Ellery Queen
- The Adventure of the 12th Floor Express (1975)
- The Adventure of the 12th Floor Express (1975)
Miss Harriet Manners
A newspaper publisher gets onto the express elevator on the way to his 12th-floor office. But when the elevator, a new model with push buttons for each floor (the operator pushed the top-floor button) gets to the top floor, the publisher is nowhere to be found. The elevator closes and goes down. To the horror of staffers on two lower floors, the elevator opens at each floor to reveal the publisher, who's dead from a gunshot wound.
A newspaper publisher gets onto the express elevator on the way to his 12th-floor office. But when the elevator, a new model with push buttons for each floor (the operator pushed the top-floor button) gets to the top floor, the publisher is nowhere to be found. The elevator closes and goes down. To the horror of staffers on two lower floors, the elevator opens at each floor to reveal the publisher, who's dead from a gunshot wound.
Henry and Harriet Manners, whose family owned the New York Examiner, are part of that expansive family tree for the Merrillians, with Harriet being the embodiment of the telegenetic echo for the women in the family. I'm going to say she and her brother were first cousins with Patricia Blake, the professor of meteorology who volunteered for the military in order to use her skills in analyzing the weather for the war effort. After nearly four hundred years, the family had grown quite vast, but even so I find it more interesting to think that Patricia and Harriet were closer in degrees of separation since they were only seen by the Trueniverse audience during the same time period - Captain Blake around 1943 and Harriet about four years later.
Harriet was at least a decade older than Patricia though, meaning that she was probably born in the early 1890s (her brother even earlier in the 1880s.)
Just one final O'Bservation - The New York Examiner exists in three dimensions of the Toobworld Dynamic:
- EARTH PRIME-TIME ('The Adventures Of Ellery Queen')
- POTUS TOOBWORLD-UNDERWOOD ('House Of Cards')
- COMIX TOOBWORLD MARVEL1 ("Captain America: The First Avenger")
Harriet Manners wasn't married when we met her. But that doesn't mean that she was a spinster. She could have been married before. And she could have had children that we didn't know anything about, as it didn't come up during the investigation into the death of Henry Manners.
We'll be revisiting the Merrillians again in August, the traditional month in which we showcase TV Westerns. But for now, our week-long salute to the characters played by the late Dina Merrill.
BCnU!
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