Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

The Novels of Ellery Queen by Edward D. Hoch

Anthony Boucher once wrote, “Ellery Queen is the American detective story,” and certainly no other American writer was so active, for such a long period, in so many different aspects of mystery writing. From 1929 to 1982 the name was in the forefront of mystery writing, editing, and scholarship. Queen not only produced some of the best detective novels of the so-called “Golden Age” (roughly 1920 to 1940) but also continued to publish important — and sometimes classic — novels during the decades that followed.

Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee’s first joint effort under the Ellery Queen name was The Roman Hat Mystery, published on August 15, 1929. It was an immediate success, transporting readers to the glamorous Broadway theater world where a clever blackmailer named Monte Field is poisoned while seated in the last row of the orchestra at the Roman Theatre. Inspector Richard Queen is in charge of the case, and his son Ellery joins him at the scene of the crime. Virtually the first words out of Ellery’s mouth are, “You just lured me away from a perfect book-lover’s paradise,” thereby establishing his character as surely as Rex Stout established Nero Wolfe’s character five years later with his first words in print: “Where’s the beer?”

The investigation moves from the Roman Theatre to Monte Field’s bedroom, where late in the book a secret compartment full of top hats is discovered. Some seventy-five pages before the finish, Queen stopped the action with the first of his famous challenges to the reader. All the clues have been given and Ellery knows the identity of the killer. Does the reader? The action resumes and moves on to a capture just as the killer is about to strike again. The final chapter, a letter from his father to Ellery, outlines the clues that helped them arrive at the surprising solution.

Though few critics today would list The Roman Hat Mystery among the ten best Queen novels, that is only because it has been eclipsed by far better adventures in the decades that followed. It remains an amazing achievement for a first novel, and was to set the pattern for the first nine Queen novels. All would have similar titles using a nationality, a common noun, and the word “Mystery.” Most would feature a Challenge to the Reader, and most would have lengthy, complex solutions revealing the killer to be the least suspected person.

Queen’s second novel, The French Powder Mystery, was published just a year after the first. It contained many of the same elements — an unfamiliar setting (this time a department store), a large cast of characters, some complex but logical deductions, and the usual Challenge to the Reader. But this time the authors added something more. The solution is so cleverly constructed that the killer’s name is withheld until the final two words of the book. It was a feat that could be topped only by Queen himself in a later book (which shall be nameless here), in which the killer’s name appears only as the first words of the novel and its last words — but is found nowhere else in the book!

The Dutch Shoe Mystery, about murder in the Dutch Memorial Hospital, was published in 1931. Its plot, involving a killer disguised as a doctor who strangles a patient awaiting emergency surgery, is almost as good as the first two Queens — but the best was yet to come. In 1932 they published four of their best early novels in a single year.

For the first of these they decided to adopt a second pseudonym and acquire another publisher. They became “Barnaby Ross,” chronicling the cases solved by Drury Lane, a retired Shakespearean actor forced to give up his career because of deafness. The first Lane novel, The Tragedy of X, was Dannay and Lee’s best book to date — a baffling mystery that cleverly uses varying modes of transportation for its settings. Thus the first murder, by nicotine poisoning, occurs on a crowded Manhattan streetcar. It is followed by murder on the Weehawken ferry to New Jersey, with the murderer finally unmasked aboard a train in New Jersey. The Tragedy of X has been called by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. (Royal Bloodline) a book of staggering complexity, stunning ingenuity, and dazzling fairness to the reader. As such, it was the first truly classic mystery to come from the pens of Dannay and Lee.

It was followed within three months by an equally complex and rewarding novel under the Queen name, The Greek Coffin Mystery. The longest and best of the early novels about Ellery, it involves the death of a wealthy old man, and the strangled body of a second man found in the coffin with him. The complicated plot features some dazzling detective work involving a typewriter, and a least-suspected person that should surprise even the most astute Queen reader. The book marks Queen’s first use of multiple solutions. In fact, four solutions are given during the course of the novel, with the true one the most astounding and satisfying of all.

Their third book in 1932 was another Drury Lane adventure under the “Barnaby Ross” name. The Tragedy of Y is a favorite Queen novel among Japanese readers, and American critics differ only on whether it or X is the best of Lane’s cases. Its portrait of the doomed Hatter family is superb, and the solution once again breaks totally new ground. Its least-suspected person has been used since then by other writers, but this was its first use in a detective novel.

The year ended with the publication of The Egyptian Cross Mystery, Ellery’s fifth case and yet another dazzling performance. The crucifixion of decapitated bodies made for some bloody murder scenes, but there was method in the killer’s seeming madness and one could forgive the gore in the face of some fine detective work and another surprising solution.

In 1933 the third of Drury Lane’s adventures was published. If The Tragedy of Z marked a falling-off from the classic stature of the first two books, it was still a very good mystery. Patience Thumm, a police inspector’s daughter, narrates the story and though parts of the narration are awkward, one still wishes she could have developed into a series character on her own. The murders here take place near a state prison in upstate New York, and the book features two memorable scenes in the prison’s execution chamber. Drury Lane arrives at the killer’s surprising identity by establishing four traits or qualifications which he must have, based upon the clues, and then ruling out all but one of the possible suspects. It was a clever technique that Queen would use again. Another plot element, mysterious packages delivered to the victims before their murders, hinting at vengeance from the past, would reappear in Queen’s The Origin of Evil, eighteen years later.

