There was a little silence. Burrows bobbed his head back and forth. “We’ve got a lot to learn,” he said. “I can see that.”

“Check,” muttered Crane. “I’m going to like this course.”

Ellery pshaw-pshawed. Nevertheless, he turned to Miss Ickthorpe who by all precedent should be moved to contribute to the general spirit of approbation. But Miss Ickthorpe’s thoughts were far away. “Do you know,” she said, her brown eyes misty, “you’ve never asked me my first name, Mr. Queen?”

PUZZLE FOR POPPY

Patrick Quentin

Detectives: Peter & Iris Duluth

HUGH CALLINGHAM Wheeler (1912-1987) and Richard Wilson Webb (1901-1970?) collaborated on the series featuring Peter and Iris Duluth, but both authors were part of a coterie of writers that mixed and matched on many other books published as by Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge. It was when Wheeler and Webb moved to the United States in the 1930s that they created the Duluth series, which changed their books from a recognizably British style to American in speech and tone.

Wheeler and Webb created the Patrick Quentin byline with A Puzzle for Fools (1936) which introduced Peter Duluth, a theatrical producer who stumbles into detective work by accident, and Iris Pattison, an actress suffering from melancholia who he meets at a sanitarium where he has gone to treat his alcoholism and eventually marries her. Iris is irresistibly curious about mysteries and draws her husband into helping her solve them.

The highly successful Duluth series of nine novels inspired two motion pictures, Homicide for Three (1948), starring Warren Douglas as Peter and Audrey Long as his wife Iris, and Black Widow (1954), with Van Heflin (Peter), Gene Tierney (Iris), Ginger Rogers, George Raft, and Peggy Ann Garner. Webb dropped out of the collaboration in the early 1950s and Wheeler continued using the Quentin name but abandoned the Duluth series to produce standalone novels until 1965.

Oddly, all the Duluth novels were published using the Patrick Quentin nom de plume but the short stories were originally published as by Q. Patrick—until they, as well as non-series stories, were collected in The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow and Other Stories (1961), which was selected for Queen’s Quorum.

“Puzzle for Poppy” was originally published in the February 1946 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in The Puzzles of Peter Duluth by Patrick Quentin (Norfolk, Virginia, Crippen & Landru, 2016).

Puzzle for Poppy

By Patrick Quentin

YES, MISS Crump,” snapped Iris into the phone. “No, Miss Crump. Oh, nuts, Miss Crump.”

My wife flung down the receiver.

“Well?” I asked.

“She won’t let us use the patio. It’s that dog, that great fat St. Bernard. It mustn’t be disturbed.”

“Why?”

“It has to be alone with its beautiful thoughts. It’s going to become a mother. Peter, it’s revolting. There must be something in the lease.”

“There isn’t,” I said.