Ellery Queen's Eyewitnesses

by Ellery Queen

  They celebrated by buying each other a Dunhill pipe monogrammed EQ, then learned that the magazine was going bankrupt and they would not collect the prize after all. Frederick A. Stokes Company, however, took on the novel—The Roman Hat Mystery—and its publication (in 1929) was a major historical event in the genre.

  For this first collaboration they decided on Ellery Queen as their pseudonym as well as the name of their detective, writer Ellery Queen, hoping readers would find it easier to remember one name than two. Queen’s genius for weighing the clues, timetables, motives and personalities in a complicated murder case until he has discovered the only possible solution dazzled his fans book after book.

  For a while, his creators lectured, masked, crosscountry, Dannay challenging Lee with intricate crime puzzles. Along with the Queen novels they also wrote four novels as by Barnaby Ross, three classic critical works on the mystery genre, The Detective Short Story, Queen’s Quorum, and In the Queen’s Parlor, and two collections of true-crime articles, Ellery Queen’s International Case Book and The Woman in the Case.

  In 1940, they interested publisher Lawrence E. Spivak of Mercury Press in the idea of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which first appeared in the fall of 1941. From the beginning, Dannay was its active editor. Davis Publications, Inc., was founded on August 1, 1957, with the purchase of EQMM from Mercury Press.

  The Ellery Queen books have sold, in various editions published by approximately 100 publishers around the world, a total of more than 150,000,000 copies. Queen’s books have been translated into every major foreign language except Chinese.

  Ellery Queen popularized the mystery drama on radio in a program called The Adventures of Ellery Queen, which was on the air for nine years, and in 1950, TV Guide gave the Ellery Queen TV program its national award for the best mystery show on television. In 1975-1976, the most recent TV program starred Jim Hutton as Ellery and David Wayne as Inspector Queen.

  Ellery Queen has won five Edgars (the annual Mystery Writers of America awards similar to the Oscars of Hollywood), including the prestigious Grand Master award (1960), three MWA Scrolls and one Raven, and twice Queen was runner-up for the Best Novel of the Year award. He also has won both the gold and silver Gertrudes awarded by Pocket Books, Inc. Mystery Writers of Japan gave Ellery Queen their gold-and-onyx Edgar Allan Poe ring, awarded to only five non-Japanese detective-story writers. In 1968, Iona College honored Queen with its Columba Prize in Mystery. In 1978, And On the Eighth Day won the Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.

  The late Anthony Boucher, distinguished critic and novelist, described Queen best when he wrote: “Ellery Queen is the American detective story.”