The first Queen adventure of 1933 was The American Gun Mystery, in which the murder occurs during a rodeo at a huge Manhattan sports arena. The plot solution involved a clever reworking of a least-suspected person the authors had used before. By this time it was clear to Dannay and Lee that the Queen books were outselling the Ross ones, and Drury Lane’s Last Case put an end to that series, much to the dismay of mystery critics and readers.

The Siamese Twin Mystery, the next Queen novel, was something of a departure. There was a smaller cast — a household of people trapped with Ellery and his father on a mountaintop threatened by a forest fire. The solution when it came was without the usual Challenge to the Reader, and seemed far simpler than what had gone before. Still, on rereading the book one appreciates its clever use of dying messages involving playing cards.

The Chinese Orange Mystery, published in 1934, is still remembered fondly by many readers for its bizarre crime scene. The year also saw publication of The Adventures of Ellery Queen, a collection of outstanding short stories which had appeared in various magazines. The best of these, and the most often reprinted, is “The Mad Tea Party.” The final book in Queen’s early period was The Spanish Cape Mystery in 1935. The novel opens with a kidnapping and, later, the discovery of a naked corpse on a secluded beach. Once again the solution is a surprise.

The next five novels in the Queen canon, influenced by the demands of slick magazines (in which some of them were serialized), show a distinct movement away from the complex plots and pure deduction of the earlier Queens. Some consider these five to be among the poorest early Queens, but they should not be dismissed too readily. Halfway House, published in 1936, is really a transition novel and still included some of the best deduction features from the earliest period. Its story of a man who lived two lives and was murdered in a limbo between his two identities is quite clever. And 1937’s The Door Between is a locked-room mystery with a startling double solution. The Hollywood settings of the next two novels, The Devil to Pay and The Four of Hearts, seem somehow to be the wrong milieu for Ellery, and in The Dragon’s Teeth Ellery himself is absent from too much of the action, yielding the scene to a charming imposter.

The high point of this second period was undoubtedly the publication of a second short-story collection, The New Adventures of Ellery Queen, in 1940. Especially notable was a short novel, “The Lamp of God,” in which an entire house is made to disappear without a trace. The collection also includes four sports mysteries, notably the boxing story “Mind Over Matter.”

It was 1942 before the next Queen novel, Calamity Town, appeared. It was worth the wait, and by general critical consensus is one of the two best novels Ellery Queen ever wrote. In this book Ellery abandons the crowded environs of Manhattan and Hollywood for the more relaxed pace of Wrightsville, a small New England town which was to have more than its share of murders in the years that followed. The characterizations in Calamity Town are more rounded, the writing is at its peak, and the novel has a depth lacking in much crime fiction. Ellery, seeking peace and quiet, is drawn into the mystery when murder occurs at a New Year’s party. All the principal events of the book take place on holidays, and Ellery finally arrives at the tragic solution on Mother’s Day.

There Was an Old Woman, published the following year, marks a brief return to the older Queen style, with nursery-rhyme allusions reminiscent of “The Mad Tea Party.” The idea of murder during a duel with pistols is an interesting one, the characters are suitably wacky, and the double solution is satisfying, but the book is not one of the major Queen efforts.

In 1945 Ellery returned to Wrightsville in The Murderer Is a Fox, an underrated novel that has much to recommend it. Here the puzzle involves a twelve-year-old poisoning which Ellery must reconstruct and solve. He does so, brilliantly, using once again a false solution followed by the real one.

In 1948 came Ten Days’ Wonder, a major Queen novel and one that continued to attract the attention of critics and filmmakers thirty years after its publication. The religious overtones in this novel are stronger than in any previous Queen book. Again Ellery is in Wrightsville, involved with Diedrich Van Horn, his young wife, and his adopted son. Though the cast is small the book is full of surprises, and includes a double solution. It is, truly, a rich cosmic drama, and a book that has gained in stature with the passing decades. It is not too bold to suggest that future generations might come to regard it as Queen’s finest achievement in the novel.

Ellery himself was near despair in the final pages of Ten Days’ Wonder, and Cat of Many Tails, published the following year, is a direct sequel. Still questioning his abilities, he is called upon to discover the identity of a Ripper-like strangler who is killing people, apparently at random, on the streets of New York. It is Queen’s longest postwar novel and his richest. The portrait of New York in the grip of near hysteria has never been bettered, and the hunt for a killer known only as the Cat is intriguing all the way. The motive, and thus the pattern the killings follow, is one of the cleverest in mystery fiction, and the apparent capture of the Cat, using a young woman decoy, is perhaps the most suspenseful scene in any Queen novel. Once again a second, true solution follows the first, leaving Ellery with further doubts about his reasoning powers. Critics generally agree that Cat of Many Tails and Calamity Town are the two best Queen novels.

