21 Facts About Ellery Queen

Dannay and Lee wrote most of the more than thirty novels and several short story collections in which Ellery Queen appeared as a character, and their books were among the most popular of American mysteries published between 1929 and 1971.

Fictional Ellery Queen was the hero of more than 30 novels and several short story collections, written by Dannay and Lee and published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym.

Indeed, Ellery Queen clearly is, after Poe, the most important American in mystery fiction.

Ellery Queen was created in 1928 when Dannay and Lee entered a writing contest sponsored by McClure's magazine for the best first mystery novel.

Fictional detective Ellery Queen is the author of the books in which he appears and the editor of the magazine that bears his name.

Related searches

Ellery Queen goes through several transformations in his personality and his approach to investigation over the course of the series.

Ellery Queen supposedly derived these characteristics from his late mother, the daughter of an aristocratic New York family who had married Richard Queen, a bluff, man-in-the-street New York Irishman.

From 1938, Ellery Queen spends some time working in Hollywood as a screenwriter and solves cases with a Hollywood setting.

Calamity Town, two sequels, and some short stories are set in the imaginary town of Wrightsville, and subsidiary characters recur from story to story; Ellery Queen relates to the various strata of American society as an outsider.

Ellery Queen is said to be married and the father of a child in the introductions to the first few novels, but this plot line is never developed and Ellery is mainly portrayed as a bachelor.

Ellery Queen's first appearance in a written story is in the final pages of There Was an old Woman, when a character with whom Ellery has had some flirtatious moments announces spontaneously that she's changing her name to Nikki Porter and going to work as Ellery's secretary.

Ellery Queen is not given any serious romantic interests after Nikki Porter and Paula Paris disappear from the books.

Ellery Queen is the principal character in some, but not all, of the juvenile novels ghost-written by other writers under the pseudonym Ellery Queen, Jr.

Ellery Queen novels are examples of the classic "fair play" whodunit mystery, and are textbook examples of what became known as the Golden age of detective fiction.

Early Ellery Queen novels were characterized by intricately plotted clues and solutions.

The Tragedy of Y bears some resemblance to the later Ellery Queen novel There Was an Old Woman: both are about eccentric families headed by a matriarch.

Helene Hanff, best known for her book 84, Charing Cross Road, was a script writer for the television series version of The Adventures of Ellery Queen, which began on the DuMont Television Network but soon moved to ABC.

Shortly after the series began, Richard Hart, who played Ellery Queen, died and was replaced in the lead role by Lee Bowman.

Sergeant Velie, Inspector Ellery Queen's assistant, was a cast regular in this series; he had 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" with Ellery Queen breaking the fourth wall to go over the facts of the case and invite the audience to solve the mystery on their own, immediately before the solution was revealed.

Ellery Queen was featured on a postage stamp issued by Nicaragua as part of a series of "Famous Fictional Detectives" to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Interpol in 1973 and a similar series of famous fictional detectives from San Marino in 1979.