Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen is a pseudonym created in 1928 by the American detective fiction writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee. It is also the name of their main fictional detective, a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve baffling murder cases. From 1929 to 1971, Dannay and Lee wrote around forty novels and short story collections in which Ellery Queen appears as a character.
Under the pseudonym Ellery Queen, they also edited more than thirty anthologies of crime fiction and true crime. Dannay founded, and for many years edited, the crime fiction magazine Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has been published continuously from 1941 to the present. From 1961 onwards, Dannay and Lee commissioned other authors to write thrillers using the pseudonym Ellery Queen, but not featuring Ellery Queen as a character; some such novels were juvenile and were credited to Ellery Queen Jr. They also wrote four novels under the pseudonym Barnaby Ross, which featured the detective Drury Lane. Several movies, radio shows, and television shows have been based on their works.
Dannay and Lee were cousins, who were better known by their professional names. Frederic Dannay was the professional name of Daniel Nathan and Manfred Bennington Lee that of Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky. Since 2013, the complete works of Ellery Queen have been represented by JABberwocky Literary Agency.
Personal lives of Dannay and Lee
Manfred Bennington Lee was born as Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky on January 11, 1905, in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the New York University with a summa cum laude degree in English in the 1920s. He died on April 3, 1971, in Roxbury, Connecticut, survived by his second wife Kaye Brinker and seven children from the two marriages.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. 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.
Image:ElleryQ1955.jpg|right|thumb|200px|Nicholas Solovioff 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. 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.
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.
Dannay and Lee remained reticent about their writing methods. 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. However, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is still in print, now published as six "double issues" per year by Dell Magazines.
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 and his crime-solving daughter Patience. From the 1940s, republications of the Drury Lane books were mostly under the Ellery Queen name.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 S.S. Van Dine, creator of the super-snob detective Philo Vance, on whom 'Ellery Queen' was indeed modeled."
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.
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. Mystery writer John Dickson Carr called this subgenre "the grandest game in the world".The first Ellery Queen book The Roman Hat Mystery established a reliable template: a geographic formula title ; 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 is Queen's method of creating a list of attributes and comparing each suspect to these attributes, thereby reducing the list of suspects to a single name, often an unlikely one.
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."
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, ghost-written with Theodore Sturgeon, delves more deeply into motive than most Queen novels. And on the Eighth Day, ghost-written with Avram Davidson, is a religious allegory about fascism.