Season 1 (1/3)

"The Three R's"
 09-10-39 :60:00*
Adapted as "The Three R's" in  EQMM, 9/46 and in The Calendar of Crime (1952).  In the condensed version There Was An Old Woman was  mentioned, in the '46  EQMM version The Murderer was a Fox (sic) and in the printed Calendar version The Origin of Evil.
Guest Armchair Detectives: four undergraduates from Midwest colleges.
Repeated condensed as "The College Crime" 09-14-44 and 09-16-44 (Episode 195)

When at the beginning of a new academic year students and teachers return to the classrooms, Ellery is hired by the administration of Barlowe College to locate a Poe scholar who vanished in the Ozarks during the summer. His finds some baffling clues: a detective-story manuscript, a skeleton with two missing fingers.

West Coast only

"The Blue Curse"
09-17-39 :60:00*
Repeated 02-04-40 (Episode 34)
Guest Armchair Detectives: four winners of a write-in contest

"Every mystery script has to have a focal clue on which the action hinges," George Zachary says. "The clue is usually some tiny detail in the story—a slot machine, a date, a baseball score board—but it must be the give-away to the murderer's identity. Unless it is perfectly correct in itself, people write in and criticize the solution."

West Coast only

During October 1939 Ted de Corsia replaced Howard Smith as Sergeant Velie.

From an audience of 30 visitors to the broadcast, four are to be chosen to comprise the armchair detective quartet. 

"The Woman from Nowhere"
10-01-39 :60:00*
Guest Armchair Detectives: Wally Butterworth and Parks Johnson (co-hosts of radio's Vox Pop program) and four audience members

A pawnbroker moves with his family from one house to another.  To his astonishment he finds they find the body of a mysterious  woman in a trunk in the basement

According to Mike Nevins a few minutes of this episode still exist. Sadly the sound quality is very poor and only the conversation of the guest armchair detectives is heard.

Kenneth Roberts, announcer for the Ellery Queen show, looked as though he needed a good night's sleep. Well, he did; he was up all night pacing the floor of the hospital where his frau gave birth to a son as dawn approached. (Radio Guide 39-11-10)
Note: Tony, Kenneth's son was born on 10-22-39

As it usually happens, all members of the cast are not in the studio when the mystery is finally solved. So the members of the cast have made up a pool, each chipping in a dime and then guessing who the murderer is. Actor Ted de Corsia has won it three times now, with Robert Strauss a close second with two wins. People were suspecting De Corsia of having inside information, but we can vouch for the difficulty of finding out any dope before the show begins. We went to a recent broadcast and tried to get Actor Ray Hedge to tell us who the murderer was. He wouldn't so much as give us the initials. When the show was over we learned that Ray Hedge played the murderer. (39-10-29 Jack Sher, The Port Arthur News)

... An interesting revelation is the explanation of the radio detective's odd name. The authors of the series, Manny Lee and Fred Dannay, wanted to compound a name for their hero that would become well-remembered. They decided, since Q was the most unusual alphabetic letter, and then, since "Queen" presented definite picture, that was to be their figure's last name. "Ellery" was chosen for its rare application, and thereupon the completed pseudonym was tested on the friends of Dannay and Lee for tenacity to the memory. The name stuck in all cases tried and it now sticks in the minds of millions of Sunday night listeners all over the nation.   
                         (39-11-18 Mason City Globe-Gazette)

 "The Black Secret"     (1)
12-10-39 :60:00*
Guest Armchair Detectives:  four unidentified guests
Repeated condensed as "The Dark Secret" 06-08-44 and 06-10-44 (Episode 181)

Ellery and Nikki go undercover as clerks in a rare-book shop where some valuable works were stolen. Then the co-owner is murdered.

Ellery solves three mysteries in a bookstore, and doing so he not only explains a dying message but competes with a rival detective Mike Callahan; who appeared in several of the early radio mysteries. (2)

"...Two boys, ages fifteen and seventeen, walked into a New York department store with a trick box designed to conceal stolen books. Caught, they confessed they had picked up the idea of the novel way to steal novels from an Ellery Queen broadcast, "The Missing Manuscript." They are on probation." (Movie Radio Guide, Feb 17.1940)
(Note: There was no episode by that name, but "The Black Secret" script fits the description exactly)

"The Dying Scarecrow" 
aka "The Scarecrow Man" (1)
01-07-40 :60:00*
Guest Armchair Detectives: Marge Kerr, Russell Markert (promoter), George Shoemaker and Helen Sioussat (radio producer/director)
Repeated condensed as "The Scarecrow and the Snowman" 1-20-44 and 1-22-44 (Episode 161)

In July Ellery, Nikki, the Inspector and Velie are driving through the Midwestern arm country. They stop to take home movies of a picturesque scarecrow and find a knifed man inside the scarecrow outfit. The victim survives but remains unidentified and vanishes from the local hospital soon afterwards. Six months later, Ellery and his entourage return to the area during a blizzard and discover the same man, inside a  snowman in a farmyard only this time very dead....

