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After years of researching Ellery Queen (begun, in fact, long before this website existed!) I still occasionally stumble upon items that don't fall into one of the many categories provided here. Perhaps we need a new section for matters that sometimes are only indirectly connected to Ellery Queen. While tangential to our primary purpose here, such matters still might be interesting to Ellery Queen fans.

Such a story popped up on August 2. 2012 in Florida...




Photo of Verna Jane Janie Browning, center, with two school friends, believed to be taken in the mid-1940s. Gloria Blackburn, 62, purchased a copy of The Devil to Pay, a mystery by Ellery Queen at the Amish Country Store in Largo on July 24. When she opened it, Blackburn found her 85-year-old mother's signature, dated 1941. She sent a photo of the signature to her sister, who lives with her mom. The mom confirmed it was hers and that the book once belonged to her when she was 14. Although she has never traveled to Florida, the book somehow made its way to Florida and into the hands of her daughter -- 71 years later. 

Websites can sometimes be a little over-enthusiastic... but you don't have to believe us! Here you find what was others thought off the Ellery Queen-books. Not to start a discussion board, just to show Ellery is still being read ... all over the globe. If you want to add a few lines please e-mail me.



A detective named Ellery Queen
Has olfactory powers so keen.
He can tell in a flash
By the scent of a gash
Who its previous tenant has been.
(Kim French)



"The fact that hardly anybody reads Ellery Queen today indicates the depths to which American mystery fiction has fallen, and the cultural politics that have afflicted it. The genre's attempts to plunder the commercial strengths of science fiction and horror have only corrupted it, replacing order and reason with ideology and sensationalism. Queen, by contrast, represented above all a love for mysteries, and through that a passion for truth."                     - Sam T.Karnick- (editor-in-chief of the Hudson Institute's magazine, American Outlook)



Where were you on the night of the 12th [I was by myself]
She went dancin’ in the dark, somebody stole her heart
Ellery Queen if you’re so keen
Won’t you help me find my sweet thing (Yeah, yeah)
from 'Whodunit' Tavares (K.St.Louis/F.Perren)

 

"I like an occasional whodunit, and for good mysteries as well as literary style, no one does it better than Ellery Queen. Read one of his books, and not only will you be puzzled and amazed as the mystery unfolds, but you will probably learn a handful of new words, too! "
                                                            - Lee Urton -




"... when I was 15 years old, I read my first Ellery Queen novel. Ellery Queen has been a profound influence on probably all aspects of my writing career. My first professional sale as a writer was to EQMM when I was 21 years old. So I actually got to correspond with, and even meet a couple of times, one of the guys who wrote under the name of Ellery Queen, whose name was Frederic Dannay. So Ellery Queen has always been a major influence on my writing." - Mike.W.Barr (comics writer)-



I discovered Ellery one rainy day in the summer of '67, when I was about 13. The EQ saga's logical and orderly, but at the same time surreal, world view fascinated me then and continue to do so today. EQ taught me how to look for patterns when I am trying to make order out of chaos -- something I use in the computer field every day. - Paul Watson -

 

"Mr. Torrance, he knew your trunk was under the stairs because you had looked everywhere else. Process of elimination, what? It's so simple Ellery Queen would laugh at it."

(extract from Stephen King's The Shining)

"I remember as a kid reading The Greek Coffin Mystery and being blown away by the cleverness and the surprise ending. After that, I gobbled all Queen's books right up. What is so interesting is how he changed (even before he started being written by a lot of other people.) The Wrightsville novels are very moving (and still retain those amazing puzzles.) I find them easier to re-read because the characterization is deeper, but the old puzzle mysteries are so intricate that they earned Queen a place as a master of the genre." Brad Friedman


  • An author often compared with Carr. I have read quite a number of their books but somehow the end always leaves me disappointed. Often the mysteries themselves are complicated and puzzling enough, but the final solutions are too fabricated and unconvincing to my taste. One of his most praised novels is The Chinese Orange Mystery but all it did to me is making me wonder whether a particular heavy-metal singer got his pseudonym after reading this book. (Anonymous from rec.arts.mystery)




Personally I think (and maybe it can sound blasphemous) that Agatha Christie is not worth half Ellery Queen, apart from some stories. Now it's up to you: I'm really blasphemous??
-  Donatella D -.




My standard of admiration is an Ellery Queen mystery novel where the entire 400 page plot hung on a single not. At the point when Ellery suddenly discovers that nowhere in this note, which is two pages long, is there the letter T. And you say to yourself, "My God, it's the most common consonant in the English language." It's a great trick. But what's an even better trick is that when you read the note, it doesn't strike you as forced or twisted in any way to create that. There is a variation on that in Bag of Bones by Stephen King - John Ebbert

 

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