The Adventures of the Puzzle Club

Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery.   Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1928, when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who uses his spare time to assist his police inspector uncle in solving baffling crimes. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired Queen upon Lee’s death.

JOSH PACHTER is an author, editor, and translator. More than 140 of his short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere, and he wrote the traditional whodunit Dutch Threat and the mystery for younger readers First Week Free at the Roomy Toilet. He’s edited anthologies inspired by the songs of Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Stephen Sondheim, Lyle Lovett, the Beatles, and by the films of the Marx Brothers. His work has won two Derringer Awards and been a finalist for the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Thriller, Macavity, Lefty, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Reader Awards. He was the 2020 recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement. joshpachter.com