Книги автора Queen Ellery

a book to remember... In this book you will investigate crime with such Famous Detectives as Perry Mason Nero Wolfe Ellery Queen and read stories of detection and suspense by such Famous Mystery Writers as Agatha Christie John Dickson Carr George Harmon Coxe Charlotte Armstrong Hugh Pentecost and be surprised at tales of mystery and crime by such Famous Literary Figures as W. Somerset Maugham Ben Hecht, John Van Druten A book to remember, a book to read and reread — a book to treasure and keep permanently in your library...

Ellery Queen has now opened his own detective agency, Ellery Queen, Inc., on Times Square, New York, and his very first case develops into a complex and spell-binding tale of crime, intrigue, and extraordinary deduction. In its telling, the author has returned to the style and method of such earlier great successes as THE DUTCH SHOE MYSTERY, THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY, etc. Here again we meet Inspector Queen, Sergeant Velie and other earlier favorites and again Ellery Queen applies his analytical deductive methods to one of the most puzzling murder plots ever uncovered in the annals of crime.

Six months after paying Ellery a handsome retainer, a retired munitions magnate, worth many millions, dies on his yacht in the Caribbean. Peculiar circumstances! An important man is quickly buried at sea with no medical certificate and no autopsy! Crew quickly dispersed before they can be questioned! Only Ellery’s diamond sharp wits could cut through the web of tangled events and arrive at the dramatic solution.

The green wig belonged to a redheaded Vegas show girl. The sequined gown had highlighted the bouncy silhouette of a blonde off-Broadway actress.

The long evening gloves were the property of a bosomy smalltown nurse. These were more than an inventory of ladies’ wear. For they were found on the scene of a brutal crime during a hideaway weekend, near the body of an internationally known jet-setter notorious for his pursuit of beautiful women. What did they mean?

The question plagues Ellery and Inspector Queen — and it will plague you — throughout the Queens’ newest murder case, most of which takes place in Queen fans’ favorite New England town, Wrightsville. But it is far from the only missing piece of the puzzle. There is the victim’s dying message. There is the mysterious woman to whom the trail is long and difficult. Above all there is the question: Who was THE LAST WOMAN IN HIS LIFE?

Follow Ellery as he works his way through a typically labyrinthine Queen maze, from one surprise to another, with the most stunning surprise of all waiting for you at the end.

For just over fifty years, Ellery Queen has dominated the American detective and mystery story scene. His annual collections of short and not-so-short stories by the cream of writers in the field have appeared for nearly forty of those years.

Including a complete short novel by Erle Stanley Gardner, The Clue of the Screaming Woman, and seventeen novelettes and short stories by masters of mystery Robert Bloch, Hugh Pentecost, Victor Canning, Lloyd Biggie, Jr. and Ellery Queen himself, amongst many others.

John who? It all began simply enough, God knows. Mary Hazelwood suddenly decided to go away for the weekend and left a note for her sister Susie, with whom she shared an apartment, that she was off for Los Angeles and that John was driving her to the airport. It was only when she didn’t return that the problem arose.

John, obviously, had been the last person known to have seen Mary. But the difficulty was that Mary knew four different men named John, and each of them denied even having seen her that day.

Which John? Susie hadn’t a clue. And when she turned for help to a young professor named Mervyn Gray, who was half in love with her sister, he found a very disturbing warning in his mailbox. In block letters sprawling across a torn sheet of cheap note paper was this terse message — Confess or tomorrow you die!

January

Janus, the god of two faces, and a college alumni class introduce Ellery to a secret society...

February

Ellery wrestles with the ghost of a President of the United States to solve a buried coin mystery...

March

A stolen income-tax form, a kleptomaniac, a bookie, and an artist become the ingredients of a murder...

April

Ellery unravels an old crime with the help of the Roman Emperor, Caligula, and a pair of dice...

May

A battle-scarred bugle and three Civil War veterans almost baffle Ellery...

June

The goddess Juno, shades of the Borgias, and a modern Helen of Troy play havoc with a June wedding...

July

A stone gargoyle, falling from a gloomy, Gothiclike tower, nearly causes sudden death...

August

In the moonstone month, Ellery hunts for buried treasure...

September

A Missouri professor, interested in Edgar Allen Poe, leads Ellery to a frightening conclusion...

October

A Halloween party turns out to be more grim than expected...

