Ellery Queen - Novels As Barnaby Ross

Novels As Barnaby Ross

Beginning in 1932, the cousins wrote four novels using the pseudonym Barnaby Ross about Drury Lane, a Shakespearean actor who had retired from the stage due to deafness and was consulted as an amateur detective. The novels also featured Inspector Thumm (at first of the New York police, then later a private investigator) and his crime-solving daughter Patience. The Drury Lane novels are in the whodunit style. The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y are variations on the locked room mystery format. The Tragedy of Y bears some resemblance to the Ellery Queen novel There Was an Old Woman: both are about eccentric families headed by a matriarch.

In the early 1930s, before Dannay and Lee's identity as the authors had been made public, "Ellery Queen" and "Barnaby Ross" staged a series of public debates in which one cousin impersonated Queen and the other impersonated Ross, both of them wearing masks to preserve their anonymity. According to H.R.F. Keating, "People said Ross must be the wit and critic Alexander Woollcott and Queen S.S. Van Dine..., creator of the super-snob detective Philo Vance, on whom 'Ellery Queen' was indeed modeled."

The cousins also allowed the Barnaby Ross name to be used as a house name for the publication of a series of historical novels by Don Tracy. (See Ellery Queen (house name).) From the 1940s, republications of the Drury Lane books were mostly under the Ellery Queen name.