Ellery Queen

• Born: January 11, 1905
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: April 3, 1971
• Place of death: Near Waterbury, Connecticut

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Ellery Queen, 1929-1971; Drury Lane, 1932-1933; Tim Corrigan, 1966-1968; Mike McCall, 1969-1972

Contribution

The novels and short stories of Ellery Queen span four decades and have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide, making Queen one of the mystery genre’s most popular authors. (For the sake of clarity and simplicity, “Ellery Queen” will be referred to throughout this article as an individual, although the name is actually the pseudonym of two writers, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, and several other writers who worked with them.) Queen is both the author and the leading character in his novels.

Queen’s early novels are elaborate puzzles, carefully plotted and solved with almost mathematical logic and precision. They represent a style of detective fiction that flourished in the 1920’s, and Queen’s contributions have become classics of the form. As the series progressed and Queen developed as a character, the books improved in depth and content, sometimes incorporating sociological, political, or philosophical themes. Their settings range from New York to Hollywood to small-town America, and each is examined with perceptive intelligence. In several of the series’ later books, Queen abandons outward reality for the sake of what Dannay termed “fun and games,” letting a mystery unfold in a setting that is deliberately farfetched or farcical.

Queen’s novels and stories are also famed for several key plot devices that have become trademarks of his style. Among them are the dying message (a clue left by the victim to the killer’s identity), the negative clue (a piece of information that should be present and is notable by its absence), the challenge to the reader (a point in the story at which Queen addresses the reader directly and challenges him to provide the solution), and the double solution (in which one, entirely plausible solution is presented and is then followed by a second, which offers a surprising twist on the first).

Queen’s contributions to the field of mystery and detection are not limited to his novels and short stories. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, begun in 1941, remains one of the world’s leading mystery publications, printing stories by a wide range of authors, while Queen the detective has also been the hero of a long-running radio series, The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1939-1948), and several television series, the first of which aired in 1950. In addition, Queen founded the Mystery Writers of America and edited dozens of mystery anthologies and short-story collections.

Biography

The two men who together invented the Ellery Queen persona were Brooklyn-born cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. In reality, their famous alter ego is a pseudonym for two pseudonyms: Dannay was born Daniel Nathan, while Lee’s real name was Manford Lepofsky. Both were born in 1905, and both attended Boys’ High School in Brooklyn. Lee went on to receive a degree from New York University in 1925, where he pursued what was to be a lifelong interest in music. In 1942, Lee married actress Kaye Brinker, his second wife, with whom he had eight children—four daughters and four sons. Dannay was married three times: in 1926 to Mary Beck (who later died), with whom he had two sons, in 1947 to Hilda Wisenthal (who died in 1972), with whom he had one son, and in 1975 to Rose Koppel.

During the 1920’s, Dannay worked as a writer and art director for a New York advertising agency, while Lee was employed, also in New York, as a publicity writer for several film studios. In 1928, the two cousins began collaborating on a murder mystery, spurred on by a generous prize offered in a magazine detective-fiction contest. The two won the contest, but the magazine was bought by a competitor before the results were announced. The following year, however, Frederick A. Stokes Company, the publishing house cosponsoring the contest, published the cousins’ novel, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), and Ellery Queen was born.

By 1931, Dannay and Lee were able to quit their jobs and devote themselves completely to their writing, producing one or two books a year throughout the 1930’s. During this period, the pair also wrote briefly under the name Barnaby Ross, publishing the four books that make up the Drury Lane series, The Tragedy of X (1932), The Tragedy of Y (1932), The Tragedy of Z (1933), and Drury Lane’s Last Case (1933). The bulk of their energy, however, was directed toward Queen, and the series flourished. Queen’s stories were a regular feature in many magazines of the period, and their popularity brought Dannay and Lee to Hollywood, which would later serve as the setting for several of their books.

It was also during the 1930’s that Queen began making appearances on the lecture circuit, and Dannay and Lee’s background in advertising and publicity came into play. It was virtually unknown in the early stages of their career that Queen was actually two men, and the cousins perpetuated their readers’ ignorance by sending only Dannay, clad in a black mask, to give the lectures. Later, Lee would also appear, as Barnaby Ross, and the pair would treat audiences to a carefully planned “literary argument” between their two fictional creations. It was not until the cousins first went to Hollywood that the world learned that Ellery Queen was actually Dannay and Lee.