"The Anonymous Letters"
01-21-40 :60:00*
Guest Armchair Detectives (East): George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert E.Lee (5 people with famous names)

ELLERY QUEEN GUESTS BEAT FAMOUS NAMES
Visitors will attempt to solve Adventure of the Anonymous Letters on CBS show George and Martha Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin and Robert E. Lee - these are the armchair detectives who have accepted Ellery Queen's challenge to beat him to the solution of the Adventure of the Anonymous Letters over Columbia network.
Mr. and Mrs. George Washington are respectively, a US postal carrier and housewife of Caldwell, N.J. Napoleon Bonaparte, aged nineteen, is a New York University senior and business manager of The Medley, a college publication. Benjamin Franklin is an attorney and Robert E. Lee an illustrator of crime stories for newspapers and magazines. The latter three are New Yorkers.
Abraham Lincoln of New Jersey and Ulysses S. Grant of New York were unable to accept the CBS sleuth's challenge to appear on the program.
          (Buffalo Courier-Express, Sunday, Jan 21, 1940)

To find the individual musical motif of a mystery, Lyn Murray studies an Ellery Queen script for hours. For "The Anonymous Letters" adventure the theme had to suggest mischief yet forecast ominous results. To complement the previous episode "The Woman in Black," a ghost story, the melodic theme had to be eerie, fantastic. (The Harrisburg Telegraph)

"Captain Kidd's Bedroom"
02-11-40 :60:00*
Repeat of "The Lost Treasure" 09-24-39 (Episode 15)
Adapted as "The Needle's Eye" (EQMM, 8/51) and collected in Calendar of Crime, 1952 
Guest Armchair Detectives: three/four experts
Repeated condensed as "The Buried Treasure" 04-27-44 and 04-29-44 (Episode 175)

Ellery investigates the husband of the niece of a retired explorer. When visiting his island he runs into a treasure hunt and the explorer gets murdered ...

Radio Thriller Puts Kidd On “Jorgan ’s Island”
Those who listened in on the Ellery Queen hour over WABC last Sunday evening could easily discern that the scene of the play was Gardiner’s Island, although it was listed as an Island two miles off the coast of Montauk Point, owned by one "Jorgan."
Ellery Queen's phantasmagoria was the equal of any of Sherlock Holmes laudanum-spiked pipe dreams.
Ellery unerringly hit on the solution to the crime, and three experts in the studio made a feeble attempt to solve the crime fifteen minutes before the closing curtain.
You see there a room in the old Manse on Jorgan's Island occupied by Captain Kidd in the seventeenth century. The old boy was said to have buried treasure on the Island, to some one or other he imparted the message that "he who would find the treasure, must look through the eye of the needle.” Queen takes a trip to Jorgan's Island, coming out at Montauk Point and being ferried across by none other than the proprietor himself, Mr. Jorgan. They are met at the dock on the Island, by “Silver” the one-legged caretaker.
Plots and intrigue develop at a fast pace and some confusion. Suffice it to say' that Queen discovers that the “eye of the needle” refers to a design on the rare old wallpaper in Kidd's bedroom, presumably not re-decorated since the departure of fair William in 1695. Poking a broom handle through the design, Queen "takes a bead” on a hill on the east  shore of the Island, and, digging there, finds a chest full of gold, silver and platinum jools. (Clue No.1) No sooner the treasure trove is recovered than Jorgan is found shot in Kidd's bedroom. Jorgan had fired his pistol, but no bullet hole is found in the room and examination discloses no wound on any one on the Island (clue No. 2) enter a guy posing as an English jook and stage-English wife—a Scotland Yard agent, one Viborg (a nasty individual) etc etc   ad nauseam.
Who done it? Give up? Well ya see, the jools is a plant by the English jook who is none other than a desperate international crook. He buries the loot on the island with the connivance of the wooden legged caretaker, invents the yam about looking through the needless eye so that the “ice” can be "discovered” and then peddled legitimately as Kidd's treasure. The platinum settings (Clue No. 1) done him in as Queen showed that this had not been used until 1900 for jewelry.
The wooden legged bloke, Silver, did the shooting, because Jorgan's bullet was lodged in his wooden leg (clue No. 2) hence no bullet hole in the room and no wounded person on the Island.
Queen announced that his program would be continued as a thirty minutes feature beginning in two weeks, but here for once he failed to give any logical reason why.
Montauk Point received about six or eight mentions in the play, the “Suffolk County police" one or two but no - distinguishable local names. As Colonel Bradley so often said about modem inventions, including the scourage known as "radio","Ah, the marvelous workings of the wheelbarrow!"
            (The East Hampton Star, Thursday Feb 15, 1940)

"The Last Man Club"
02-18-40 :60:00*
Repeat of 6-25-39 (Episode 2)
Guest Armchair Detectives: unknown
Repeated condensed as "The Disaster Club" on 01-06-44 and 01-08-44 (Episode 159)

When Ellery and Nikki witness a hit-and-run,  the victim's dying words lead them into the affairs of a survivor-takes-all-group to which the dead man belonged.

George Zachary, program originator, announced that Queen Fans have been given the opportunity to select the mystery that they have most enjoyed.