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Buy from Crippen and Landru: The Zanzibar Shirt and others Stories - James Holding (1907-1997) This author write a part of the Ellery Queen Jr novels, and decided to write a series of short stories about fictional sleuths King Danforth and Martin Leroy, two collaborative mystery writers (whose character was named Leroy King) on their own around-the-world cruise with their wives. The cases on the high seas are masterpieces of deductions and logic, following the smallest clues to their logical deductions.
The Misadventures of Ellery Queen edited by Josh Pachter &‎ Dale C. Andrews features stories classic pastiches, parodies and homages. 16 stories by a wide variety of authors, all written (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) as homages to, and parodies and pastiches of, the character -- and writing team -- known as "Ellery Queen". INTRODUCTION: Elementary Questions, by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews INTRODUCTION: Sorely Missed Adventures, by Richard Dannay INTRODUCTION: The Sincerest Form of Flattery, by Rand Lee THE MYSTERY OF THE RED BALLOONS, by Thomas Narcejac, translated by the RK Jones DYING MESSAGE, by Leyne Requel THE GILBERT AND SULLIVAN CLUE, by Jon L. Breen OPEN LETTER TO SURVIVORS, by Francis M. Nevins THE REINDEER CLUE, by Edward D. Hoch THE BOOK CASE, by Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu TEN MONTHS' BLUNDER, by J.N. Williamson THE ENGLISH VILLAGE MYSTERY, by Arthur Porges ELROY QUINN’S LAST CASE, by Dennis M. Dubin THE NORWEGIAN APPLE MYSTERY, by James Holding THE MAN WHO READ ELLERY QUEEN, by William Brittain E.Q. GRIFFEN EARNS HIS NAME, by Josh Pachter THE LAST CHECK, by Patricia McGerr THE DEATH OF THE MALLORY QUEEN, by Lawrence Block THE RANSOM OF EQMM #1, by Arthur Vidro THE TEN-CENT MURDER, by Joseph Goodrich You can also order your copy by clicking the banner above...
This month at Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's iPod page...

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc has for some years now the privilege of representing the complete works of Ellery Queen. As of this year they also publish nine eBook editions of the Ellery Queen novels. These downloads are available through the usual channels listed on their own page here.

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Q.B.I.: Covers added since April 2018: 58 better and 20 new covers. The latter corresponding with the red numerals in the list. Latest additions made on Sep 16. 2018: 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

`November 4. 2018- April 18. 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.

`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.

`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

`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)

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.

`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...

`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. It seems like Ellery Queen only used the Duesenberg whenever he was not residing in N.Y. It's an 1924 open two seater with a "Dickey seat" in the back and a counter which shows 215000 km (Finishing Stroke).The Duesenberg was a symbol of wealth and the luxury dream car of Americans. It is only as second hand car Ellery could afford this vehicle. It's a second hand... Click here or on the cover to read more...

`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...

`July 1. 2018` William Smith played Richard Queen in some 10 episodes of the *Ellery Queen* radio series. He is the last actor to get his "in-depth" biography here ... not without good reason. Although the internet has made it easier to research biographical information about many actors otherwise long forgotten, when it comes to correctly identifying someone the unending stream of information available on the internet can present its own difficulties. "Bill Smith" unfortunately is a combination of two very common names. This makes mis-identification a real risk. "The" Bill Smith we're looking for isn't William Smith born on March 24. 1933. This last actor who, in my mind, forever will be Falconetti (Rich Man, Poor Man), did start his acting career at an early age. Physical appearances aside, he simply could not have been the actor who took on the roles 'our' Bill Smith played. The current online information on both of these actors tends to be sadly scrambled. Click on his picture to read the information we have sifted through and found to be correct.

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...

