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

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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?”

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