Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

The Misadventures of Ellery Queen by Jon L. Breen

I confess I stole the title of this piece, but it was inevitable. Ellery Queen (certainly the Frederic Dannay half and maybe the Manfred B. Lee half as well) showed his/their love of parodies and pastiches by editing a whole volume of them, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1944), which included serious tributes such as Vincent Starrett’s classic “The Unique Hamlet” alongside comical cases for sleuths with names like Sherlaw Kombs, Holmlock Shears, Hemlock Jones, and Picklock Holes. The less-than-amused guardians of the Arthur Conan Doyle estate managed to get that Holmes anthology suppressed. Undeterred, editor Queen would publish many parodies and pastiches over the first forty years of this magazine and especially enjoyed those in which the target was Queen him/themselves. The title “The Misadventures of Ellery Queen” was first used on a survey article by Marvin Lachman in the August 1969 issue of The Queen Canon Bibliophile, a short-lived but significant fanzine edited by the Rev. Robert E. Washer, and later on a proposed anthology, an unrealized 1980s project of Josh Pachter.

In a parody, an author’s style is imitated for comic effect. In a pastiche, the characters and backgrounds of another writer are used in serious imitation of the style. Since elements of homage and mockery often coexist, editor Queen sometimes called the stories parody-pastiches. A third category beloved of editor Queen was the indirect pastiche, in which the style and characters may be different but the source of influence is explicit.

The earliest EQ parody in EQMM kidded not Queen the author but Queen the editor. In the March 1947 issue, Baynard Kendrick’s takeoff on true-crime articles, “The Case of the Stuttering Sextant,” was introduced by Clayton Rawson (a former True Detective editor who would later be a managing editor of EQMM) in the style of a Queenian story note: “’Tec fans will greet this epoch-making masterpiece of murder with huzzas and dancing in the streets (white tie). EQMM fans will be tickled pink to learn the story has not previously appeared in any other language (including the Sanskrit)...”

As Lachman points out, most of the early parodies in EQMM were Sherlockian in nature, and while EQ the sleuth appears as a supporting player in some of them, the first writer to do a story starring a parody Ellery was Arthur Porges. Celery Green, an American sleuth traveling in Britain, assists Inspector Dewe East in two broadly comic stories, “The English Village Mystery” (December 1964) and “The Indian Diamond Mystery” (June 1965). The detective’s given name allows him to stalk off at the end of each case.

I first broke into print in this magazine in the late ’60s as a parody-pastiche specialist. After buying stories in imitation of Ed McBain, Burt L. Standish, and S. S. Van Dine, Fred Dannay asked if I would like to do a Queen parody, and I responded with my fourth published story, “The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery” (March 1969), a theatrical dying-message puzzler about E. Larry Cune, surely one of the more strained Queenian parody names. I would return to the character twice in EQMM — “The Swedish Boot Mystery” (November 1973) and “The Adventure of the Disoriented Detective” (September 1976) — and once in The Queen Canon Bibliophile — “The Idea Man” (August 1969) — always ringing changes on the old dying-message ploy.

In the April 1971 Wilson Library Bulletin, David Peele’s “The Cataloging on the Wall” finds librarian Quellery Een in his office holding “his treasured first edition of the Viking Portable Mickey Spillane” and interviewing candidates to replace his deceased cataloger Slinki Porter. A Challenge to the Reader is included, and a library-school graduate might indeed figure out how he decided Elsie Dinsmore was the girl for the job. Funny stuff but likely to puzzle non-librarians.

One of the cleverest send-ups of the Queen style was also one of the least widely distributed, “The Persian Fez Mystery; or The Tragedy of Q” from Joe R. Christopher’s 30-copy chapbook Queen’s Books Investigated; or, Queen Is in the Accounting House (1983), wherein it is revealed that Elroy Queep “only in his novels... solved the cases before the police; in real life his suggestions were always wrong.”

Pure pastiches of Ellery Queen have been relatively rare. The earliest may be one chapter of Marion Mainwaring’s 1954 novel Murder in Pastiche; or, Nine Detectives All at Sea. Despite the use of assumed names for the various great detectives traveling on the same ocean liner, Mainwaring’s imitations are generally straight-faced. Ellery, under the name Malory King, joins detectives based on Hercule Poirot, Sir John Appleby, Perry Mason, Roderick Alleyn, Nero Wolfe, Miss Silver, Mike Hammer, and Lord Peter Wimsey in addressing a shipboard mystery. The author is a splendid literary mimic, capturing the stylistic quirks of her various subjects. Many years later, she would apply this knack to the completion of a novel left unfinished by Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers (1993).

The stories Norma Schier wrote in imitation of famous detective-story writers were more pastiche than parody, but the names of the sleuths and the authors’ names attached were anagrams of the originals. The stories would be collected under the title The Anagram Detectives (1979), one of the earliest products of Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press. EQ author and character became Leyne Requel in the story “Dying Message” (July 1966), a clever example of the titular gambit. All the other character names are anagrams as well, leading to such unusual handles as Carson Pellicot and Porter Oattes.

Despite the assumed name given the character, Dennis M. Dubin’s “Elroy Quinn’s Last Case” (July 1967), written when the author was a high-school senior, is also more pastiche than parody. The ageing sleuth is asked into a case with international implications by Inspec-tor Thomas Velie, Jr. Since the name Velie is not changed and various authentic Queen titles appear as supposed Quinn titles, I wonder if it was at the request of editor Queen that Ellery’s name was changed.

