Ellery Queen

The Smart Set magazine rejudged the contest and awarded the prize to an entry by the writer Isabel Briggs Myers but in 1929, Frederick A. Stokes Company agreed to publish Dannay and Lee's story under the title The Roman Hat Mystery. Buoyed by its success, they were contracted to write more mysteries and they went on to write a successful series of novels and short stories that lasted 42 years.^{[15][19][20][21]}

During the 1940s, Ellery Queen was probably the most popular American mystery writer.^[22][4] More than 150 million copies of Queen's books were sold globally and 'he' remained the best-selling mystery writer in Japan till the end of the 1970s.^[23][24]

Many short stories were also published under the Queen name, which were mostly well-received. The novelist and critic Julian Symons called them "as absolutely fair and totally puzzling as the most passionate devotee of orthodoxy could wish" and said they were "composed with wonderful skill"^[25] whereas the historian Jaques Barzun said they were "full of ingenious gimmicks and adorned with excellent titles".^[26]

Dannay, without much involvement from Lee, founded the crime fiction magazine Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, and served as its

Dannay and Lee remained reticent about their writing methods.[7]^[28] Novelist and critic H.R.F. Keating wrote, "How actually did they do it? Did they sit together and hammer the stuff out word by word? Did one write the dialogue and the other the narration? ... What eventually happened was that Fred Dannay, in principle, produced the plots, the clues, and what would have to be deduced from them as well as the outlines of the characters and Manfred Lee clothed it all in words. But it is unlikely to have been as clear cut as that."^[29]

According to the crime fiction critic

British crime novelist Margery Allingham said that Dannay and Lee had "done far more for the detective story than any other two men put together" and critic Anthony Berkeley Cox famously quoted "Ellery Queen is the American Detective Novel".^[31][32]

Although Dannay outlived Lee by eleven years, the Ellery Queen nom de plume died with Lee. The last novel featuring the character Ellery Queen, A Fine and Private Place, was published in 1971, the year of Lee's death.^[33] However, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is still in print as of 2023, now published as six "double issues" per year by Dell Magazines.^[34]

Barnaby Ross

In 1932 and 1933, Dannay and Lee wrote four novels using the pseudonym Barnaby Ross featuring

In the early 1930s, before their identity as the authors behind Ellery Queen and Barnaby Ross had been made public, Dannay and Lee staged a series of public debates with Lee impersonating Queen and Dannay impersonating Ross, both of them wearing masks to preserve their anonymity. According to H.R.F. Keating, "People said Ross must be the wit and critic Alexander Woollcott and Queen [must be] S.S. Van Dine, creator of the super-snob detective Philo Vance, on whom 'Ellery Queen' was indeed modeled."^[29]

In the 1960s, Dannay and Lee allowed the Barnaby Ross name to be used as a pseudonym for a series of historical romance novels by the writer Don Tracy.^[15][35]

Fictional style

The Queen novels are examples of "fair play" mysteries, a subgenre of the

The first Ellery Queen book The Roman Hat Mystery established a reliable template: a geographic formula title (The Dutch Shoe Mystery, The Egyptian Cross Mystery, etc.); an unusual crime; a complex series of clues and red herrings; multiple misdirected solutions before the final correct solution is revealed, and a cast of supporting characters including Ellery Queen, the detective, Queen's father Inspector Richard Queen and his irascible assistant Sergeant Thomas Velie. What became the best known part of the early Ellery Queen books was the "Challenge to the Reader", a single page near the end of the book, on which Queen, the detective, paused the narrative, directly addressed the reader, declared that they had now seen all the clues needed to solve the mystery, and only one solution was possible. According to Julian Symons, "The rare distinction of the books is that this claim is accurate. These are problems in deduction that do really permit of only one answer, and there are few crime stories indeed of which this can be said... Judged as exercises in rational deduction, these are certainly among the best detective stories ever written."^[37]

In many earlier books like The Greek Coffin Mystery and The Siamese Twin Mystery, multiple solutions to the mystery are proposed, a feature that also showed up in later books such as Double, Double and Ten Days' Wonder. Queen's "false solution, followed by the true" became a hallmark of the canon. Another stylistic element in many early books (notably The Dutch Shoe Mystery, The French Powder Mystery and Halfway House) is Queen's method of creating a list of attributes (the murderer is male, the murderer smokes a pipe, etc.) and comparing each suspect to these attributes, thereby reducing the list of suspects to a single name, often an unlikely one.^[38][4]

By the late 1930s, when Ellery Queen, the fictional character, had moved to Hollywood to try movie scriptwriting, the tone of the novels changed along with the detective's character. Romance was introduced, solutions began to involve more psychological elements, and the "Challenge to the Reader" vanished. The novels also shifted from mere puzzles to more introspective themes. The three novels set in the fictional New England town of Wrightsville even showed the limitations of Queen's methods of detection. Julian Symons said "Ellery... occasionally lost his father, as his exploits took place more frequently in the small town of Wrightsville... where his arrival as a house guest was likely to be the signal for the commission of one or more murders. Very intelligently, Dannay and Lee used this change in locale to loosen the structure of their stories. More emphasis was placed on personal relationships and less on the details of investigation."^[39]

