Mystery of Ellery Queen

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 819, 7 April 1955, Page 20

Mystery of Ellery Queen

"LIE’S a man in his early thirties-a man with brains, not a roughneck. He’s cultured and widely-read, big and can handle himself in a brawl. He almost never uses a gun and doesn’t carry one. He is no Micky Spillane, but if the occasion calls for it-and it sometimes does-he’ll break bones with the best of them." Thus Ellery Queen on Ellery Queen, his fabulous character and latterday knight-errant, whose adventures have sent chills up and down the relaxed spines of millions of arm-chair detectives all over the world. Since.the appearance of The Roman Hat Mystery in 1929 .the number of Queen publications has mounted to 80. There have been 28 novels; four books of short stories; twenty anthologies and many critical works and juvenile books. That seems a lot of crime for one man ‘to perpetrate, but hold on! Here the mystery deepens, because there is not one Ellery Queen-our hero; not twoour hero and his author; but threeEllery Queen, detective, and his two coauthors. Total world sales of Queen titles since 1929 have already reached 45 millions, which is best-selling in anybody’s language. Long ago, of course, Mr. Queen moved off the confines of the printed wage. His kind of smooth manner went over well in films and radio, and the Ellery Queen show was on the air in the United States from 1939 to 1950. Like many another radio character hot on the scent of even greater popularity Ellery went over to television and there he’s sitting very pretty still. A series of The Adventures ‘of Ellery Queen have now been personally selected’ by Manfred B. Lee (co-author, with his cousin Frederic Dannay, of the famous character). These scripts have been produced in Australia to make an unusual kind of mystery show. Each of the private eye’s adventures is self-con-tained. For each show, besides the regular corpus inanime, another more-or-less ‘willing victim is first of all introduced to listeners, then ushered into an audition booth, where he hears most of the exciting tale. Then he is invited to give

his solution of the case, Most often he is wrong and he and radio listeners are left marvelling at the ingenuity of that wily and practised team of professional dupesters, Messrs. Lee and Dannay. Charles Tingwell plays Ellery Queen and his guest list includes such varied personalities as Frank Clune, Robert Newton, Gene Krupa, the artist William Dobell, Adrian Quist, the boxer Jimmy Carruthers, Darby Munro, Chips Rafferty, and Professor Harry Messell, Head of the School of Nuclear Physics, Sydney University, «~ Heseeeee ¢ Ong tear e nas Even more intétesting to thé unfanatical derecty rey fan is e strange mystery of "Ellery Queen" himself. These two. young men from Brooklyn, aged 24 and 25, at the height of the depression, entered a detective-story competition. Much to their surprise they won, but the magazine failed before their effort was printed. However, a publisher took their first novel The Spanish Hat Mystery, and it sold 9000 copies. The two authors reasoned that to make a living writing Queen novels they would have to turn out four a year, which would flood the market. They decided to become Barnaby Ross as well, who wrote stories about a detective called Drury Lane. They kept up an elaborate anonymity, even wearing masks to attend promotion parties publicising their books. Once they teamed up for a debating tour, one impersonating Queen and the other Ross, The two do not collaborate in person. They exchange all their ideas by telephone. and have managed to persuade the tax collector to deduct their astronomical telephone bills as business expenses. For each novel one manipulates the plot while the other does the writing and, as like as not, the process will then be reversed. Lee is an avid stamp collector, while Dannay collects-of all things-detective novels. The Adventures of Ellery Queen will be heard from ZB stations at 9.0 p.m. each Wednesday, beginning April 13, and from 2ZA at the same time each Fridav night, beginning April 15.