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From a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master: three novellas and two short stories featuring "the prince of American detective fiction. . . . He's one of the great who never palls" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). "Ellery Queen is the American detective story." —Anthony Boucher, author of Nine Times Nine The amateur theater company of Wrightsville is dying a slow and painful death. Every production is worse than the last, and the backers are about to pull the plug when the director reaches for his ace in the hole: the always-reliable production The Death of Don Juan. For the lead, he digs up faded Broadway star Foster Benedict, whose name is enough to sell out the run. But on opening night, Benedict makes a hash of the first act . . . and doesn't show up for the second. When he's found in his dressing room with a knife buried in his back, it's clear that the libertine's death has come a bit too soon. World-famous detective Ellery Queen is in the audience, and in this novella—as well as in the other stories collected in Queens Full—he proves that Don Juan doesn't have a monopoly on adventure.
Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen has a somewhat convoluted history. In the late 1920's, cousins Daniel Nathan and Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky decided to embark on a writing partnership. They chose pen names: Frederic Dannay (Nathan) and Manfred Bennington Lee (Lepofsky) and then invented a detective, dubbing him "Ellery Queen."The character of Ellery Queen first appeared in "The Roman Hat Mystery" in 1929 and was an immediate success. Ellery was described as an elegant, analytical amateur sleuth who often worked alongside his father, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York City Police Department. The Queen stories also had an interesting hook. They helped popularize a new type of crime story - the "fair-play" detective mystery - which summarized clues and challenged the readers to identify the culprit beforehand.As the character grew in popularity, the two authors began to expand his reach. Soon books began to appear with "Ellery Queen" as the author. The character appeared in magazines, radio, television, films, and comic books. Eventually, the cousins began to hire outside ghost writers to create the Queen novels and stories and published collections and anthologies of crime fiction. By the 1940's, Ellery Queen was the most popular American mystery writer, selling over 150 million books.
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