Ellery Queen

Manfred Bennington Lee was born as Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky on January 11, 1905, in Brooklyn, New York. Frederic Dannay was born as Daniel Nathan on October 20, 1905, in Brooklyn, New York. He married his third wife Rose Koppel, an assistant registrar at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, in 1975 (his first two wives had both died; Dannay had three children from those marriages). He died on September 3, 1982, in White Plains, New York. == Pseudonym==

Ellery Queen was created in the fall of 1928 when Dannay and Lee entered a mystery novel writing contest offering a prize of $7500 () jointly sponsored by ''McClure's magazine and Frederick A. Stokes Company. They decided to use as their collective pseudonym the same name they had given to their detective as they believed readers tended to remember the names of detectives but forget those of their creators. They were informed that they had won the contest, but McClure's magazine went bankrupt and was absorbed by The Smart Set'' magazine before they received any money. 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 until Lee's death in 1971. painted this cover for a 1955 issue of ''Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine''. During the 1940s, Ellery Queen was probably the most popular American mystery writer. 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" whereas the historian Jaques Barzun said they were "full of ingenious gimmicks and adorned with excellent titles". Dannay, without much involvement from Lee, founded the crime fiction magazine ''Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, and served as its editor-in-chief until his death in 1982. However, they together edited numerous collections and anthologies of crime fiction such as The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes and 101 Years' Entertainment, The Great Detective Stories, 1841–1941.'' They were awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1961 for their work under the Ellery Queen pseudonym. From 1961 onwards, they allowed the 'Ellery Queen' nom de plume to be used as a house name for several crime thrillers written by other authors. Dannay had initially opposed this project but was eventually persuaded by Lee, who was in financial difficulty at that time and wanted the extra royalties it would bring. The editing and supervision of these thrillers was done almost entirely by Lee; Dannay refused to even read these books. None of the ghostwritten novels feature Ellery Queen as a character. Three of them star "the governor's troubleshooter" Micah "Mike" McCall and six of them feature Captain Tim Corrigan of the New York City Police Department. The prominent science-fiction writer Jack Vance wrote three such novels including the 1965 locked room mystery A Room to Die In. 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." According to the crime fiction critic Otto Penzler, "As an anthologist, Ellery Queen is without peer, his taste unequalled. As a bibliographer and a collector of the detective short story, Queen is, again, a historical personage. Indeed, Ellery Queen clearly is, after Poe, the most important American in mystery fiction." 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". 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. ==Barnaby Ross==

In 1932 and 1933, Dannay and Lee wrote four novels using the pseudonym Barnaby Ross featuring Drury Lane, a Shakespearean actor who had retired from the stage due to deafness and is now often consulted as an amateur detective. The novels also feature Inspector Thumm (initially as a member of the New York police, later as a private investigator) and his crime-solving daughter Patience. From the 1940s, republications of the Drury Lane books were mostly under the Ellery Queen name. ==Fictional style==

The Queen novels are examples of "fair play" mysteries, a subgenre of the whodunit mystery in which the reader obtains the clues along with the detective and the mysteries are presented as intellectually challenging puzzles. These types of novels comprised what would later be known as the Golden age of detective fiction (Usually dated from 1920 to 1940 but some critics include the 1940s and even the 1950s). 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." 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. 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. ==Ellery Queen, the fictional character==

