Puzzle Doctor

An Ellery Queen Bibliography, or, A Challenge To This Reader

UPDATE: I’ve created a new page to provide quick access to the bibliography. I’ll update the links there and try and remember to do these as well.

I’ve posted a number of Ellery Queen reviews now, so I’ve decided to set up an index as I plan to review the complete bibliography. It’s a bit of a task, as there are forty two of them and I intend to re-read the ones that I read several years ago and track down the ones that I don’t own.

To provide myself with some boundaries, I’m only going to consider the books that deal with Ellery himself or that were definitely written by Fred Dannay and/or Manfred Lee
– the list of books follows and I would appreciate it if anyone better informed than me feels that I’ve missed something out or included something that I shouldn’t of. It’s based on the Wikipedia bibliography and the only omission that I’ve made is A Study In Terror as it sounds tangential at best. Links to reviews will appear as they are created. Obviously this is going to take a while to fill up, but I’m going to try and alternate so that every other review is from the list. I’ve no intention, though, to do it chronologically, so if you’ve got a favourite, cross your fingers…

Novels Featuring Ellery Queen

Short Story Collections featuring Ellery Queen

  • The Adventures of Ellery Queen
  • The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (inc. the novella The Lamp of God)
  • Calendar of Crime
  • QBI – Queen’s Bureau of Investigation
  • Queens Full
  • QED – Queen’s Experiments In Detection

Novels not featuring Ellery Queen

Other Books

  • The Tragedy of Errors – detailed plot for an unwritten story + extras
  • The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries

11 comments

  1. Well, that was a good start. Opened up my copy of The Casebook of Ellery Queen only to find its simply The Adventures of … and The New Adventures of… stuck together. So that’s one off the list already.

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  2. There are two very important, posthumous titles missing from your list: The Tragedy of Errors and The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries.

    I posted a review of the former on my blog only yesterday, and it’s an amazing collection of previously uncollected material – comprising of a detailed plot outline of an unpublished Ellery Queen novel, short stories and an accumulation of essays and personal reminiscences. I recommend it if you haven’t read it already. The collection of radio plays likewise. They’re mostly fun, well plotted detective stories and the volume also collects several unusual plays that show an altogether different Ellery Queen (the author) than we know from the books. There’s a really dark story involving an innocent child and another one is set among a bunch of homeless men in an abandoned parking lot – not your typical GAD setting.

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  4. I agree that “A Tragedy of Errors” belongs in the list – it’s a pretty powerful outline/story in its own right, and it provides an enormous insight into the way the cousins interacted.

    You might also consider the anthology “Challenge to the Reader.” It’s a collection of short stories (one Queen story included) by a wide variety of then-popular authors, but with one enormous Queenian (?) difference: in the stories, EQ changes the name of the detective and any key associates. The idea is that the reader must identify the detective and author BY THE INTERNAL EVIDENCE – the way the detective detects, the settings, sometimes the language. It remains one of my favorite anthologies, and, I think, one of the better gimmicks for getting the reader involved in this grandest of games.

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  5. Hiya – what a fab idea of yours, well done! You do need to add THE DEVIL TO PAY (1938) from Queen’s second ‘period’ though. On the other hand, QUICK AND THE DEAD shouldn’t be there as it is just an alternate title for a paperback reprint of THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN from the 1950s – I know you loved that book, but …

    Lots of luck with the challenge mate.

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  7. Curious – I see that the GAD Wiki doesn’t include “Challenge to the Reader” in its list! But EQ (in addition to editing it) wrote afterwords to every story – identifying detective, author, and the clues, along with an introduction where he explains the idea to his fictional friend, J. J. McC.. An excerpt:

    “If in reading any story the reader is on the alert he’ll spot all the essential points of identification. The detective’s residence or the locale in which he operates: Honolulu would certainly identify Charlie Chan. The period of the story: London in the Nineties would obviously narrow the possibilities down to Sherlock Holmes and Martin Hewitt…”

    And so each story, while it keeps its original title, has the detective’s name changed. So the table of contents lists, for example: “THE LONG DINNER: In which BERTIE OXFORD Follows a Strange Menu to the Land of the Goddess of Sarn.” At the end of the story, “J.J. McC.” and Ellery go over the internal clues which should identify “Bertie Oxford,” and they then reveal the names of character and author.

    It’s great fun, and the stories do feature many of the popular detectives of the day, suitably disguised by EQ. It was first published in 1938; Amazon’s booksellers appear to have dozens of copies available pretty inexpensively. If you don’t want to review it for your EQ series, you really ought to consider getting it and reading it just for the fun of it.

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  11. Your list now seems pretty accurate. I remember how difficult it was in pre-internet days to get an accurate listing. The old hardcovers used to list all of the EQ books, but they included Glass Village and Casebook. I spent many years looking for them, and when I found Glass Village, I was disappointed to find it didn’t feature Ellery. And now I’ve finally uncovered the secret behind Casebook!
    I would, however, include Ins. Queen’s Own Case and A Study in Terror. You already have include House of Brass, which is also a solo Inspector Queen novel (Ellery does make a cameo appearance on the first page and disappears.) Brass is actually a sequel of sorts to Own Case; it picks up right afterwards. Chronologically, Own Case is problematic, since Ins. Queen has retired in it (as in Brass); yet, he is still active in all of the other books. Oh well! No one can make heads or tails out of Roman Hat Mystery’s place in the chronology either- in that book, it says that it was one of Ellery’s last cases!
    As for Study in Terror, the book ingeniously allows Ellery to match wits with Sherlock Holmes by using a framing device of Ellery reading a manuscript of Dr. Watson’s. Since in the other EQ novels, Holmes is just a fictional character, the book probably doesn’t fall within the real-world Ellery’s chronology (see above for trying to figure that out!) but it does have some decent deduction by him.

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