Ellery Queen

Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and a pseudonym used by two American cousins, Frederick Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971), to write detective fiction. In a successful series of novels that covered forty-two years, Ellery Queen was not only the name of the author, but also that of the detective-hero of the stories. Movies, radio shows, and television shows have been based on their works. The two, particularly Dannay, were also responsible for co-founding and directing Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, generally considered as one of the most influential English crime fiction magazines of the last fifty years.

Ellery Queen, Detective

Ellery Queen was created when Dannay and Lee entered a writing contest sponsored by a magazine for the best first mystery novel. They decided to use as their collective pseudonym the same name that they had given their detective. Inspired by the formula and style of the Philo Vance novels by S. S. Van Dine, their entry won the contest but before it could be published, the magazine was sold and the prize given to another entrant by the new owner. Undeterred, the cousins decided to take the novel to publishers, and The Roman Hat Mystery was published in 1929.

The Roman Hat Mystery established the basic formula: the unusual crime, the complex series of clues, the supporting characters of Ellery's father Inspector Richard Queen and his irascible assistant Sergeant Velie, and what would become most famous, Ellery's "Challenge to the Reader". This was a single page near the end of the book declaring that the reader now had seen all the same clues Ellery had, and asking if the reader could deduce the solution.

Ellery the character was himself a detective story writer, a snobbish, almost priggish Harvard-educated intellectual of independent wealth who wore a pince-nez and investigated and solved crimes solely because he found them stimulating. He derived these characteristics from his mother, the daughter of a rich aristocratic New York family who had married Inspector Queen, a bluff, man-in-the-street New York Irishman, and died before the stories began. His mannerisms in the first nine or ten novels were apparently based on those of the then-extremely popular Philo Vance character of the same era. As time went on, however, these mannerisms were toned down or disappeared entirely, to the point where he became a near-faceless, near-characterless persona whose role in the books was purely to solve the mystery.

Story style

The Queen novels were the epitome of the classic "fair play", whodunit mystery, particularly during what became known as the "Golden Age" of the mystery novel. All the clues are made available to the reader in the same way they are to the protagonist detective, and so the reading of the book becomes an intellectual challenge as well. Mystery writer John Dickson Carr termed it "the grandest game in the world." Other characteristics of the early Queen novels were the intricately plotted clues and solutions. In The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), often regarded as the finest Ellery Queen novel, multiple solutions to the mystery are proposed, a feature that would show up in later books, most notably Double, Double and Ten Days' Wonder.

In that same year, the cousins created Drury Lane under the name of Barnaby Ross, eventually writing four novels about Lane, a Shakespearian actor/detective. These novels were later reiussed under the Ellery Queen byline. For a while in the 1930s "Ellery Queen" and "Barnaby Ross" even staged a series of public debates in which one cousin impersonated Queen and the other impersonated Ross.

By 1938, with Ellery making the move to Hollywood to try his hand at scriptwriting, both his character and the character of the novels began to change. Romance was introduced, the solutions began to involve psychological elements as well, and the "Challenge" vanished from the pages. The novels also moved from mere puzzles to more introspective themes. Ten Days' Wonder (1948), set in the New England town of Wrightsville (a backdrop for several Queen novels during the 1940s), was even bold enough to show the limitations of Ellery's methods of detection. The 1950s and 1960s showed more experimental work, with one of the last novels to feature Ellery, And on the Eighth Day (1964), being a religious allegory touching on fascism. Although some of the later novels, especially Calamity Town and Cat of Many Tails, are considered classics, some criticize the combination of religious symbolism and detection in the later Queens as clumsy and pretentious. Some of the later Ellery Queen novels were ghost-written by science fiction writers Theodore Sturgeon, Avram Davidson, and Jack Vance.

Towards the end of their careers, the cousins also produced novels, mainly original paperbacks, written by various people under the Ellery Queen name that did not feature the character Ellery Queen as the protagonist. These included three novels featuring the governor's "troubleshooter" Mike McCall: The Campus Murders (1969, written by Gil Brewer); The Black Hearts Murder (1970, written by Richard Deming); and The Blue Movie Murders (1972, written by Edward D. Hoch). The science-fiction writer Jack Vance also wrote four of these books. One of them, A Room to Die in, is a particularly ingenious locked room mystery.

Other media

The Ellery Queen character and stories were adapted for a critically acclaimed but short-lived American television series in the mid-1970s starring Jim Hutton in the title role (with David Wayne as his widowed father). Each episode would end with Queen breaking the fourth wall to go over the facts of the case and invite the audience to solve the mystery on their own. There had been earlier Ellery Queen television shows in the 1950s, featuring several different actors as the detective, and mostly broadcast live. Some of the scripts for those series were written by Helene Hanff, best-known for the book 84 Charing Cross Road.

Among the many variants were syndicated radio "filler" spots during the 1970s, called "Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries". The spots would begin with a professional announcer saying, "This is Ellery Queen..." and would go on to describe a case in one minute. The radio station would then encourage callers to try to solve the mystery and win a sponsor's prize. Once they got a winner, the solution part of the spot would be played as confirmation.

The cousins, under their collective pseudonym, were given the Grand Master Award for achievements in the field of the mystery story by the Mystery Writers of America in 1961.

Bibliography

Novels

The Roman Hat Mystery - 1929
The French Powder Mystery - 1930
The Dutch Shoe Mystery - 1931
The Greek Coffin Mystery - 1932
The Egyptian Cross Mystery - 1932
The American Gun Mystery - 1933
The Siamese Twin Mystery - 1933
The Chinese Orange Mystery - 1934
The Spanish Cape Mystery - 1935
Halfway House - 1936
The Door Between - 1937
The Devil to Pay - 1938
The Four of Hearts - 1938
The Dragon's Teeth - 1939
Calamity Town - 1942
There Was an Old Woman - 1943
The Murderer Is a Fox - 1945
Ten Days' Wonder - 1948
Cat of Many Tails - 1949
Double, Double - 1950
The Origin of Evil - 1951
The King Is Dead - 1952
The Scarlet Letters - 1953
The Glass Village - 1954 (neither Ellery Queen nor Inspector Queen in book)
Inspector Queen's Own Case - 1956 (Inspector Queen only)
The Finishing Stroke - 1958
The Player on The Other Side - 1963 (ghost-written with Theodore Sturgeon)
And on The Eighth Day - 1964 (ghost-written with Avram Davidson)
The Fourth Side of The Triangle - 1965 (ghost-written with Avram Davidson)
A Study In Terror - 1966 (Sherlock Holmes part written by Paul W. Fairman)
Face to Face - 1967
The House of Brass - 1968 (ghost-written with Avram Davidson)
Cop Out - 1969 (neither Ellery Queen nor Inspector Queen in book)
The Last Woman in His Life - 1970
A Fine and Private Place - 1971

Short story collections

The Adventures of Ellery Queen - 1933
The New Adventures Of Ellery Queen - 1940
Calendar Of Crime - 1952
Q.B.I. - Queen's Bureau of Investigation - 1955
Queen's Full - 1966
QED - Queen's Experiments In Detection - 1968
The Best Of Ellery Queen - 1985 one previously uncollected)
The Tragedy Of Errors - (1999) (a previously unpublished synopsis written by Dannay)
The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries - (2005)

External link

Ellery Queen - a website on deduction

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