In the 1950s and the 1960s, Dannay and Lee became more experimental, especially in the novels they wrote with other writers. The Player on the Other Side (1963), ghost-written with Theodore Sturgeon, delves more deeply into motive than most Queen novels. And on the Eighth Day (1964), ghost-written with Avram Davidson, is a religious allegory about fascism.^[33]

Ellery Queen, the fictional character

Ellery Queen
Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen
First appearance	The Roman Hat Mystery
Last appearance	A Fine and Private Place
Created by	Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (writing as Ellery Queen)
Portrayed by	Donald Cook Eddie Quillan Ralph Bellamy Hugh Marlowe Carleton G. Young Sydney Smith William Gargan Lawrence Dobkin Howard Culver Richard Hart Lee Bowman George Nader Lee Philips Bill Owen Peter Lawford Jim Hutton
In-universe information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Amateur detective, Author
Family	Richard Queen (father)
Nationality	American

Ellery Queen, the fictional character, is the hero of more than thirty novels and several short story collections, written by Dannay and Lee and published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym. He is probably inspired by Philo Vance, the detective created by the writer S.S. Van Dine.^[15] According to the critic H.R.F. Keating, "Later the cousins [Dannay and Lee] took a sharper view of Vance, Manfred Lee calling him, with typical vehemence, 'the biggest prig that ever came down the pike'."^[29]

As Van Dine had done earlier with Philo Vance, Dannay and Lee gave Ellery Queen an extremely elaborate back story that was rarely mentioned after the first few novels. In fact, Queen goes through several transformations in his personality and his approach to investigation over the course of the series.^[1][3]

In the earlier novels, he is a snobbish Harvard-educated intellectual of independent means who wears pince-nez glasses and investigates crimes because he finds them stimulating. He supposedly derives these characteristics from his unnamed late mother, the daughter of an aristocratic New York family, who had married Richard Queen, a bluff and short policeman.^[4]

Beginning in the 1938 novel The Four of Hearts, he spends some time working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Soon, he has a slick façade, is part of Hollywood society and hobnobs comfortably with the wealthy and the famous. Beginning with Calamity Town in 1942, he becomes less of a cypher and more of a human being, often becoming emotionally affected by the people in his cases, and at one point quitting detective work altogether. Calamity Town and some other novels during this period are set in the imaginary town of Wrightsville, where subsidiary characters recur from story to story as Queen relates to the various strata of American society as an outsider.^[4]

However, after his Hollywood and Wrightsville periods, he returns to his New York City roots for the rest of his career, and is then seen again as an ultra-logical crime solver who remains distant from his cases. In the very late novels, he often seems a near-faceless, near-characterless persona whose role is purely to solve the mystery. So striking are the differences between the different periods of the Ellery Queen character that Julian Symons advanced the theory that there were two Ellery Queens — an older and younger brother.^[40]

Queen is said to be married and the father of a child in the introductions of the first few novels, but this plot line is never developed and he is portrayed as a bachelor in all of his later appearances. Nikki Porter, who acts as Queen's secretary and is something of a love interest, is first introduced in the radio series The Adventures of Ellery Queen in 1939. Her first appearance in a written story is on the final pages of the 1943 novel There Was an Old Woman, when a character with whom Queen has had some flirtatious moments suddenly announces that she will change her name to Nikki Porter and will work as Queen's secretary. Nikki Porter appears sporadically thereafter in the novels and short stories, linking the character from radio and movies to the written canon.^[3]

Paula Paris, an agoraphobic gossip columnist, is linked romantically with Queen in the 1938 novel The Four of Hearts and in some short stories in the 1940s but does not appear in the radio series or films and soon vanishes from the books. Queen is not given any serious romantic interests after Nikki Porter and Paula Paris disappear from the books.^[3]

The Queen household, an apartment on West 87th street in New York City, is shared by Ellery Queen and his father Richard Queen. It also contains a houseboy named Djuna in the earlier novels. Possibly of Roma origin, Djuna appears periodically in the canon, apparently ageless and family-free, in a supporting role as cook, receiver of parcels, valet, and occasional comedy relief. He is the protagonist in most of the juvenile novels ghost-written under the pseudonym Ellery Queen Jr.^[3][15]

In other media

Radio

The radio series The Adventures of Ellery Queen was broadcast on several networks from 1939 to 1948 with the lead role played by Hugh Marlowe (1939–1940), Carleton Young (1942–1943), Sydney Smith (1943–1947), Lawrence Dobkin (1947–48) and Howard Culver (1948). All episodes in this series were paused just before the end to allow a panel of celebrities a chance to solve the mystery.^{[41][42][43][44]} Some of the surviving scripts were published for the first time in the 2005 book The Adventure of the Murdered Moths.^[45]

Between 1965 and 1967, Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries were broadcast as radio fillers. They began with the radio announcer Bill Owen saying "This is Ellery Queen..." and contained a short one-minute case.^[15][46]

Television

Some of the scripts of the television series The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950–1951 on Dumont, 1951-1952 on ABC) were written by Helene Hanff, best known for her 1970 novel 84, Charing Cross Road.^[47] Shortly after the series began, Richard Hart, who played Queen, died and was replaced by Lee Bowman.^[48]

In 1954, Norvin Productions produced the