Francis M. Nevins’s brilliant first story, “Open Letter to Survivors” (May 1972), begins with the following epigraph from Ellery Queen’s Ten Days’ Wonder (1948): “...there was the case of Adelina Monquieux, his remarkable solution of which cannot be revealed before 1972 by agreement with that curious lady’s executors...” References to unrecorded cases, so common in the Sherlock Holmes canon, are rare in the Queen writings. Though the name Ellery Queen never appears in the text itself (his own idea, says Nevins, not Fred Dannay’s), the identity of the author/sleuth is obvious, and the story has a stature among Queen pastiches comparable to Vincent Starrett’s “The Unique Hamlet” among Holmes pastiches.

Ellery appears more or less under his own name in Julian Symons’s Great Detectives: Seven Original Investigations (1981), in which Ellery (pince-nez in place) and his father are given a distinctly old-fashioned look in Tom Adams’s illustrations. Taking a Sherlockian mock-scholarly approach, Symons opines that the Ellery of all the books after Halfway House (1936) was in fact a younger brother of the original, less pretentious but also less gifted. That younger brother, Dan Queen, solves a mid-twenties mystery as related by J. J. McCue, the family friend who introduced the early Queen novels. (Fred Dannay, to whom Symons sent the manuscript, admitted to being amused but offered no further comment.)

The September/October 1999 issue of this magazine, commemorating the seventieth anniversary of The Roman Hat Mystery, featured two new pastiches, both set in the present and both calling Ellery by his full name: Edward D. Hoch’s “The Circle of Ink” (about Ellery the college guest lecturer) and my own “The Gilbert and Sullivan Clue” (about Ellery the Hollywood screenwriter).

Indirect pastiches, maybe more accurately termed homages, have been much more numerous. James Holding was the author of the earliest, longest, and most ambitious series of these, adopting the nationality/object pattern of the early Queen novels and featuring not a stand-in for Ellery himself but two men based on his creators, Fred Dannay and Manny Lee. King Danforth and Martin Leroy (collaborators under the name Leroy King), embarked on an around-the-world cruise with their wives, find a puzzle in every port. The series began with “The Norwegian Apple Mystery” (November 1960) and continued through “The African Fish Mystery” (April 1961), “The Italian Tile Mystery” (September 1961), “The Hong Kong Jewel Mystery” (November 1963), “The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery” (December 1963), “The Tahitian Powder Box Mystery” (October 1964), “The Japanese Card Mystery” (October 1965), “The New Zealand Bird Mystery” (January 1967), and “The Phillipine Key Mystery” (February 1968), reaching a total of ten entries with “The Borneo Snapshot Mystery” (January 1972).

Margaret Austin’s “Introducing Ellery’s Mom” (July 1962) actually recounts two cases (one respectable failure and one cleverly plotted success) narrated by the middle child of mystery writer and amateur sleuth Kate McKay. Young Ellery has older siblings named Nicholas Charles and Hildegarde and younger ones named Ngaio and Perry.

William Brittain, a prolific contributor of fair-play detective stories to EQMM, launched a new series in December 1965 with “The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr” and “The Man Who Read Ellery Queen.” In the latter, the only possession 80-year-old Arthur Mindy brought to the Goodwill Senior Citizen Home was his collection of EQ novels, and he applies Queenian logic to the theft and concealment of another resident’s gold coin. Editor Queen inserted the appropriate Challenge to the Reader. Brittain would subsequently produce stories about readers of Agatha Christie, John Creasey, G. K. Chesterton, Georges Simenon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Isaac Asimov, in addition to his long series of puzzle stories about high-school science teacher Leonard Strang.

Josh Pachter came on the scene in the December 1968 issue with “E.Q. Griffen Earns His Name,” written when he was 16, making him second only to James Yaffe in the ranks of youngest EQMM contributors. (Pachter’s account of his first sale is entertaining: Told by his mother that Frederic Dannay was on the phone, he picked it up and said, “Dad, this isn’t funny!”) The character would return in “E.Q. Griffen’s Second Case” (May 1970), written when Pachter was 17. Ellery Queen Griffen is one of eleven children of Inspector Ross Griffen, all of them named after famous fictional detectives. In his first case, he confronts two mysteries — he strikes out on the more trivial but solves the more serious, a robbery from a jewelry store, summarizing his conclusions very much in the EQ manner, in this case making a rather obvious solution sound more brilliant than it is. In his second and stronger outing, the victim is a hippie poet and children’s-book writer who is stabbed in the back and scrawls a dying message on the sidewalk. The second story includes a reference to the young sleuth’s Uncle James, an aspiring writer — an in-joke for serious Queen fans: James Griffen, along with Wilbur See, was one of the character names Dannay and Lee considered before settling on EQ. Subsequently, only one of the other Griffen children had a published case: “Sam Buried Caesar” (August 1971) about Nero Wolfe Griffen.

In the broad field of crime-mystery-detective-suspense-thriller fiction, Conan Doyle undoubtedly remains the most frequent object of parody and pastiche, distantly followed by Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane, more distantly still by Raymond Chandler, Dorothy L. Sayers, S. S. Van Dine, and a few others. But Queen the author — and not entirely thanks to the enthusiasm of Queen the editor — surely must rank in the top ten.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Jon L. Breen.