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. The creation of Queen was probably inspired by Philo Vance, the detective created by the writer S.S. Van Dine. 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. 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. The Queen household, an apartment on West 87th street in New York City, is shared by Ellery Queen and his widowed father, Richard Queen. (Very late in the series, Richard Queen remarries, but how this affects his living arrangement is never spelled out.) The household 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. ==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. Some of the surviving scripts were published for the first time in the 2005 book The Adventure of the Murdered Moths. 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. Television in the television program The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen. 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. Shortly after the series began, Richard Hart, who played Queen, died and was replaced by Lee Bowman. Florenz Ames played Inspector Queen. In 1954, Norvin Productions produced the syndicated series Ellery Queen, Detective with Hugh Marlowe reprising his role from the radio series. Inspector Queen was once again played by Florenz Ames. Episodes from this series were broadcast on many local American stations and in United Kingdom between 1954 and 1959 under various titles like Mystery Is My Business, Crime Detective and New Adventures of Ellery Queen. George Nader played Queen in NBC's The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen (1958–1959), but was replaced by Lee Philips in the final episodes. Peter Lawford starred as Ellery Queen in the 1971 television film ''Ellery Queen: Don't Look Behind You (a loose adaptation of the 1949 novel Cat of Many Tails)''. Harry Morgan played Inspector Richard Queen in this film, but he is described as Ellery Queen's uncle (perhaps to account for the fact that Morgan was only eight years Lawford's senior, or to account for Lawford's British accent). The 1975 television movie Ellery Queen (aka Too Many Suspects, a loose adaptation of the 1965 novel The Fourth Side of the Triangle) led to the 1975–1976 television series of the same name starring Jim Hutton in the title role with David Wayne as his widowed father Richard Queen. This series was developed by Richard Levinson and William Link, who later won a Special Edgars Award for creating it and Columbo. It was done as a period piece set in New York City in 1946–1947. Sergeant Velie, Inspector Queen's assistant, regularly appeared in it; he had previously appeared in the novels and the radio series, but had not been seen regularly in any of the previous television versions. Each episode contained a "Challenge to the Viewer" in which Queen broke the fourth wall to go over the facts of the case and encouraged the audience to try to solve the mystery before the correct solution was revealed. Eve Arden, George Burns, Joan Collins, Roddy McDowall, Milton Berle, Guy Lombardo, Rudy Vallée, and Don Ameche were among the celebrities featured in this series. In 2011, in an episode of the crime series Leverage, “The 10 Li'l Grifters Job”, Timothy Hutton's character Nate Ford appears at a murder mystery party dressed as Ellery Queen, in a homage to the actor's late father, Jim Hutton. Films • The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) - Donald Cook as Ellery Queen, Guy Usher as Inspector Queen (based on The Spanish Cape Mystery) • The Mandarin Mystery (1936) - Eddie Quillan as Ellery Queen, Wade Boteler as Inspector Queen (loosely based on The Chinese Orange Mystery) • Ellery Queen, Master Detective (1940) - Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen, Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter, Charley Grapewin as Inspector Queen (very loosely based on The Door Between) • ''Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery'' (1941) - Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen, Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter, Charley Grapewin as Inspector Queen • Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime (1941) - Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen, Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter, Charley Grapewin as Inspector Queen (loosely based on The Devil To Pay) • Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring (1941) - Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen, Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter, Charley Grapewin as Inspector Queen (loosely based on The Dutch Shoe Mystery) • A Close Call for Ellery Queen (1942) - William Gargan as Ellery Queen, Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter, Charley Grapewin as Inspector Queen • A Desperate Chance for Ellery Queen (1942) - William Gargan as Ellery Queen, Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter, Charley Grapewin as Inspector Queen • Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen (1942) - William Gargan as Ellery Queen, Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter, Charley Grapewin as Inspector Queen • La Décade prodigieuse (1971) (English title: ''Ten Days' Wonder) - directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles. There is no character named Ellery Queen but Michel Piccoli plays Paul Regis, the detective (Based on Ten Days' Wonder'') • Haitatsu sarenai santsu no tegami (1979) (English title: The Three Undelivered Letters) - directed by Yoshitarō Nomura (based on Calamity Town but not containing Queen or any other detective) Theater In 1936, Dannay and Lee, in collaboration with playwright Lowell Brentano, wrote the play Danger, Men Working. The production never made it to Broadway, closing after a few performances in Baltimore and Philadelphia. In 2016, American playwright Joseph Goodrich adapted the 1942 novel Calamity Town for stage. The play premiered at the Vertigo Theatre in Calgary, Alberta on January 23, 2016. Comic books and graphic novels mangaEllery Queen appears as a character in some issues of Crackajack Funnies beginning in 1940, a four issue series by Superior Comics'' in 1949, two issues of a short-lived series by Ziff Davis in 1952, and three comics published by Dell in 1962. In February 1990, Queen was used as a guest star by the comic book writer Mike W. Barr in the ninth issue of the magazine Maze Agency in the story titled The English Channeler Mystery: A Problem in Deduction. In July 1996, Queen, the character, was highlighted in the ''Gosho Aoyoma's Mystery Library section of volume 11 of the Detective Conan'' manga, a section of the series in which Aoyoma introduces a detective (or occasionally a villain) from mystery literature. A character also stated that he preferred Queen, the author, to Arthur Conan Doyle in volume 12 of the manga. Board games and jigsaw puzzles Ellery Queen's name was attached to many games and puzzles including (''Ellery Queen's Great Mystery Game) Trapped in 1956, The Case of the Elusive Assassin by Ellery Queen in 1967, Ellery Queen: The Case of His Headless Highness in 1973, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine Game in 1986 and a VCR-based game called Ellery Queen's Operation: Murder (loosely based on The Dutch Shoe Mystery'') in 1986. Stamps Queen, the character, was one of the twelve fictional detectives featured on a series of stamps issued by Nicaragua in 1973 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Interpol and on a similar series issued by San Marino in 1979. ==Awards and honors==

'Ellery Queen' received the following Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America: • 1946: Best Radio Drama (tied with Mr and Mrs North) • 1950: Special Edgar Award for ten years' service through ''Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine'' • 1961: Grand Master Edgar Award • 1969: Special Edgar Award on the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Roman Hat Mystery They were also runners-up for the Edgar in the following categories: • 1962: Best Short Story (Ellery Queen 1962 Anthology) • 1964: Best Novel (The Player on the Other Side) The Mystery Writers of America established the Ellery Queen Award in 1983 "to honor writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry". ==Bibliography==