Halfway House (novel)
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 First US edition | |
| Author | Ellery Queen |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Series | Ellery Queen mysteries |
| Genre | Mystery novel / Whodunnit |
| Publisher | Stokes (US) Gollancz (UK) |
Publication date | 1936 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Preceded by | The Spanish Cape Mystery |
| Followed by | The Door Between |
Halfway House (subtitled A Problem in Deduction) is a novel that was written in 1936 by Ellery Queen. It is a mystery novel primarily set in New Jersey, United States. The book was first published in condensed form in the June 1936 issue of Cosmopolitan.
Joe Wilson was a poor, itinerant salesman with a pretty young wife in Philadelphia. Joseph Kent Gimball was a wealthy, socially prominent New Yorker with an elegant and aristocratic wife. These two very different men were actually the same man, a bigamist leading a bizarre double life. His deception was revealed to the world after he was murdered in his "halfway house," a riverfront shack outside Trenton, New Jersey, that he used as a hideout to switch identities. But who killed him?
Ellery Queen, who is drawn into the investigation to help old friends, is able to look beyond the strange nature of the victim to seek hard facts. He puts his finger on the central question: "Who was murdered -- Joe or Joseph?" Queen performs an extended feat of logical deduction from seemingly insignificant clues, such as a number of burnt matches, and finally develops a profile of the killer that can fit only one person in the case.
