Ellery Queen was the intellectual creation of cousins from Brooklyn, New York, who wrote under the pseudonyms Manfred B. Lee (Manford Lepofsky) and Frederic Dannay (Daniel Nathan). The cousins, particularly Dannay, also edited “The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.” Their 33 novels and numerous short stories were published over a span of 42 years and were also made into movies, radio shows and several television series based on the novels.
Ellery Queen was supposedly also the pseudonym under which the detective novelist wrote up the mysteries he solved. According to his mythos, Ellery Queen was born in 1905, the son of New York Police Inspector Richard Queen. Ellery assisted his father in solving murder cases, obnoxiously ordering around the investigating police, portrayed as a cross between Keystone Kops and the Gestapo. The earliest novels were set in New York City, but Ellery moved to Hollywood in the late '30s to early 40s when Lee and Dannay moved there to write screenplays for the Queen series of movies. Disappointed with the experience, subsequent novels were set in a small New England town called Wrightsville and later moved back to New York City.
In their later years, the cousins permitted a number of the Queen stories to be written by other authors, providing the outlines and clues to be included in these ghost-written stories. Theodore Sturgeon, Avram Davidson and Jack Vance, all science fiction/fantasy writers, were some of the more famous authors to try their hands at the mystery genre during this period.
The cousins collectively won a half-dozen awards from the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1983, the Ellery Queen Award was created "to honor writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry."
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