November

Ellery and Nikki deliver Thanksgiving baskets to the needy and discover a dangerous secret...

December

The famous jewel thief, Comus, nearly outwits Ellery in a Christmas mystery of dolls, danger and deception...

The Roman Hat Mystery has been chosen from more than 100 selected manuscripts to represent the Stokes contribution to the mysterio-detective literature of 1929. Because we believe it to be in a class by itself we are publishing no other detective novel this season. Following no hackneyed formula, conveying to the public an entirely new experience in this popular type of fiction, The Roman Hat Mystery offers a foolproof plot of fascinating complexity, a theatrically romantic setting and a most ingenious deductive pattern that is plausible, gripping throughout and wholly original in weave. The essential clue is a missing silk tophat. On the surface it appears to be of minor significance, yet about this elusive thread the entire amazing tale revolves. The reader is given every fact necessary to the solution; and yet we challenge your most ardent amateur criminologists to deduce the startling dénouement. Not only in plot but in protagonist does this novel offer something “different.” You will like the old snuff-taking Inspector, Richard Queen, a shrewd and human manhunter; you will more than like his son Ellery, whose keen intellect dominates every situation. A brilliant analyst, a convincing maker of miracles, Ellery Queen bids fair to join that immortal group to which Sherlock Holmes, Lupin and few others belong.

Halfway House, where a strange man finds final rest on his tortured journey through life... Halfway House, where under the grim shadow of a sensational murder, opposites meet and clash — common peddler and financier, young housewife and cold society woman, struggling lawyer and millionaire debutante... Halfway House, where Ellery Queen, crime consultant to the world-at-large, returns to his old love of pure and pungent deduction in what is unquestionably his most fascinating narrative of real people and subtle violence to date — a modern Tale of Two Cities by the master mystery-teller.

After seven consecutive best-sellers — Ellery Queen poses an eight problem more bizarre than “The Egyptian Cross Mystery”, more ingenious than “The Siamese Twin Mystery”; more amazing than any crime ever conceived in fiction. We do not hesitate to predict that THE CHINESE ORANGE MYSTERY will be hauled by Mr. Queen’s thousand of ardent fans as the most original of his analytico-deductive novels. What Inspector Richard Queen wanted to know was the identity of the murdered man. How could he be expected to solve a murder mystery without knowing who was murdered? The body of the slain man was found on the 22nd floor of the Hotel Chancellor in a private room; no one even remotely connected with the investigation had ever seen the man before. His name, where he came from, why he was there — remain a baffling mystery to the end. Yet all who found themselves enmeshed in the web of the tragedy — Donald Kirk, millionaire publisher and collector; his invalid father; his younger sister; the young novelist from China; the adventurers from abroad — found their lives warped and changed by the death of this nameless nobody from nowhere! But what perplexed Ellery Queen even more was the incredible appearance of the scene of the crime. Everything had been turned backwards! The victim’s clothing had been turned backwards, the rug upside down, the pictures facing the wall — everything movable in the room had been turned backwards. And what was the explanation of those grotesque ramrods stack up the victim’s back?

In his spirited Introduction to a topnotch collection of Great American Detective Stories, Anthony Boucher says: “The detective short story belongs to us. It started in America and it started off magnificently. In five stories, Edgar Allan Poe created the form and almost all its possible variants... There are as many kinds of detective short stories as there are of detective novels — and you’ll find most of them here, from the ethical poetry of Melville Davisson Post to the brash foolery of Frank Gruber.”

A glance at some of the titles of the stories included confirms Boucher’s modest words and guarantees that you’ll find plenty of good reading here.

Dane McKell, millionaire socialite, was planning an exhilarating summer when he discovered to his horror that his father was having an affair with another woman. The McKells were not only very, very rich, they were also very, very respectable, and Dane’s mother was a gentle and lovely lady.

Dane forced a meeting with the woman in the case with the full intent of breaking up his father’s relationship. Then, helplessly, he himself fell in love with her. After that — murder.

This is the basic situation, a brilliantly plotted detective story that only the old master, Queen, could devise, and that only Ellery, working with his father, Inspector Queen, could solve.

As always with classic Queens, the reader will have it solved three times before he discovers that he has been outwitted as usual.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first book, Ellery Queen takes a long step forward. He has written a novel expressed only incidentally in terms of mystery, a novel whose theme is uppermost in the minds of all thoughtful Americans today.