`June 2. 2018` This month's mystery podcast offered on the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine website is Dale Andrews' Ellery Queen pastiche, "Literally Dead," which the author himself recorded for EQMM during the recent Malice Domestic convention in Bethesda, Maryland. Click and enjoy! It's his third Ellery pastiche -- the first, "The Book Case," is included in The Misadventures of Ellery Queen, co-edited by Josh Pachter and Dale and available on Amazon.
Ellery Queen really came in all different "shapes and sizes". One more successful than the other. Bill Owen is most famous as "King of Trivia" but also portrayed Ellery in the nationally syndicated radio series *Ellery Queen*'s Minute Mysteries (1965-67). It ran for many years on radio stations. ... (click on picture for more)

`May 17. 2018` Mystery book maven Otto Penzler has started another new initiative, Penzler Publishers. The new house will release its first six books this fall under the American Mystery Classics imprint. American Mystery Classics, Penzler said, will feature “traditional mystery stories” by some of the most popular writers from what he called the "golden age of detective fiction," which he said ran from the end of World War I through World War II. The new books will be released in both hardcover and trade paperback, but not as e-books. Penzler said his inspiration to launch the imprint by the fact that British publishers have been successfully releasing mystery reprints from this time period. And, he added, no company in the U.S. has followed suit. “We’re not doing the hardboiled guys that Vintage does,” Penzler explained. Instead, he went on, his imprint will focus on authors such as Ellery Queen and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Another motivation for creating the new company was to meet the needs of customers who have requested, both in his bookstore and in notes on his website, print copies of classics available now in only in e-book format. Relying on sales of books through his Mysterious Bookshop as well as his Mysterious Press.com e-bookstore, Penzler also found that traditional mysteries were the most in demand. The Queen book that is part of the inaugural list is The Chinese Orange Mystery. Penzler will release another six books in March 2019. By 2020, he said he hopes to be releasing 24 books annually. `(Source: Publishers Weekly`)

`May 10. 2018` Although Dannay once recalled there was talk of an EQ newspaper comic strip it is said nothing came of it. Starting September 30, 1946 the newspaper The Wilkes-Barre Record ran the first in a series of eight mystery novelettes by famous detective fiction writers. Each story was contained in six installments. Starting with "A Tale of Two Women" by Dashiell Hammett it also included: "The Adventure of the House of Darkness" by Ellery Queen (from Oct 7. to Oct 12. 1946), "Borrowed Crime" by William Irish, "Cocaine" by Cornell Woolrich, "Death Rides the Train" by Eric Stanley Gardner, "The Mystery of The Spotted Pup" by Dorothy D. Hughes, "The Seventh Murder" by Carroll John Daly and "Intruder at Scotland Yard" by Eric Ambler. Read more here ...

`April 22. 2018` Anniversaries/birthdays ... always a mix of emotions. On the one hand a year of set backs and even a loss of friends to look back to and on the other hand accomplishments and things to look forward to. Even considering it's the 19th birthday of this site, Ellery Queen-wise, we still have something to look forward to. Let me take you through a string of thoughts: Jeffrey Marks' biography on Ellery Queen makes good progress and could hit the shelves this year... Jeffrey also stood at the helm at Crippen & Landru publication of The Zanzibar Shirt and others Stories by James Holding (see below). An, as usual at C&L, very fine edition, features amongst others "The Norwegian Apple Mystery" the very same story also included in The Misadventures of *Ellery Queen* co-edited by Josh Pachter &‎ Dale C. Andrews. Josh informed us that perhaps thanks to the enthusiastic review in the new Spring issue of MYSTERY SCENE and the backcover ad on the new May/June issue of EQMM, the Kindle edition of Dale Andrews' and my MISADVENTURES OF ELLERY QUEEN has climbed up to #68 in its category on Amazon. Dale proudly refers to the review available at the site of Larque... Josh wonders, as a challenge to the reader, if they can make it into the Top 50 or even the Top 10? We hope so, it would make an already good year for fans of Ellery Queen even better, no small feat for an author who almost 90 years ago wrote his first story...