 After nine popular mystery novels and the first of many movies, the character of Ellery Queen was at this point firmly established.This novella was among the first shorter fictional pieces to feature Ellery Queen.This period in the Ellery Queen canon signals a change in the type of story told, moving away from the intricate puzzle mystery format that had been a hallmark of the nine previous novels, each with a nationality in their title and a "Challenge to the Reader" immediately before the solution was revealed.