By Anthony Boucher, New York Times, October 9, 1949.
“A detective novel," wrote S.S. Van Dine in 1928 should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric. preoccupations.’ And Ellery Queen, making his debut the following year, loyally obeyed Van Dine’s dictum, But the detective novel, thank heaven, has in the past twenty years grown far away from the sterile smugness of Van Dine and Ellery Queen has grown up with it.
“Queen has not followed the trends of the times so closely as to succumb to the amorphous plotlessness of the current "suspense novel"; "Cat of Many Tails" presents the puzzle-minded reader with a very pretty problem indeed. And it includes a brand-new solution to one of the fine classic gambits, the hidden motive underlying an apparently unrelated series of murders. It then goes on to probe the psychology behind the puzzle, with Ellery as an odd sort of lay deductive analyst.
“But what you will most remember the novel for is its ‘descriptive passages’ and ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations. If the human characters still betray a touch of the bloodlessness of the Van Dine era, the actual protagonist of the novel, the City of New York, comes magnificently to life. The impact of mass murder on the soul of a city has never, that I can recall, been depicted with such convincing vividness. Even the benighted few who have hitherto deplored the artificiality of the Queen saga will find a new scope and stature in ‘Cat of Many Tails.’”
