A Theory on Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen is one of the most prominent and influential figures in 20th-century American crime fiction. The creation of a pair of cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who decided it would be a clever bit of publicity to give their detective their own pen name, Ellery Queen emerged on the scene in 1929’s The Roman Hat Mystery. In the early books, he’s a rather snobbish young man, who stresses logic and acts as if he is of a different social class than his widowed father, Inspector Richard Queen of the NYPD. Later in the series, he’s more laid-back, down-to-earth, and amiable, and he also makes a lot more mistakes, coming up with a clever but wrong solution before (usually) identifying the true criminal.
Notably, in the early books, the authors gave Queen a backstory– he and his father retired from crime fighting long before the publication of the book. Ellery married and had a son, and they all moved to Italy, along with Djuna, the young man who performed household tasks for them. The first books are supposedly fictionalized versions of the Queens’ adventures, polished and prepared for publication by a friend. But soon, this retirement narrative is forgotten, and never mentioned again. Ellery solves crimes in New York, works for a while as a Hollywood screenwriter, discovers a small American Everytown called Wrightsville and solves murders that only seem to happen when he visits, and addresses a few other bizarre crimes in various locales. At times, Ellery seems substantially changed from his earlier appearances. Djuna disappears midway through the series, and sometimes the Queen father and son live together, and sometimes they do not.
Dannay and Lee produced many books (and radio shows and other works) starring Ellery Queen over the decades, only producing a couple of fiction novels that did not include either Ellery or his father. But in the 1950’s, when the cousins were battling health problems and writer’s block, the duo decided to hire a few ghostwriters to do some of the literary legwork for them, though they came up with the initial plots and clues, and they revised the ghostwritten books substantially. This era produced some of their most critically acclaimed novels. In the 1960’s however, a slew of ghostwriters were hired to write books under the name Ellery Queen, though none of these novels would feature Ellery. Over the last few months, I’ve read all but a handful of the original Ellery Queens, and all of the 1960’s ghostwritten Queens. The 1960’s ghostwritten Queens are, with a few exceptions, much weaker than the originals.
For years, readers have wondered about how to explain the changes in Ellery’s character. Julian Symons proposed that there were two men who were Ellery Queen: the original, and a cousin who took over the writing and detecting once the first EQ retired. I would take that idea a couple of steps further. We never see an elderly Ellery, as we would if over forty years had passed from the earliest to the latest case. In the early books, Ellery appears to only write about his own cases, in later novels he writes original novels, though there are no clues as to the detective he created or the plots of most of his books, only that they are a long, hard slog to write and he’d much rather be doing almost anything else, preferable detecting. Additionally, Inspector Queen marries again late in the series, but a couple of books later his new bride is nowhere to be found and is never mentioned in the last adventures. There are other discrepancies in Ellery’s height, attitude towards religion, and mental state. It seems to me that perhaps it was more than just the real-life Ellery Queen that became a “house name.” What if, in the fictional world of the books, Ellery Queen was a house name, and over the course of the saga, three, four, perhaps even more men took up the typewriter and published mysteries under the EQ name?
It would explain a lot. The original EQ retired to Italy. Another man wrote in NYC for a while. The Hollywood EQ, usually not working with his father, might be a different man altogether. The darker, brooding EQ of the 1950’s could be another man. Finally, the last two books feature a more blundering EQ, who gets the case totally wrong in The Fourth Side of the Triangle and it’s up to Inspector Queen to find the truth, the one time he shows up Ellery. In A Fine and Private Place, Ellery makes a terrible and humiliating false accusation, one that could have been avoided with a little simple research. Perhaps this weaker detective is yet another EQ. It would also explain the different relationships between Ellery and his “father.” Sometimes the two are quite close. In other books, the previously affable Richard Queen snaps and growls and there is no real affectionate bond between the two. Perhaps the different Ellerys– at least five, maybe more, were really ghostwriters, some being the sons or nephews of police officers, young men who wanted to have a go as mystery writers, so they signed a contract, wrote under the “house” pen name, and they tried their hands at mysteries. Of course, all the names were changed when they wrote about their adventures, and in some of the later books, the man writing and investigating under the name EQ had no police inspector relative, and instead paired up with a homicide detective with minimal liking or respect for “Ellery.”
It seems to me that this would account for a lot of the discrepancies and differences. Ellery doesn’t really age over more than four decades. Lots of character points don’t match up convincingly. Ellery Queen was not one man, but at least five men, possibly more, and these men were of radically different investigative skill and literary prowess. Also, I wonder if we ought to consider the 1960’s “ghostwritten” novels to be the books written by the various men writing under the EQ name. These books are of varying quality, reflecting the differing skills of the men who were Ellery Queen. This is my take on the mystery that was Ellery Queen– I wonder what other people might think about this?
–Chris Chan
Chris Chan’s first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released on November 3rd. His book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books on September 7th. His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there). It is also available in a Kindle edition.
