MURDER AT THE MOVIES

The year 1939 is a banner one for movies—Flying Deuces, Only Angels Have Wings, The Wizard of Oz, Gunga Din, Beau Geste, Tower of London, Gone with the Wind—but in Fort York, Ontario, where a puckish fan is restaging selected scenes from the offerings of the West End Theatre (a horse wearing a bowler hat, a condor set free from the local aviary, a house bulldozed with its elderly owner inside), Inspector Albert Tretheway (Murder on the Thirteenth, 1992, etc.) can't help seeing a sinister pattern. It'll all end in murder, of course, in one of the hoariest plot devices Ellery Queen ever beat to death, but die-hard puzzle fans may find its lavender-scented nostalgia appealing. For everybody else: a moderately ingenious trifle that could better have been a short story back in the days it was set.