THE EXPANDABLE CALENDAR OF
ELLERY QUEEN

When Edward D. Hoch and I were asked to write new Ellery Queen cases for the September/October 1999 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which commemorated the 70th anniversary of The Roman Hat Mystery, we first had to address a thorny question: in what period should the stories be placed? The 1920s where the saga began? The 1960s where the official saga ended? The peak decades in between? We each decided on the present. In Ed’s “The Circle of Ink,” Ellery lectures to casually-dressed college students with laptop computers, while my “The Gilbert and Sullivan Clue” includes a reference to the coming and much-feared advent of Y2K.

Our decision was an appropriate one. Like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, and quite a few other detectives long on the scene, Ellery Queen pretty much ignored the problem of aging. Just as The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) was set during the theatrical season of 192-, the principal events of the final Queen novel, A Fine and Private Place (1971), were clearly dated 1967. Ellery the sleuth always lived in the present, and his cases were often packed with current topical references. True, The Finishing Stroke (1958) flashed back to the late 1920s and gave Ellery the sleuth the same birth year, 1905, as his creators Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. But the resurgent Ellery who resurfaced in The Player on the Other Side (1963) did not seem to have aged beyond 53 or even that far, and his elderly father’s retirement in Inspector Queen’s Own Case (1956) was ignored, permitting the pair to continue through the 1960s pretty much as usual.

The Queen team sometimes went to the extent, ill-advisedly I think, of updating the allusions when their older stories were reprinted. For example, the original version of "Long Shot," their horse-racing mystery in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (1940), refers to Rosemont’s winning time in the 1937 Santa Anita Handicap, but in a 1966 Penguin reprint of The New Adventures, the reference is changed to Vulcan’s Forge’s winning time in 1949, though the rest of the story retains its 1930s feel.

When detectives are depicted on television, of course, a specific period must be decided upon, usually but not always the present. British TV sets Hercule Poirot in the 1920s and 1930s and Christie’s other famous sleuth Miss Marple in the 1950s. When Richard Levinson and William Link adapted Queen for the 1975-76 TV season, they set the stories in the late 1940s, a decision I had fun with in one of my Queen parodies featuring E. Larry Cune.
I’ve done four published stories about the awkwardly named Cune. The first of them, “The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery” (EQMM, March 1969), was written at the request of Fred Dannay, who loved parodies, and was subsequently reprinted in three anthologies. The second, published in Reverend Robert E. Washer’s fanzine Queen Canon Bibliophile (August 1969) was called “The Idea Man,” a much slighter effort that has never been reprinted. Nor have Cune’s two subsequent appearances in EQMM. “C.I.A.: The Swedish Boot Mystery” (November 1973) was too much tied to its time—C.I.A. in this instance stood for Cune’s Investigatory Archives. “The Adventure of the Disoriented Detective” (September 1976) seemed as hopelessly dated as its predecessor, but the TV series’ recent DVD release has given it a new currency. So here it is, unreprinted since its initial publication.