmailing Sheila, too?” Ashton cried.
“That’s right. He was playing both sides of the street.”

It was only Ashton who was surprised and shouted out, not Dane, which was side evidence that he had indeed known before then that Ramon was the blackmailer.

So what should he do next? He believes that Ellery can deduce that the murderer and the blackmailer is a person, and believe that he is not the murderer, so as long as you believe Queen father and son, let them run their own case to find Ramon on the line, Ellery should be able to find their own anagrams, rely on their own to come to the conclusion of “Norma = Ramon”. He doesn’t have to interfere or imply or manipulate anything.

Dane was quiet. Then he threw up his hands. “I’m ready to be guided by whatever you say, Mr. Queen.”

So there is clearly a false lead, and although Dane didn’t lead Ellery to reason at all, Dane was in a position to do so, and he didn’t do so because the case itself could have pushed the detective to move forward and reason out that false answer. It must be known that once you start to guide the detective, to provide him with undiscovered key clues, then you are also bound to be associated with this clue, which is detrimental to the murderer, that is, “do not add clues, if not necessary”. The conclusion from this analysis is that this work discusses a situation where it is better not to lead than to lead when the conditions for designing clues to guide the detective’s reasoning hold true. The fact that this false clue was originally designed for the police, with no consideration for the detective at all, and yet was only picked up by Ellery, is rare when viewed in the Queen canon.

But with that said this topic is not a complete discussion, why did Ramon take Sheila’s envelope? Was he trying to threaten Dane with it at the time? Knowing that Ramon didn’t know that Sheila would subsequently be murdered, how would Sheila feel about taking something of hers like that? Had she been so controlled by Ramon that Ramon could take whatever he wanted? Even so, if Sheila wasn’t dead, Ramon wouldn’t dare threaten Dane with the letter, and even though Sheila certainly hadn’t told Ashton that it was Ramon who was blackmailing him, all it took was for Dane and Sheila to testify against each other to know that the blackmailer was Ramon, and pulling out the carrot brought out the mud, so it was also Ramon who was blackmailing Ashton. The risk of doing this is too great, unless Ramon has been suppressing the letter and not acting on it, and he just thought that taking it away might be of use in the future, which IMO is the most likely possibility.

Then, after Sheila’s murder, in Ramon’s POV, Dane seems to be the killer without a doubt, is that really the case? If so, why did he start blackmailing Dane only after Ashton and Lutetia were acquitted? Was he unsure who the killer was? But on second thought, no matter who was being tried in court, as long as Dane’s story hadn’t come out, as long as Dane hadn’t been involved in the case, he could have blackmailed Dane.

No, while that analysis seemed reasonable, it didn’t hold water. As long as Dane’s family is on trial, he has no fear of blackmail, and he is perfectly capable of saving his family from jail by admitting his crimes in a big way. So the extortion necessarily could have taken place only after Dane’s parents were acquitted, when it appeared that Dane’s family was going to get out of the Sheila case. But Raymond still made the fatal mistake of not using the same tone, format and pick-up location as the last blackmail letter, which would have linked it to blackmailing Ashton, and Ellery would have inevitably suspected him, and, as Ellery said, only Raymond could have found out about Ashton’s date with Sheila.

With that comes another failing on Raymond’s part: how did he have the audacity to meet Sheila in person? Did he think Sheila couldn’t find out who he was? Even if Sheila didn’t know or Sheila wouldn’t tell, wouldn’t he be seen by bystanders going into the flat? Even if John Leslie didn’t see him on the one occasion of the murder, it would have been noticeable if he had come around a few more times, and it’s important to note that he met Sheila not only at Sheila’s house, but also at McCall’s house, and that they lived in the same apartment building! It makes sense for a driver to go to McKell’s house, but it doesn’t make sense for him to climb up to the top floor to go to Sheila’s house. It is not difficult to conclude from this analysis that the design of the plot in relation to Ramon is very “artificial”, unnatural and particularly stupid, and that the behaviour in question is designed to fit in with Ellery’s performance.

