Paying a visit to a rundown carnival, it doesn't take long for
professional sleuth Ellery Queen (Richard Hart) to stumble upon the
murder of an acrobat, who was apparently hanged from her trapeze. The
police is quick to arrest her drinking pal Tex (Don Kennedy), primarily
for the knot zused in the hanging, but Queen has other ideas, first
suspecting the carnival's owner, the Colonel (Raymond Bramley), who was in
love with the dead girl, but then stumbling upon her own husband Hugo
(Kurt Katch), who wanted to get rid of her to be with another trapeze
artiste, Louise (Sono Osato). But when Queen comes face to face with Hugo,
hugo manages to overcome him and tie him up, to then go and practice his
new high wire routine with Louise ... but when he tries to move in on her,
she rejects him, and he is shot by the police (who have since freed Queen)
just before he can kill Louise just as he did his wife. Early
television crime drama made on a very low budget, so don't expect to see
any high-wire acts despite the fact that they are the very subject matter
of the episode. But apart from budgetary limitations, this episode of The
Adventures of Ellery Queen isn't too bad, as Richard Hart makes a
likeable hero, the story moves along at a steady pace, and to a point, the
whole thing is even plausible. That all said, don't expect a classic
though, only solid low budget genre entertainment.
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