During the 1940’s, Dannay and Lee produced fewer books and stories, choosing instead to devote themselves to their weekly radio show, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, which ran until 1948. In 1941, the pair also created Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, with Dannay serving as the principal editor. Their collaboration continued throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s as they produced more Queen novels and stories, edited numerous anthologies and short-story collections, and cofounded the Mystery Writers of America. Dannay also wrote an autobiographical novel, The Golden Summer (1953), under the name Daniel Nathan. In 1958, they published The Finishing Stroke, a book intended as the last Queen mystery, but they returned to their detective five years later and eventually produced seven more Queen novels, the last of which, A Fine and Private Place, appeared in 1971, the year of Lee’s death. Dannay continued his work with the magazine until his own death eleven years later.

Among the critical acclaim and wide array of awards Dannay and Lee received were numerous Edgar Allan Poe awards and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1961 and a place on a 1951 international list of the ten best active mystery writers. Throughout their long partnership, the pair, who bore a remarkable resemblance to each other and often finished each other’s sentences in conversations, steadfastly refused to discuss the details of their collaboration. The division of labor between them, in terms of plotting, characterization, and editing, remains unknown.

It is known, however, that during Lee and Dannay’s lifetimes, their pseudonym became a household name, and numerous mystery novels by Ellery Queen were published by other writers under Lee’s or Dannay’s supervision. This type of collaboration began in the early 1940’s with novelizations of filmscripts. Eventually, two new series characters were introduced under Queen’s name: Tim Corrigan and Mike McCall. Some of the authors who wrote as Ellery Queen have been identified: Avram Davidson, Richard Deming, Edward D. Hoch, Stephen Marlowe, Talmage Powell, Theodore Sturgeon, and Jack Vance.

Analysis

Like Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen was a master of intricate plotting. From the very first of the Queen novels, The Roman Hat Mystery, his cases are cunningly devised puzzles that the reader must work to assemble along with Queen. Unlike some practitioners of the art, Queen is a believer in fair play; all the pieces to his puzzles are present, if the reader is observant enough to spot them. One of the features of many of the books is Queen’s famous “challenge to the reader,” in which the narrator notes that all the clues have now been presented and diligent mystery lovers are invited to offer their own solutions before reading on to learn Queen’s. The mysteries abound with misdirections and red herrings, but no vital clue is ever omitted or withheld—although arcane bits of knowledge are sometimes required to reach the proper solution.

The Early Queen Books

In Queen’s earliest books, all of which sport “nationality” titles such as The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) or The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934), the clever plotting is often at the expense of character development (as is also true of Christie). The Ellery Queen featured in these novels is a rather cool, bloodless character—an assessment shared by at least one half of the writing partnership that created him. According to Francis M. Nevins, Jr., in his later years, Lee was fond of referring to the early Queen as “the biggest prig that ever came down the pike.” It is an accurate description, and one that the Queen sought to change later in his career.

Queen appears in the early books as a brilliant, self-absorbed gentleman sleuth, complete with pince-nez and a passion for rare books. As the series progressed, he slowly grew into a character of some depth and feeling, although he never reached the level of three-dimensional humanity achieved by Dorothy L. Sayers in her development of Lord Peter Wimsey. Indeed, Wimsey is an apt comparison for Queen; both are gentleman sleuths with scholarly interests who begin their fictional careers more as caricatures than characters. Yet Sayers fleshed out her detective so successfully in the following decade and a half that Wimsey’s emotional life becomes a central feature in several of her later novels. Queen, on the other hand, is humanized and sketched in without ever becoming a truly compelling figure apart from his dazzling crime-solving talents.

Character development aside, however, Queen’s mysteries employ several ingenious recurring plot devices that have become trademarks of the series. Chief among these is the “dying message,” in which the victim somehow provides a vital clue to his killer’s identity, a ploy that would play an important part in many of the series’ later books. It first appeared in The Tragedy of X, a Drury Lane novel originally written under the name Barnaby Ross and later reissued with Ellery Queen listed as the author. The Scarlet Letters (1953) features one of the most gripping examples of the device, as a dying man leaves a clue for Ellery by writing on the wall in his own blood. The Roman Hat Mystery contains another important trademark, the “negative clue,” in this case a top hat that should have been found with the victim’s body but is missing. The negative clue exemplifies Queen’s skills as a detective: He is able to spot not only important evidence at the scene but also details that should have been present and are not.