After this high point Ellery returned to Wrightsville in 1950’s Double, Double. Here a series of killings seems to follow a children’s rhyme (“Rich man, poor man”). The final solution, after another false one, is satisfying — though a variation had been used in an earlier novel. It is not the equal of the three previous Wrightsville books, though still a distinctively Queenly novel.

The 1951 Queen novel was The Origin of Evil, which echoes some elements from previous books. Here again the killings are preceded by enigmatic gifts, and the motive lies in the past. Ellery returns to Hollywood in this novel, and it is far more successful than his previous outings there.

The first of Queen’s two 1952 books was another short-story collection, Calendar of Crime, with each story revolving around an event associated with a month of the year. All the stories grew out of scripts Dannay and Lee wrote for the Ellery Queen radio series, and two of them, “The Gettysburg Bugle” and “The Dauphin’s Doll,” are among Queen’s best. The 1952 novel was The King Is Dead, a clever locked-room mystery set on the mythical island kingdom of a weapons tycoon. It is Queen’s closest attempt at a political thriller, but the plot — complete with a scene back in Wrightsville — seems closer to fable than reality.

The Scarlet Letters, an enjoyable Manhattan romp that follows a blackmail plot to twenty-six New York locations keyed to letters of the alphabet, followed in 1953. The murder and solution, bunched together near the end of the book, provide a plot more suitable for a short story than a novel. But the book is fun to read and gives us our best novel-length portrait of Ellery’s secretary Nikki Porter.

In 1954 Queen produced something entirely different, a novel with serious overtones about American life in the 1950s — and the threat of McCarthyism — which also happened to be a first-rate detective story. The Glass Village was Queen’s first novel without Ellery or any other series character, and its plot involved a foreign-looking tramp accused of murdering an elderly primitive painter. Johnny Shinn, a returned veteran whose uncle is a judge, solves the mystery in a New England town. Dannay and Lee hoped to attract attention by lifting the book out of the regular Ellery Queen series, but in truth the detective could have been Ellery and the setting could have been Wrightsville. In fact, the novel was dramatized in an Ellery Queen television series with Ellery as the detective.

The year 1955 saw publication of another short-story volume, QBI: Queen’s Bureau of Investigation, including “Snowball in July” and other excellent tales. In Inspector Queen’s Own Case, published the following year, Ellery is again missing, while his father, retired from the police force, falls in love and solves a mystery involving the murder of a two-month-old baby. Since most of the suspects are older people, the contrast with the extreme youth of the victim is striking. The book has much to say about ageing, suggesting that the Queen canon might be drawing to an end. Indeed, Queen’s 1958 novel The Finishing Stroke showed every sign of being his last, from its title to the intricate house-party murder set back in 1929 but not solved until the present. Again there is a series of bizarre gifts, and a neat twist about halfway through the book.

The first of twenty-eight paperbacks under the Ellery Queen name but without Ellery began appearing in 1961, the work of other writers supervised by Lee. But it was not until 1963’s The Player on the Other Side that Ellery was back again, in a small masterpiece plotted by Fred Dannay. Once more religion figures prominently in the plot, and the doomed York family reminds one of York Hatter’s family in The Tragedy of Y. But the surprise solution here is unlike anything Queen had attempted before.

The following year saw publication of And on the Eighth Day, the last of Queen’s truly innovative plots and Fred Dannay’s personal favorite among his novels. Taking place during Holy Week of 1944, it follows Ellery as he loses his way while driving across a western desert and stumbles upon a small religious community living by primitive customs. The community views him as a forerunner in the manner of John the Baptist, and when a man is bludgeoned to death during his stay he must solve the mystery. Both the crime and its detection seem simple at first, but the book grows in stature upon rereading.

Early in 1965 Queens Full appeared, a collection featuring a Wrightsville novelette, “The Death of Don Juan,” and a surprising least-suspected person in another novelette, “The Case Against Carroll.” A new Queen novel, The Fourth Side of the Triangle, offered a series of false solutions, and was followed by 1967’s Face to Face, with more echoes of earlier Queen books.

The year 1968 saw a final story collection, QED: Queen’s Experiments in Detection, with one of Fred and Manny’s special favorites, “Abraham Lincoln’s Clue.” That year’s novel was The House of Brass, a treasure-hunt story featuring Ellery’s father and his new wife, with Ellery appearing only near the end. In 1969’s Cop Out, Ellery and his father are both absent and the bank robbery plot contains no real detection. Both are back on the scene in The Last Woman in His Life, a novel with a fairly obvious dying-message clue.

The final Queen novel before Manfred Lee’s death was A Fine and Private Place in 1971, serving as a fitting end to the Queen canon. The book contains more real detection than its immediate predecessors and has a complex plot built around the number nine. A detailed outline of the next novel, The Tragedy of Errors, was prepared by Fred Dannay but never completed by Lee. It was published along with some uncollected stories in 1999.

Ellery Queen’s novels, and the changing character of Ellery himself, reflected the evolution of the American mystery from 1929 to 1971. In much the same way, Fred Dannay’s editing of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine traced the progress of the mystery short story, and has done more than anything else to keep it alive and well.