Ellery Queen - Fictional Style

Fictional Style

The Queen novels are examples of the classic "fair play", whodunit mystery, textbook examples of what became known as the "Golden Age" of the mystery novel. Because the reader obtains clues in the same way as the protagonist detective, the book becomes an intellectually challenging puzzle. Mystery writer John Dickson Carr termed it "the grandest game in the world".

The early Queen novels were characterized by intricately plotted clues and solutions. In The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), The Siamese Twin Mystery, and others, multiple solutions to the mystery are proposed, a feature that also showed up in later books such as Double, Double and Ten Days' Wonder. Queen's "false solution, followed by the truth" became a hallmark of the canon. Another stylistic element in many early books (notably The Dutch Shoe Mystery, The French Powder Mystery and Halfway House) is Ellery's method of creating a list of attributes (the murderer is male, the murderer smokes a pipe, etc.). Then, by comparing each suspect to these attributes, he reduces the list of suspects to a single name, often an unlikely one.

By the late 1930s, when Ellery Queen — author and character — moved to Hollywood to try movie scriptwriting, the tone of the novels began to change along with the detective's character. Romance was introduced, solutions began to involve more psychological elements, and the "Challenge to the Reader" vanished from the books. Some of the novels also moved from mere puzzles to more introspective themes. The three novels set in the fictional New England town of Wrightsville, starting with Calamity Town in 1942, even showed the limitations of Ellery's methods of detection. According to Julian Symons, "Ellery ... occasionally lost his father, as his exploits took place more frequently in the small town of Wrightsville ... where his arrival as a house guest was likely to be the signal for the commission of one or more murders. Very intelligently, Dannay and Lee used this change in locale to loosen the structure of their stories. More emphasis was placed on personal relationships, and less on the details of investigation."

In the 1950s and 1960s, the authors tried some more experimental work, especially in three novels written by other writers, all based on detailed outlines by Dannay. The Player on the Other Side, ghost-written by Theodore Sturgeon, delves more deeply into motive than most Ellery Queen novels. And on the Eighth Day (1964), ghost-written by Avram Davidson, was a religious allegory touching on fascism. Davidson also wrote The Fourth Side of the Triangle.

Toward the end of their careers, the cousins allowed some crime novels, mainly paperback originals, to be written by various ghostwriters under the Ellery Queen name. These books did not feature the character Ellery Queen as the protagonist. They included three novels featuring "the governor's troubleshooter", Micah "Mike" McCall, and six featuring private eye Tim Corrigan. The prominent science-fiction writer Jack Vance wrote three of these original paperbacks, including the locked room mystery A Room to Die In.

There are also several collections of Ellery Queen short stories. These were praised by Julian Symons as follows "...in some ways the short story is better suited than the novel to this kind of writing... This is notable especially in the case of Ellery Queen. The best of his short stories belong to the early intensely ratiocinative period, and both The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1934) and The New Adventures (1940) are as absolutely fair and totally puzzling as the most passionate devotee of orthodoxy could wish... (E)very story in these books is composed with wonderful skill."