f we are to believe J.J. McC’s introductions, it is a well known fact that Ellery together with a wife and his father eventually retired in a small villa in the mountains of Italy. According to McC some of Ellery’s adventures were written in this Italian recluse. The Roman Hat Mystery was the first of these, followed by The French Powder Mystery, and The Dutch Shoe Mystery. The basis for those mysteries may be obscure, but we know from J.J.’s introduction that The Egyptian Cross Mystery fictionalized one of Ellery's “last” cases. Apparently this was also true of The Chinese Orange Mystery, which was based on some of Ellery’s notes that formed the basis for a fictional narrative. J.J. also tells us that the Inspector retired after 32 years of intense police work and in retirement enjoyed writing monographs on "American Crime and Methods of Detection" for a German magazine, which is not that surprising since he once studied in Germany (Heidelberg).

Some of Ellery’s successes, we are told, were never written in book form. Whilst J.J. was reading The Adventure of Ellery Queen, the great detective found himself hunting down a serial killer in Minnesota, who cut off his victims left finger. And J.J. mentioned, while meeting Ellery and their mutual friend Judge Macklin in a Russian restaurant on the East side, that Ellery had been extremely upset in not solving "The Tyrolean Case" last summer. J.J.Fallacy, as Ellery sometimes called him, tells us these stories never saw print. But we are also told that Ellery did write some stories under his own name before The Roman Hat Mystery was published. Since this was a real case J.J. explains that Ellery’s true identity had to be hidden and so it was published under an alias... Ellery Queen.

In the foreword to Halfway House Ellery points out to J.J. McC that the book could have been titled The Swedish Match Mystery, but it was not. Halfway House did, however, keep the subtitle of its predecessors “a problem in deduction.”

If we try to figure out J.J. McC’s actual identity, and the basis for his friendship with the Queens, we must, at least at first, turn back, once again, to the introductions to those first ten mysteries. We are told, for example, that J.J. lived in Rye, N.Y. for a while where he had an office. He owned a motorboat, was a backstroke-swimming champion at college and he rowed stroke-oar. Some believed that perhaps J.J. was a lawyer, and that he originally knew the Queens through connections to the New York Police.

He occasionally flew to Europe during the early days of commercial aviation. It was on one of these trips that J. J. ran into the Queens in their small Italian mountain village. Through this encounter J.J. began his quest to persuade Ellery to gather his notes on the murder of Monte Field, which led eventually to the publication of The Roman Hat Mystery. Ellery averred that as reward he could write the introduction to every Queen opus.

That did not quite happen -- J.J. McC’s introductions, as noted, appear in the first ten mysteries of Ellery Queen. But after that -- J.J. disappears. There were no more forewords. From J.J.’s perspective we could speculate that perhaps Ellery may have succumbed to pressure from his publishing company, which may have thought it better to drop J.J. McC. But in any event, J.J. McC departs, leaving his true identity as mysterious as Ellery Queen's. The introductions that we do have end with his initials, followed by a location -- e.g., Rye, N.Y. , Claremont, N.H. or Northampton, Massachusetts.

As we have noted, the first ten Ellery Queen books each contained a foreword (sometimes even an afterword) by J. J. McC. Notwithstanding the ruminations set forth above in our own “Foreword,” the character, like Ellery himself, in fact originated from the cousins' minds. We are told much about the inspector and Ellery in those early forewords, including the "fact" that the two retired Queens eventually resided in a little Italian mountain village... . Again this was part of the "staged confusion" surrounding the identity of Ellery Queen. But in later Queen mysteries, basically from Halfway House on, Ellery himself begins to change and earlier details, such as the Queens' residency in Italy, disappeared from the books. J.J.’s introductions were gone, but J.J. himself did not completely disappear.

One Ellery Queen anthology, Challenge to the Reader (1940, Blue Ribbon Book) in fact had J.J. McC. in a starring role. The anthology contains 25 short stories by famous writers where both author and main characters are disguised. The reader ultimately is provided with a Challenge to identify both. Each story is read to J.J. by Ellery himself and is followed by an afterword in which the two of them provide the solution. The first part of the book "In Which Mr. Ellery Queen Invents a New Kind of Detective Story Anthology" is a nine-page explanation of the device and has an amusing interaction between Ellery (complete with pince-nez) and J.J. (basically a "self-interview" with Dannay on detective fiction). The discussion also includes some additional information on the Queen apartment (!). On one occasion Ellery's friend J.J. McC. "dropped in to find shelter from the cold gray rain that was blurring 87th Street and Mr. Queen was properly grateful since he was fatigued from his herculean labors in the case of the Whistling Mouse (in which, if you will recall, he traced the clue of a sound from Mott Street to the International Settlement in Shanghai)." J.J. and Ellery proceed to discuss several possibilities for a new form of an anthology and even describe one that would later be the basis for the "Puzzle Club" stories!

Later, toward the end of the Queen canon, there a character J.J. Mc Cue appears in a small but crucial role in Face to Face. McCue is identified as a judge, and is described as a friend of Ellery and the Inspector. It seems reasonable to conclude that Dannay and Lee are telling us, finally, that this is the person who wrote the early forewords.

Julian Symons, in his book Great Detectives disagrees, however, concluding that Judge McCue knew the Queens but never wrote a foreword of any kind.

Symons claims to have followed a Northampton lead, through a professor of Romance Languages at Smith and a Professor Emeritus at nearby Amherst College to discover the actual identity of the elusive J.J. Mc C. He had, according to Symons, not been a lawyer, but instead was the vice-president of a large New York-based insurance company. He was a bachelor, fascinated by crime, and all his spare time had been occupied recording the Queen cases. His connection with Northampton came through his sister, who had lived in the town for more than thirty years. J.J. Mc C., according to Symons, died in 1975 ("six years ago"). Symons claimed to have visited his sister who knew little of her brother's hobby ("as she called it"). Symons used this visit as a lead-in to his own Ellery Queen pastiche, included in the book. So it might well be that this investigation is a "J.J. Mc C touch" in itself.  (1)

Finally, why did the cousins use the device of J.J. McC's foreword in the first place? At least one critic has called it "a clumsy and superfluous framing device". None of the functions these forewords fulfill are actually necessary for the story. You can skip the forewords in the early EQ books and your reading experience will arguably lack nothing except some clutter. As we mentioned earlier many translations didn't even include the forewords.

Why were these forewords written and included? One reason might be that the popular S.S. Van Dine (pseudonym for Willard Huntington Wright), who was greatly admired by Dannay and Lee and whose mysteries greatly influenced Queen's early works, employed a similar device. Van Dine’s first Philo Vance story The Benson Murder Case began with a Publisher's note followed by a foreword by S.S. Van Dine himself. Both pieces take a decidedly J.J. like approach... (2)

So Van Dine may have provided the idea for the device and Dannay, who at one point in his career was a typography consultant, surely must have been partial to look-alike/sound-alike J.J. McC. variation of S.S. Van Dine... Of course in the Queen stories author and detective were the same person, so Ellery Queen couldn't write the introductions. In came J.J.

Advertising agents Dannay & Lee went to great lengths to package their detective, to define Ellery as a crime-solver head and shoulders above the others. The inclusions of J.J.’s forewords helped to accomplish this. Writer Sarah Monette ("Packaging the Detective", 2011) dissected the accomplishments of the J.J.Mc C. foreword in The Roman Hat Mystery as follows: