Mystery Men - authors behind pseudonym Ellery Queen have enduring influence

National Review, March 6, 2000 by S. T. Karnick

Queen's influence is hard to overestimate. Roman Hat and its successors established what quickly became known as the "traditional" American mystery (rather ironically, given its newness). Immensely popular authors such as Rex Stout (creator of Nero Wolfe), Cornell Woolrich, Erie Stanley Gardner, and Craig Rice (FDR's favorite) quickly created their own variations on Queen's fusion of toughness and intellect. Even Dashiell Hammett, the most prestigious of hard-boiled authors, tried it, with his last and most likable novel, The Thin Man, from 1934. And Dannay began a long, influential career as critic, editor, historian, and anthologist, tirelessly promoting the genre, establishing its pedigrees and clarifying its history, finding and championing new authors (such as Jorge Luis Borges, whom he was the first American editor to publish), and bringing the new tradition to radio, film, and eventually television.

Perhaps most importantly, Dannay restlessly sought innovations in his own fiction. Queen quickly became a pioneer in the use of religious motifs, complex character relationships, black humor, and ambitious subject matter such as racism, eugenics, and original sin. No less important was the great detective's emotional attachment to his cases, another characteristic incorporated from hard-boiled fiction. In some of the books, notably Ten Days' Wonder (1948) and Cat of Many Tails (1949), Ellery's actions cause additional deaths, and his anguish over his presumption and intellectual arrogance gives these stories additional depth and lasting interest.

Cat of Many Tails, concerning the strangulation murders of six people during a hot summer in New York City, shows the amount of action, psychological insight, and social observation Queen brought to the puzzle mystery. While Ellery and his father try to discern the pattern behind the murders and identify the killer, sensational newspaper and radio coverage whips the public into a frenzy, vigilante groups rise up, and the city bursts into lethal riots. After an exhaustive police investigation and some bravura reasoning by Ellery, the police set a trap for the killer, but before Ellery realizes that they have captured the wrong person, more deaths occur. Ellery resolves to quit his "glorious career of [bumbling] masquerading as exact and omnipotent science," but a wise professor dissuades him, avowing that the "great and true lesson" the detective should learn from the story is, quoting from the Gospel of Mark, "There is one God; and there is none other but He."

Ellery's initial unquestioning belief in rationalism is undermined and ultimately destroyed in these middle-period fictions, especially the novelette "The Lamp of God" and the Wrightsville mysteries set in a fairly typical American hamlet, of which 1942's Calamity Town is a classic. Although Queen's devotion to the puzzle sometimes hindered character development and philosophical depth, his best books meticulously explored the limits of human ingenuity and free will. As critic Francis Nevins Jr. noted of Queen's Tragedy of Y, "Although rooted in a genre that has traditionally been oriented to reason, order, and optimism, Y evokes depths of tragic despair that are virtually without parallel in the history of crime fiction."