EDITORIAL
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Q.B.I.: Covers
added since April 2018:
109 better and 66 new covers. The latter corresponding with
the red numerals in the
list.
Latest additions made on Feb. 9. 2019:        April 2017 - April 2018: 51 better and 106 new covers April 2016 - April 2017: 131 better and 436 new covers April 2015 - April 2016: 10 better and 185 new covers April 2014 - April 2015: 18 better and 103 new covers |
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February 9. 2019 - April 18.1999
Barnaby Ross was in many ways a sidekick
invented by two clever marketing men. Considered
to be among EQ's finest work and true classics
of the genre, it starred
Drury Lane
in four novels of 1932 - 1933. With the fourth
contribution to the series the cousins stopped
publishing Ross books simply because, whilst
taking them as long to write, the sales weren't
as good. For the same reason the Drury Lane
series was republished under Ellery
Queen's own name..
Forgotten Books' Classic
Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to
regenerate facsimiles of historically important
writings. |
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January 26. 2019
In 1930 Fred Dannay married Mary Beck, they
stayed together until her death, July 4. 1945
(aged 37). After she died he left Great Neck,
Long Island, and moved into that two-family
house in Brooklyn with Mary's sister Shirley and
husband Murray, and their daughter Joan
(b.1939). Fred had purchased the house. Two
years later Fred remarried Hilda Wiesenthal (a
relative of Simon Wiesenthal), who was the widow
of a doctor, Isadore Silverman, who died in the
Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The
newlywed Dannays then bought and moved to a
small home in the quiet Larchmont on 29 Byron
Lane. |
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January 1. 2019
Happy New Year to
everything Ellery Queen!
Aya Fukushima (Boon Fukushima) is a Japanese freelance illustrator and textile designer who surprised us with this rendition of famous photograph of Manfred B. Lee and Fred Dannay (Picture courtesy of Aya Fukishima). We've given it a fitting place in our "museum", it'll show up in the "Pastiche section" of this site. Click here ... |
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December 15. 2018
On June 15. 1981 Fred
Dannay and his wife Rose attended the third Crime
Writers' International Congress which was held in Stockholm. The
international jury, with Fred in it, chose the unknown Frank Sisk, a
65 year old American journalist, as winner in the short-story competition
with "A visit with Montezuma". Which not only resulted in a
publication but also a Saab Turbo. Many detective
writers attended.
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TIP: Interested
readers should know most of the pictures used on
the website have long descriptions with
background information sometimes not included in
the text on the same page. Microsoft's Internet Explorer
used to have this feature activated as a
standard. Firefox users wanting this can install an add-on called 'Popup ALT Attribute'. Makes a big difference, believe us. When installed pointing at a picture results in details or additional information. The above example shows the additional information provided when you move the cursor over a picture. |
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December 1. 2018 Next March will see the publication of Frederic Dannay, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and the Art of the Detective Short Story by Laird R. Blackwell. This critical study presents the first thorough examination of the role Queen played in the flourishing of the detective-crime short story with particular focus on the importance of Frederic Dannay as editor of EQMM and scores of short story anthologies. Many of the authors  ("Old
Masters," "New Masters," and "tec tyros" alike),
detectives, and stories that Queen promoted and
championed are listed and described, including
authors who won Edgars, EQMM Contests,
Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, famous authors from
other genres such as Baum, Borges, Dreiser,
Whitman, Wells, and even William Butler Yeats,
"lost and forgotten" stories of classic authors,
and auspicious debuts of authors and detectives
who were to become famous. With over 50 years as
author, historian, and editor, Queen was the
detective-crime short story's "guardian angel,
patron saint, and publisher." Without the
influence of Queen, the detective-crime short
story may not have survived, for Queen was "the
last bastion of short mystery fiction"; he was
"the detective-crime short story." As author of the popular Ellery Queen novels and short stories, as literary historian and critic, and especially as editor of the renowned Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine-- Ellery Queen was the single greatest force in the mid-1900s for the survival and health of the detective-crime short story. Queen's indefatigable and enthusiastic promotion of his favorite form of fiction was vital to its continuing popularity after the passing of Doyle and Chesterton and Christie and Hammett and its other famous authors of the early- and mid-20th Century. Click on the cover to pre-order! |
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November 4. 2018
1999 Actor Ken Swofford died Thursday, his grandson Brandon Swofford announced. The red-headed Swofford portrayed the determined reporter  Frank
Flannigan on the admired but
short-lived 1975-76 NBC series
Ellery Queen, starring Jim
Hutton, and he recurred as Lt.
