Shadmehr Rastin: Read the Book ‘The Ten Days’ Wonder’
According to the Cinemadrame News Agency, Shadmehr Rastin, our country’s renowned screenwriter, introducing the book The Ten Days’ Wonder by Ellery Queen, translated by Khosrow Samiei and published by Tarh-e No Publications, wrote: “Ellery Queen is the pseudonym for two accomplished American crime writers, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, who succeeded in creating a fictional character, an American Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, in American crime literature.”
While Agatha Christie subtly and mysteriously presented her anti-colonial sentiments in the criminal plots of Poirot’s cases, Ellery Queen, with a psychological and introspective approach, delved into the motives of their criminals.
However, Ellery Queen, influenced by the crime works of Georges Simenon and his character Commissioner Maigret, indirectly attributes the crimes of their murderers to the socio-economic conditions of 1930s America.
The Ten Days’ Wonder by Ellery Queen is one of countless crime and mystery novels by the duo “Dannay and Lee,” from which not only a television series has been adapted, but also, subtly or imperceptibly, films in the crime, mystery, and police genres have drawn inspiration from Ellery Queen’s characters. So much so that the detectives in Fincher‘s works and the character of Clarice in the Hannibal series are considered adaptations of Ellery Queen.
Ellery Queen’s working relationship with his father, a retired police officer, somewhat evokes Kafka‘s relationship with his father, a kind of obedience and hatred in an unchangeable coexistence.
Perhaps the absence of influential or seductive female characters in Ellery Queen’s works is the reason for their lack of popularity in the third millennium. However, wherever there is talk of a murderer with psychological motives, a trace of Ellery Queen can be found.
Somewhere in the book The Roman Hat Mystery, Ellery Queen tells his father: “Money is the root of all evil,” and without changing his tone, he continues: “Dad… money is the result of all evil.” And in the book The Player on the Other Side, he says: “There is no longer any surprise in the real world, or rather, everything is so wonderful that wonder has ceased to exist.”