Going back to the black purse, how Queen solves the problem the first time around, he notices that the purse is missing, it’s a very crude design, the purse has a very low presence, and has no purpose other than to serve as a camouflage prop for Dr. Stone, and then after many pages it suddenly says that it’s a key item. It’s like Carr said in The Grandest Game in the World, the key clue is the killer’s green tie. But how to prove it?

And then, if he is conscientious, he will turn back through the book to discover whether Dagmar Doubledick’s tie really was green. Perhaps he finds this clue, a violet by a mossy stone, half hidden somewhere in the dusky recesses of Chapter Six; perhaps he misses the page and does not find it at all. In either case he is left with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction: as though he has been, if not swindled, at least outtalked.

Granted, the black leather bag was conspicuous enough, but it wasn’t a proud accomplishment for Ellery; Queen was passionate about how shocking a certain disregarded key clue could actually lead to through reasoning. Or, perhaps, was Lee supposed to be in charge of this one? Sadly, we no longer know.

What’s also confusing about this work is what the relationship between Ashton and Sheila really is; from Sheila’s signature she doesn’t think of him as a lover, and from her statements we can see that she considers her feelings for Ashton to be more of a friendship than a romance, and while that’s a good enough reason, there’s more to it than that, and I’ll be reinforcing my proofs on that point below. Sheila’s side of the story seems to be fine, then look at Ashton. is that what he thinks, we don’t have Ashton’s point of view and there is no way of knowing what is really going on inside his head from this book. When Lutetia first explains this like Dane did:

“He said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. There is another woman.’”
“Just like that?”
“Well, dear, I asked him.”

The expression “I’m terribly sorry. There is another woman” doesn’t mean that Ashton is in love with Sheila, but after all the buildup, it means in Dane’s and the reader’s mind that Ashton is already in love with Sheila, but he is too embarrassed to admit it. That’s what triggers the stakes that follow. We read the entire text and still don’t know how much Ashton has grown attached to Sheila, but one thing is obvious: he’s admitted to himself that he’s sorry for Lutetia, so I’m afraid that even if he hasn’t been unfaithful physically, he’s already been unfaithful mentally. Even so, Queen and Davidson did not use the book’s characters mouth will be broken, but instead showed a plausible, mixed feelings, so do good or bad, perhaps only to be readers to comment on.

Yusan Iiki’s “accidental reasoning” doesn’t seem to hold up in this book either, and I asked a native English-speaking friend who thought “Norma = Ramon” was obvious. It would have been easy to guess Ellery’s “Ramon is a criminal claim”, and in fact he was thinking the same thing Ellery was thinking.

As Mr. Iiki puts it:

The difference between “interesting reasoning” and “accidental reasoning” is whether or not there is any subtlety in the reasoning. And it’s hard to create such a masterpiece just by reasoning about ordinary, mundane cases. It is the reasoning of a case in which some kind of subterfuge has been used that creates the subtlety.

In Ellery’s point of view, Ramon used a trick, and he deduced that the murderer was Ramon, so can this be considered “accidental reasoning? I don’t think so, for the following reasons:

1. The core of this “accidental reasoning” is the anagram, and it is self-evident what the status of the anagram is in Queen’s work. When the reader thinks about this case, he or she will surely think about the name of the series of paintings that appeared in this case (because the name of the series has been emphasized by Queen again and again), and then consider the anagram.
2. “Norma = Ramon” from the anagrams is very simple for European and American readers, and I think Chinese readers can understand it as well. For this work, this level of anagrams is easy for native English readers, and since it is not easy to specify the names of the characters in the Chinese translation, the translation is closer to “accidental reasoning” than the original.
3. Split Ellery’s answer into two parts, one is the explanation of the anagrams, and the other is who the murderer is. It is clear, then, that Queen has already made his point in the text:

The fact that “the chauffeur done it,” as the man on the street put it, seemed to take the zing out of the Sheila Grey murder case. It was as if the case-hardened mystery buff, reading a new work of fiction, were to follow the red herring through 250 pages and find, on page 251, that the criminal was the butler. Other news began to crowd the Grey case into corners of the front pages, and soon it was being reported on page 6, and beyond.

The inference about who the murderer is isn’t a surprise because all one has to do is lock down the anagrams, and the truth about what the inference pushes out is even less of a surprise. In fact, it was probably more foreign readers like me who were surprised by the reasoning, and I’m afraid Mr. Iiki’s division read the Japanese translation rather than the original.

Since the reasoning is not unexpected, the only thing that is unexpected is the truth at the end. Whether that truth is unexpected or not seems to depend only on whether or not the reader still suspects Dane by the end; if they do, it’s to be expected, and if they don’t then it’s probably a big shock.

Of course, a friend of mine takes issue with that. He thinks Ellery’s selection of five people who might have known about Ashton’s friendship with Sheila, eliminating four by deduction, and leaving the last one as the killer, is “accidental reasoning.” That makes sense to me.

In addition, even if this work is given to Lee to write, it is hard to imagine that he would set the Sheila murder in the middle or further back, this is because of the core design of this work, in this case, the three sides of the triangle must be examined one by one, so that the three suspects have to be captured and released in turn, and if the murder occurs in the middle, then the pace of the early part of the book is too slow and the pace of the late part of the book is too tense, it is very difficult to choreograph The. Of course, it could be set up so that each of the three forces, or the three detectives, arrests the suspect they have identified in their mind and gives three answers, and then gives the true answer at the end, which might not make the late pacing too fast, however, we can’t imagine that Queen would have more than one detective in the work, and also have them wrestle with each other. Based on the above discussion, I think Mr. Iiki’s attribution of the “short series format” to Lee’s absence is also inappropriate.

Finally, there is another problem that we have not been able to understand. In the work, through Sheila’s words and the analogy related to Henry Havelock Ellis, it seems to suggest that Ashton’s sexual function is impaired, in which case, Sheila must not have slept with Ashton, and their bodies are innocent, and if the above statement is true, then there is a new problem. question of whether there was sex between Ashton and Lutetia and whether Dane was born to Ashton and Lutetia by birth. From the text we seem to get the impression that Dane is indeed their biological son, and furthermore, the beginning telling Lutetia’s story reads:

It was in the area of sex and marriage that Lutetia McKell’s upbringing expressed itself most strongly. A woman came to her marriage bed a virgin.

Since Lutetia was found to be a virgin when she went to bed on the wedding night, it would seem to suggest that there was intercourse between Ashton and Lutetia on the wedding night, which would mean that Ashton was still capable of giving birth to Dane when he was young, but only in his old age, which could be side-stepped by the fact that Ashton was only interested in his work. But if this statement is considered misleading, it could also be interpreted as “Lutetia and Ashton did not have intercourse on their wedding night, went to bed and fell asleep, and she was still a virgin that night.”

If this assumption is valid, then the previous statement is in jeopardy, and one has to ask: did Sheila hear Ashton say that he was sexually unavailable while she was sitting and chatting, or did she see that Ashton’s genitals were unavailable after she was already in bed? If it’s the former, it could still be Ashton’s excuse that he didn’t want to be physically unfaithful to Lutetia, and the whole thing would all make sense: Dane is pro-life, and Ashton isn’t sexually impotent, he’s just excusing himself from wanting to have sex with Sheila.

If the latter is the case, let’s move on, then is it possible that Sheila gave up on Ashton as a result, turned to another man, and befriended Dane? It also seems unlikely, since we know that Sheila has been known to change men more than just once a year and flip-flop on her ex when she does, in which case how would she tolerate having one part of her life occupied by two men at once? Furthermore, even if this were actually feasible, then why is the name of her year-long series uniquely an anagram of Dane and not an anagram of McKell? It’s not impossible to note:

Apparently she preferred to use his Christian name as the basis of the anagram, but she would use the surname if she had to.

She was allowed to use her last name as an anagram, but in the end she didn’t. For these reasons, Ashton was not Sheila’s Love of the Year in 1963. Therefore Sheila’s feelings for Ashton should not have been a romance but, as she claims, really a platonic friendship. As long as this is confirmed, then the hypothesis is not valid at all, because Sheila would not have slept with Ashton at all, and when I came to this conclusion, I ruled out the possibility of a man and a woman being friends but accepting to sleep with each other, because Queen has already ruled it out for us: platonic friendship does not allow for sexual relations! The reason is that Queen has already ruled it out for us: platonic friendship does not allow sex.

In summary, although we don’t know the real answer to this question, we can guess the general situation: Ashton is talking to Sheila and reveals that he is sexually impotent, but whether he really can’t or not is something that only he knows, so it is difficult to correlate this with Dane’s life.

But I think readers will be happy to correlate it with Dane’s life.

To more thoroughly address the question of Dane’s birth, we’ll have to examine Lutetia again.

Lutetia is a very specific character with a very specific motive for killing: it appears that she wants to kill the third party, Sheila, but in fact she wants Sheila to kill her herself. Because she feels she’s a bad wife. So, if Dane is not Lutetia and Ashton’s biological child, how did she survive all these years? Why did she love Dane so deeply if he wasn’t her own? If it was her own, how did she face Ashton, and why did Ashton show his deep love for Lutetia and Dane after the murder? All of these questions go unexplained. Therefore, although it is obvious and easy to think of the speculation that there is something wrong with Dane’s life, I am afraid that it does not stand up to scrutiny.

So, although the author did not explain in the ending, we can get two more convincing and more probable statements after analyzing: either Ashton avoided having sex with Sheila under the pretext of sexual impotence, and Dane is really the biological son of Ashton and Lutetia; or Ashton really lost his sexual ability in his old age.

Let’s finish by reviewing the title of the book, The Fourth Side of the Triangle. It is strange how a triangle can generate a fourth side, and geometrically this does not make sense. But we can understand this with the help of 浦賀和宏’s The Tragedy of Delta. I won’t spoil the book, but I will hint at the plot, which I would like to illustrate with the “triangle” Δ in this book.

The Tragedy of Delta explains the trilateral relationship very well. This leads to the question: when does a triangle grow a fourth side? Or, to put it another way, why does a triangle grow a fourth side? The answer is not hard to come up with: when there is something wrong with the triangle, furthermore, the triangle is not a triangle as the reader understands it, or it is not a triangle at all.

Through misdirection or narrative trickery, Quinn makes the reader initially think that the triangle is the triangle in Figure 1, and it is only after Dane’s arrest that the reader realises that the triangle has an extra point with newly added sides. At this point the triangle doesn’t seem to be a triangle anymore. It is several triangles stacked on top of each other. The real triangle is not the one the reader thinks it is at the beginning; it’s more complicated than that. That’s probably what the title is getting at.

Notice the blurb for Ten Days’ Wonder:

These are the people who formed the triangle:
Howard Van Horn — a young sculptor suffering from strange attacks of amnesia. He goes in desperation to Ellery Queen with a baffling problem.
Diedrich Van Horn — Howard’s millionaire foster father. His money bought him a wife tailor-made to his specifications. He needed Ellery Queen too — but for a more sinister reason.
Sally — the young and beautiful wife. She came from the wrong side of the tracks but moved in the Van Horn mansion with complete assurance.
Ellery Queen finds a pattern of sins that leads irrevocably to murder.

In this way, The Fourth Side of the Triangle is an updated version of Ten Days’ Wonder’s “triangles” – Ten Days’ Wonder was really one kind of triangle, but The Fourth Side of the Triangle is many kinds of triangles.

The above are a few questions and explanations that came to my mind while reading, and there may be other issues that are worth discussing for this work, or, perhaps, there are still inadequacies in the above analysis, in which case, readers are still invited to criticize and correct them.