Catalano on several episodes of
another sleuthing series, Angela
Lansbury's Murder, She Wrote. Swofford frequently played
lawmen of various stripes, doing
so on other shows. He was 85.Only last December 2017 we lost actor Tom Reese after a brief illness. Tom played Sergeant Velie in the same Ellery Queen series. |
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November 2. 2018 Information Please (NBC Red) ran from 1938 to 1946, in this series of quiz programs listeners could submit questions to a panel of experts. Money was paid to those whose questions were used, and more prizes were awarded to listeners whose questions stumped the panel. On September 18. 1942 the panelists were series regulars John Kieran and Franklin Pierce Adams and guests Christopher Morley and Orson Welles. After announcer Milton Cross explained the rules, the panelists answered questions on topics that included history, popular and classic literature, silent movies, and geography. Some of the questions dealt with Welles's radio and theater career. Mystery writer "Ellery Queen" submitted a question about fictional detectives and stumped the panel for which he was awarded a war bond and a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Read more here. |
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October 13. 2018 When Josh Pachter began work on Misadventures (2017) he re-read The Tragedy of Errors and got inspired when he found three cases for something Ellery Queen called "The Puzzle Club". The central concept of the five-story EQ miniseries — which Isaac Asimov later co-opted for his much longer run of Black Widowers stories — was that six friends gathered at irregular intervals for a gourmet dinner, but before sitting down to eat one member of the group was ensconced in what was called “The Puzzle Chair,” and the other five presented an invented mystery for the evening’s designated solver to tackle. His idea for a brief puzzle story seemed well suited for the Puzzle Club, so he wrote it up, titled it “A Study in Scarlett!” and submitted it to EQMM. Janet Hutchings liked it, got approval by the Dannay and Lee heirs and it should be appearing in the magazine in 2019. Enjoying the experience Josh set out to write four more Puzzle Club pastiches, and then after they’d all been published in EQMM, intends collecting the original five and his new five in a single volume: The Puzzle Club, by Ellery Queen and Josh Pachter. Read more here |
A challenge to the reader: if you think you
could add additional
information (even
corrections) please do so...
 You can reach us by clicking
the "Uncle Sam" icon (right).
We've always appreciate
corrections and additional information, however
small the detail may be... |
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October 1. 2018 Darlene Cypser is an attorney, author, and historian living in Colorado. She's more well-known among  Sherlockians than
Queenians, though she has confessed several
times that Ellery Queen was her
first love. .She thinks what Ellery Queen needs for a revival is not a new movie or television show, or even necessarily new books. She thinks it is the same thing that has kept the Sherlock Holmes community so vibrant for so long: 1) Gatherings of fellow devotees, and 2) The Game. She's convinced introducing both could go a long way towards the goals for Ellery Queen mentioned on this website. After re-reading her collection of Ellery Queen books she once gain found herself facing a nagging question, a story that had to be told. "My method of fleshing out a Canonical world is different from writing a pastiche. ... For my current work I decided that I only needed to determine the chronology of the first nine books, which constitute what Francis Nevins called the first period." Subsequently she offered that piece of work to this site. So you're able to enjoy it by clicking here or on her picture below.  (Photo courtesy Darlene Cypser) |
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September 17. 2018 Defining pastiches is open for discussion. One possible definition would be that it exaggerates the reality. Surely one of the definitions. If so then caricatures also fall into this category. Sort of...
Much to our surprise we found a caricature of the nephews "Manning Lee" (sic) and "Fred Dannay" drawn by Thor Fredric (Tor Fredriksson, 1913-1961) who did cartoons for the Swedish language press in Finland during the 1930s and through WWII. After the war he founded a sports magazine and spent less time drawing. His wartime efforts show that he could've had an interesting career in that direction, too. Because of the Finnish/Swedish language barrier, Thor Fredric's cartoon work has been all but forgotten, until some samples of it were rediscovered in a book about WWII cartoons in 2014. Picture Courtesy Jyrki Vainio. We also added the caricature to the pastiche pages here... |
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September 1. 2018
Fred
Duesenberg cars were made for success. During
the decade of the twenties, his automobiles won
the Indianapolis 500 in 1924, 1925, and 1927,
while finishing second or third in four of the
other seven Indianapolis events. |
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August 3. 2018 JJMcC, stockbroker, was a close friend to the Queens and although he had only recently moved to Italy he had met the Queens several times in totally different circumstances. How long ago it now seems since El asked him to write the foreword for his first "opi". JJMcC has been forgotten by most of the Queen followers. In several translations he was totally discarded as just another writer who wrote a 'upbeat' intro to a detective story. At first his labored articulation as oracle to the Ellery Queen novels discouraged neither Ellery's publisher nor the omnipotent gentleman himself. Thanks to JJMcC Ellery's fictionalized memoirs were published! He carried the burden of keeping the Queen's secret with some difficulty. Queen père and fils were major cogs in the wheel of N.Y. City's police machinery during the 20s and 30s. The secret of their real names was one secret they demanded to be kept. A secret never revealed. Click here for more... |
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