The Glass Village

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.