The Finishing Stroke

Another familiar motif in Queen’s stories is a carefully designed pattern of clues, sometimes left deliberately by the murderer, which point the way to the crime’s solution. The Finishing Stroke contains a superb example of the technique in its description of a series of odd gifts left on the twelve days of Christmas for the murderer’s intended victim (although the fact that a knowledge of the Phoenician alphabet is necessary to arrive at the solution may strike some readers as unfair). Several of the plots, including those of four back-to-back novels, Ten Days’ Wonder (1948), Cat of Many Tails (1949), Double, Double (1950), and The Origin of Evil (1951), hinge on a series of seemingly unrelated events, with the murderer’s identity hidden within the secret pattern that connects them.

Cat of Many Tails

Several of Queen’s books also contain “double solutions,” with Queen providing an initial, plausible solution and then delving deeper and arriving at a second, correct conclusion. This device brings added suspense to the stories, as well as opening the door to the realm of psychological detection into which Queen sometimes ventures. In Cat of Many Tails, Queen’s initial conclusion, plausible except for one small detail, is forced on him by a guilt-stricken suspect who is attempting to shield the true murderer. A similar situation arises in And on the Eighth Day (1964), when Queen is deliberately misled—this time by a suspect with noble motives—into providing an incorrect solution that leads to a man’s death.

The psychological motivations of his characters play an increasingly important part in Queen’s books as the series progresses. One of the author’s favorite ploys is the criminal who uses other characters to carry out his plans, a situation that occurs in Ten Days’ Wonder, The Origin of Evil, and The Scarlet Letters. In these cases, Queen is forced to look beyond the physical details of the crime and search for insight into the mind of the murderer. Often the quarry he seeks is toying with him, taking advantage of the knowledge that Queen is his adversary to tease him with clues or lead him astray. At the close of both Ten Days’ Wonder and Cat of Many Tails, Queen is overcome with guilt, blaming himself for not solving the cases more quickly and possibly preventing further deaths. Indeed, Cat of Many Tails opens with Queen so shattered by his confrontation with Diedrich Van Horn, the villain of Ten Days’ Wonder, that he has given up sleuthing altogether—until his father’s pleas draw him into a suspenseful serial killer case.

The filial relationship between Ellery Queen and Inspector Richard Queen plays a far greater part in the series’ earlier books than it does in later ones. Queen and his father share a Manhattan apartment located on West Eighty-seventh Street (the site of New York’s famous Murder Ink bookstore), and Inspector Queen’s long career with the police force provides an entrée for Ellery Queen to many of his cases. The two are devoted to each other, and the inspector’s admiration for his son’s brilliant detective powers knows no bounds. Eventually, however, Queen the author may have believed that he had exhausted the possibilities of the father-son crime-solving team, for Ellery’s later cases tend to occur away from home.

Calamity Town

A wider variety of settings for his books also gave Queen the opportunity to work a thread of sociological observations throughout his later stories. Calamity Town (1942) is set in the small community of Wrightsville (also the setting for Double, Double), and Queen colors his story with details of small-town life. Queen knew that there is a particular horror inherent in crimes that shatter an apparently tranquil and unspoiled community. Yet urban crimes have their own form of terror, one that Queen examines in Cat of Many Tails as the serial killer strikes seemingly random victims and brings New York City to the brink of panic and chaos. The action shifts from Greenwich Village and Times Square to Harlem and the Upper East Side as Queen searches for the thread that links the victims’ lives. In other Queen novels, Hollywood comes under close scrutiny, sometimes with bemused humor and amazement (The Four of Hearts, 1938) or contempt for its greed and power-seeking (The Origin of Evil).

The Origin of Evil

The Origin of Evil is also representative of the forays into philosophy and religion that Queen undertakes on occasion. This story, whose title is a play on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), explores humankind’s innate capacity for evil. Religious philosophy is given an interesting twist in And on the Eighth Day, in which Ellery stumbles on a lost desert community and is taken by its inhabitants to be a prophet whose coming had been foretold to them. Although he believes that their reaction to him is based on a series of misunderstandings and coincidences, he finds that his presence among them has indeed come at a crucial time, and the fulfillment of their ancient prophecy unfolds before his eyes. One chapter, in a clear biblical reference, consists simply of the sentence “And Ellery wept.”

Ellery Queen’s novels and stories are mysteries with classic components: a murder, a set of clues, a group of suspects, and a gifted detective capable of assembling a revealing picture out of seemingly unrelated facts. Queen’s long career as a writer gave him the opportunity to play with the mystery genre, exploring a wide range of settings and themes as he took his character from a “priggish” youth to a more satisfyingly three-dimensional middle age. Yet Queen’s enduring popularity remains grounded in those classic elements, and his work stands as proof that there are few things that will delight a reader like a baffling, carefully plotted mystery.

Principal Series Characters:

• Ellery Queen , a mystery writer and an amateur sleuth, is single and lives with his father in New York City. In his mid-twenties when the series begins, he is middle-aged by its close and has lost much of the effete brittleness of character that marked his earliest appearances. Brilliant and well-read, he has a restless energy and a sharp grasp of nuance and detail that he brings to bear on the crimes he investigates—and later records in murder mystery form. He is sometimes deeply affected by the cases on which he works and often blames himself for failing to arrive at a quicker solution.
• Inspector Richard Queen , Ellery’s father, is a respected member of the New York Police Department. A longtime widower, fond of snuff, he lives with his adored son, whom he often consults on particularly difficult cases. A kindly man who is nevertheless tough and persistent in his pursuit of the truth, he enjoys an affectionate, bantering relationship with Ellery.
• Djuna , the Queens’ young houseboy and cook, appears regularly throughout the earlier books in the series. A street waif when he is first taken in by Inspector Queen, he takes charge of the two men’s Upper West Side apartment while still a teenager. Bright, slight of build, and possibly a Gypsy by birth, he is tutored and trained by Ellery and his father and greatly admires them both.

Bibliography

Breen, Jon L. “The Ellery Queen Mystery.” The Weekly Standard 11, no. 4 (October 10, 2005): 41-43. A profile of Lee and Dannay that looks at their rise to fame and then at the decline of the popularity of their works and the reasons behind the drop.

Dove, George N. The Reader and the Detective Story. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997. This examination of the conventions of the detective stories discusses Ellery Queen.

“Ellery Queen.” In Modern Mystery Writers, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Scholarly essay on Queen placing the works produced under that name in the context of mystery and detective fiction generally and discussing their place in the canon.

Grella, George. “The Formal Detective Novel.” In Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robin W. Winks. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Though Grella’s essay is on the detective novel and only briefly mentions the work of Ellery Queen, the essay does discuss the characteristics of the formal detective story of the “golden age” and is thus very useful in considering Queen’s stories.

Grossberger, Lewis. “Ellery Queen: A Man of Mystery and He Likes It That Way.” The Washington Post, March 16, 1978, p. D1. A brief biographical sketch, discussing how Frederic Dannay developed the Ellery Queen persona and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine; also discusses his popularity in Japan and his editing work, as well as his shyness and stage fright.

Harmon, Jim. The Great Radio Heroes. Rev. ed. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Includes a chapter on radio detectives comparing Queen to Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and others. Bibliographic references and index.

Keating, H. R. F., ed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense, and Spy Fiction. London: Windward, 1982. Keating’s short entry on Ellery Queen contains some useful biographical information but has little in the way of literary criticism.

Malmgren, Carl D. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Malmgren discusses Queen’s Halfway House and The House of Brass, alongside many other entries in the mystery and detective genre. Bibliographic references and index.

Nevins, Francis M., Jr. “Ellery Queen.” In Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Nevins’s article on Queen is perceptive and critically useful. His discussion focuses on Queen’s novels, but his delineation of story motifs applies well to the short stories. Includes a complete bibliography.

Routley, Erik. The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story: A Personal Monograph. London: Victor Gollancz, 1972. Routley’s book is a highly personal survey of detective fiction, but it includes several pages on the work of Ellery Queen that are fairly perceptive about Queen’s characters of the novels.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, a History. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Symons’s history of the detective story includes several pages on Ellery Queen in the chapter entitled “The Golden Age: The Thirties.”