The American Gun Mystery (also published as Death at the Rodeo) is a novel that was written in 1933 by Ellery Queen.

With twenty thousand people in the stands, a group of celebrities including detective Ellery Queen in the boxes, and a full cohort of newsreel movie photographers recording the event for posterity, Buck and forty-one cowboys and cowgirls gallop around the track, whooping and firing their six-guns — until the former movie star is shot in the heart and trampled under the galloping hooves.

Suspicion falls on many of the rodeo's performers and staff, and even on some of the celebrities, but one crucial and baffling point must be explained before anyone can be arrested.

The character of Ellery Queen and the more-or-less locked room mystery were probably suggested by the novels featuring detective Philo Vance by S.S. Van Dine, which were very popular at the time.

Other details of the lives of the fictional Queen family contained in earlier introductions later disappear and are never mentioned again; the introductory device of "J.J.