Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 47, No. 4. Whole No. 269, April 1966

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It began with a double celebration — the birth of the New Year and the 70th birthday of Godfrey Mumford, famous throughout the horticultural world as a breeder of chrysanthemums. But happy as the double occasion was, there were ominous, deeply disturbing overtones.

If only the others had known, they might have been forewarned... For Ellery had come back to Wrightsville — one of his spur-of-the-moment visits to the town he loved so much, to the New England town where he had experienced some of his greatest triumphs — and greatest failures; and it was no secret (especially to Chief of Police Newby) that Ellery Queen was Wrightsville’s perennial jinx. Whenever Ellery came to Wrightsville, evil came out of its lair...

The Chrysanthemum Case proved no exception. Indeed, it proved to be one of the most perplexing mysteries in Ellery’s career — a crime whose investigation made the “great detective” think he was Ellery in Blunderland; and to add the ultimate grotesquerie, the case offered the “last word” in bizarre and fantastic clues, the “last word” in baffling and frustrating “dying messages.”

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