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Mystery Men - authors behind pseudonym Ellery Queen have enduring influence
National Review, March 6, 2000 by S. T. Karnick
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. Thus his decline, and that of the traditional American mystery, in this time of widespread belief that there are no real truths.
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The first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, appeared 70 years ago, and it's no exaggeration to say that Queen set the standard and form of the modern American crime story. Yet the anniversary passed with little fanfare. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine dedicated an issue to its founder and namesake, and a small publisher released the outline of a final, unpublished Queen novel and other oddments, but that was about it. Almost none of Queen's books is now in print, and the few that are, are very hard to find. This is a shame. Ellery Queen was the single most important figure of the Golden Age of the American mystery, which ran from the 1930s through the '50s. Ellery Queen, as critic Anthony Boucher put it, is the American detective story.
Actually, Queen was a pair of young Manhattan ad-men, cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, whose first novel was composed for a mystery-writing contest. They showed ingenuity and foresight in using their detective's name as nom de plume, thereby giving readers only one name to remember, and the series became immediately popular. Their books have sold over 100 million copies. Between 1929 and Lee's death in 1971, they wrote 39 novels, hundreds of short stories, and countless radio scripts and film treatments. Lee typically wrote the books and stories following detailed outlines (often more than a hundred pages) created by Dannay, who formulated the plots, puzzles, characters, and themes. And though their early novels were clearly influenced by S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance books and built on a solid tradition including Doyle, Chesterton, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Earl Derr Biggers, and Melville Davisson Post, they combined these influences in a unique way that set the standard for the Golden Age of mysteries.
Before Queen, there were two distinct types of crime fiction in the U.S.: the puzzle mystery and the hard-boiled story. The puzzle form began with Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841 and was the dominant type of crime fiction until the late 1920s. These mysteries typically have a limited group of suspects and a detective who reasons out the solution based on observation and knowledge of human nature. The author "plays fair" with the reader, supplying all the clues necessary to solve the mystery before the detective reveals the answer.
The hard-boiled style started in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and tried to reflect seamier aspects of American life. The typical protagonist was a loner who lived by a strict but highly idiosyncratic moral code and outlasted the (often corrupt) police, power brokers, and criminal class to bring a small measure of justice to the weak and unprotected. Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer are among the best-known hard-boiled detectives. Whereas puzzle mysteries tended toward conservatism in their depiction of a rational world in which justice is possible, the hard-boiled form was popular among liberals for its intimation that American society was essentially unjust (and thus ripe for political change).
Queen's innovation was to give the puzzle mystery an infusion of reality from the nascent hard-boiled form. This is particularly evident in the main characters of the series. Ellery is the classic amateur detective, a la Philo Vance--an intellectual snob who wears a pincenez--but his connection to the police is plausible, for his father is Inspector Richard Queen of the NYPD. Queen pere is wise, decent, and dedicated, and their relationship is affectionate, mutually respectful, and reasonably complex. Inspector Queen's assistant, Sergeant Velie, is a stolid, trustworthy cop. This was quite a contrast to Sherlock Holmes's humorous contempt toward Scotland Yard, an attitude which had become rampant in the genre by the 1920s.
Queen soon dropped the Vance affectations, and the series became a perfect fusion of the puzzle mystery with the rising realism and toughness of the hardboiled story. One can even see the roots of the police procedural (still a staple of the genre, as evident in Ed McBain's continuing popularity) in Roman Hat, much of which is devoted to a detailed description of the NYPD's investigation of a murder in a Broadway theater. Like a police investigator, Queen arrived at his solutions through meticulous logical deduction from empirical evidence, rather than intuition or psychological insights. Dannay created the genre's most complex puzzles and fairly presented all the clues, even stating explicitly when Ellery and the reader had enough information to solve the riddle. Of course, only geniuses needed apply, but that was part of the fun.
