Ellery Queen's Calendar of Crime

By Ellery Queen

1952

First Published

3.86

Average Rating

300

Number of Pages

9H09M

Audio Length

In New York City in 1928, a 23 year old advertising copywriter, Daniel Nathan, and his publicity agent cousin, Manfred Lepovski, wrote a story for a contest. Since the contest required anonymity, they wrote under the pen name of Ellery Queen. They also made Ellery Queen the name of the principal character in the story, reckoning that repetition would increase his name recognition. An amateur sleuth who assists his father Inspector Queen, Ellery presents all the facts to us in his stories, then challenges us to solve the mystery before he does. In the 1930s the cousins turned their attention to writing Hollywood scripts, and in 1941 founded Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, to encourage young writers and nurture the medium. Their development of character, and their explorations into psychological and historical dimensions of the genre, broke new ground. While that first story of theirs didn't win the contest, Ellery Queen went on to become a major force in American fiction, and won an unprecedented 5 Edgars, the award of the Mystery Writers of America.

Avg Rating

3.86

Number of Ratings

276

5 STARS

28%

4 STARS

37%

3 STARS

29%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Ellery Queen

Author · 99 books

aka Barnaby Ross. "Ellery Queen" was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty two years writing, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age "fair play" mystery. Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen's first appearance came in 1928 when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who used his spare time to assist his police inspector father in solving baffling crimes. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired Queen upon Lee's death. Several of the later "Ellery Queen" books were written by other authors, including Jack Vance, Avram Davidson, and Theodore Sturgeon.