On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first book, Ellery Queen takes a long step forward. He has written a novel expressed only incidentally in terms of mystery, a novel whose theme is uppermost in the minds of all thoughtful Americans today.For thirty years old Judge Shinn has delivered the Fourth of July oration on the little village green. He has said again and again: "There is no liberty without justice," and "Let one man be deprived of his liberty, or his property, or his life without due process of law, and the liberty and property and lives of all of us are in danger." When mere accusation takes the place of evidence, freedom is in peril.To Shinn Corners, the "outside" has always been suspect. Only a few years back, a "furriner" killed a Shinn Corners man and "got away with it," thanks to a jury over in Cudbury who, with fancy talk about Justice and A Fair Trial, let him off on a plea of self-defense. Shinn Corners has never gotten over that; resentment lies in the streets like dynamite, ready to explode at a touch. And now murder strikes, claiming as its victim the best-loved citizen of the village.For Johnny Shinn, late of Army Intelligence, veteran of two wars, the grim events that follow are profoundly disturbing. Johnny, "all scattered to hell and gone," has been through too much to worry about "ideals of justice." Like so many young Americans today, Johnny is hung up between the recent past and the dark future. He can only say in response to Judge Shinn's attempts to revitalize him, "Oh, I believe, I believe it all — but what can I do about it?"What happens after the murder is the story of what Johnny, in spite of himself, does about it. The tense lynch trial that is the focus of the action is really the trial of Johnny Shinn as an American. Against an atmosphere of frightening contemporary reality, THE GLASS VILLAGE raises pointed problems that all the Johnny Shinns of the free democracies, and their uncles and their aunts, must wrestle with and solve if our way of life is to survive.
“Now you take murder,” said Superior Court Judge Lewis Shinn, putting down the novel his house guest had left lying on the porch. “Murder in New England is not the simple matter you furriners from New York and such places hold it to be. No back-country Yank would have reacted like this criminal.”
“Fellow who wrote this, for your information,” said Johnny, “was born twenty-eight miles from here.”
Judge Shinn snorted, “Oh, you mean Cudbury!” as if the bench he had occupied there for the past thirty-two years had never raised the calluses he was currently sitting upon. “Anyway, he couldn’t have been. I’d know him.”
“He moved away at the ripe old age of eleven.”
“And that makes him an authority, I suppose! Not that you’ve damaged my thesis.” The Judge leaned over and dropped the book gingerly into his guest’s lap. “I know Cudbury people who are as ignorant of the real New England as this fellow. Or you, for that matter.”
Johnny settled back in one of the Judge’s rush-bottomed rockers with a grin. The early July sun in his face was smoothing the wrinkles around his eyes, as the Judge had promised, and Millie Pangman’s breakfast — consisting chiefly of their Peepers Pond catch of the day before — had accomplished the same feat for his stomach. He brought his feet up to the porch railing, sending a brittle paintfall to the warped floorboards.
“Cudbury,” Judge Shinn was sneering. “Yes, Cudbury is twenty-eight miles northeast of Shinn Corners as those pesky crows fly — look at ’em over yonder in Mert Isbel’s corn! — and just about ten thousand miles away from the Puritan spirit. What would you expect from a county seat? It’s practically a metropolis. You’ll never learn about the back-country Yankee from Cudbury.”
In the week Johnny had hung about Cudbury waiting for the Judge to clear his docket he had heard Shinn Corners referred to with snickers, like a vaudeville joke — Cudbury asserting its cultural superiority, the Judge had said. Johnny had grasped the reason on the drive down Wednesday evening. They had taken a chewed-up blacktop road out of Cudbury, bearing southwest. The road ran through flat tobacco farmland for a few miles, worsening as low hills appeared and the farms petered out. Then they were in scrubby, burned-over-looking country. The boy at the wheel of the Judge’s old Packard, Russell Bailey, had spat repeatedly out his window... not very tactfully, Johnny had thought, but Judge Shinn had seemed not to notice. Or perhaps the Judge was used to it. While court was in session he lived in Cudbury, in Bessie Brooks’s boarding house next to the County Lawyers’ Clock and within a hundred yards of the County Court House. But on occasional weekends he had Russ Bailey drive him down to Shinn Corners, where Millie Pangman would open the old Shinn house, air the beds and dust the ancient furniture, and cook his meals as if the Pangman farm across the road had no connection with her at all. Perhaps — Johnny remembered thinking — the fact that the road Millie Pangman had to cross to reach the Judge’s house was named Shinn had something to do with it. Not to mention the Shinn Free School, which had graduated her Merritt and her Eddie, and which little Deborah was to attend in the fall. Powerful name, Shinn. In Shinn Corners.
Twenty miles out of Cudbury the scrub had changed to second-growth timber as the hills thickened, to degenerate a few miles on into a land of marsh and bogs. Then at the twenty-five mile mark they had skirted Peepers Pond with its orchestra of bull fiddles, and suddenly they had topped the hill named Holy and seen Shinn Corners in the wrinkled valley a mile below, looking like a cluster of boils on an old man’s neck. Everything in the shifty dusk had seemed poor — the untidy land, the dried-up bed of what his kinsman said had once been a prosperous river, the huddle of once-white buildings. When Russ Bailey deposited them in the heart of the village on the uncut lawn of the Shinn house and drove the Judge’s Packard away to be garaged in Cudbury at ’Lias Wurley’s for the week of their stay, Johnny had felt an absurd sinking of the heart. It was different from Cudbury, all right. And Cudbury had been bad enough. It was the last place in the world a man could find an answer to anything.
Johnny smiled at himself. All hope was not dead, then.
The thought tickled him in a lazy sort of way.
“But you mentioned murder,” Johnny said. “I suppose you’re prepared with an impressive list of local homicide statistics?”