For thirty years old Judge Shinn has delivered the Fourth of July oration on the little village green. He has said again and again: “There is no liberty without justice,” and “Let one man be deprived of his liberty, or his property, or his life without due process of law, and the liberty and property and lives of all of us are in danger.” When mere accusation takes the place of evidence, freedom is in peril.

To Shinn Corners, the “outside” has always been suspect. Only a few years back, a “furriner” killed a Shinn Corners man and “got away with it,” thanks to a jury over in Cudbury who, with fancy talk about Justice and A Fair Trial, let him off on a plea of self-defense. Shinn Corners has never gotten over that; resentment lies in the streets like dynamite, ready to explode at a touch. And now murder strikes, claiming as its victim the best-loved citizen of the village.

For Johnny Shinn, late of Army Intelligence, veteran of two wars, the grim events that follow are profoundly disturbing. Johnny, “all scattered to hell and gone,” has been through too much to worry about “ideals of justice.” Like so many young Americans today, Johnny is hung up between the recent past and the dark future. He can only say in response to Judge Shinn’s attempts to revitalize him, “Oh, I believe, I believe it all — but what can I do about it?”

What happens after the murder is the story of what Johnny, in spite of himself, does about it. The tense lynch trial that is the focus of the action is really the trial of Johnny Shinn as an American. Against an atmosphere of frightening contemporary reality, THE GLASS VILLAGE raises pointed problems that all the Johnny Shinns of the free democracies, and their uncles and their aunts, must wrestle with and solve if our way of life is to survive.

JOHN MARCO, the dashing and handsome Spaniard, the great lover, despoiler and betrayer of women, sat quietly on the beach terrace of Spanish Cape that ghostly night, apparently musing on his many iniquities, on the hold he had over the frantic desperate women in the house above him. Hat on head, hand on stick, long black opera cloak draped about his virile figure... that is the way they found him the next morning — dead, strangled, murdered... and when they removed the opera cloak they found him without shoes or socks, without trousers or coat or shirt or necktie or underwear — completely nude!

Daring, clever, extraordinarily exciting, here is Ellery Queen at his best. And, as you might expect, again a stunning surprise at the end!

A STATEMENT TO THE PUBLIC

Since 1929 we have the exclusive privilege of publishing the detective stories of Ellery Queen in the United States. In our years publishing Queen’s thirteen books we have refrained from the usual and monotonously extravagant publishers’ claims, preferring to let the books speak for themselves.

They have spoken so eloquently — each has been an instant best-seller here and abroad — that Queen is now recognized by the world’s press and public as one of the greatest writers of detective stories.

Now, with our publication of Ellery Queen’s fourteenth book and latest novel, THE FOUR OF HEARTS, we feel compelled to break our silence. We honestly believe that THE FOUR OF HEARTS is not only Ellery Queen’s finest novel to date, but is destined to be ranked as a classic by those familiar with this type of fiction.

We ask you to compare it mercilessly, point for point — in plot, in characterization, in atmosphere, in style, in ingenuity, in excitement and bafflement and as a source of sheer reading pleasure — with any detective story you have ever read.

We ask you to judge for yourself whether our claim is even slightly overmagnified. We feel confident that your judgement will substantiate our opinion.

At first it seemed as though only　The Madman Theory could explain the brutal shotgun slaying which lay in wait for the friendly group of back-packing hikers.

But Inspector Omar Collins, lean, gloomy-eyed, black-haired, was a painstaking man.

The more he pursued it, the less he believed in The Madman Theory.

“A Problem in Adultery” might aptly be the subtitle of Ellery’s latest case.

Who is pretty Mrs. Lawrence’s lover? And how can the young, rich Broadway producer be saved from the folly of her infidelity and the fury of her husband Dirk, the unsuccessful author who cannot control his morbid attacks of jealousy? These are Ellery’s major problems.

Beginning with a night rendezvous in the park and a punch in the jaw from Irate Husband, Ellery finds himself hot on the trail of an unknown Casanova... suspected lover, home-wrecker, and likely target for a .45. And making the trail all over the jungle of New York City — from Chinatown and The Bowery to the upper reaches of Bronx Park — are the tantalizing Scarlet Letters, an alphabetical puzzle that keeps Ellery — and the reader — cudgeling his wits to the very end.

Ellery has a special surprise for you in a case as sensational as the front page of tomorrow’s tabloid — the first appearance in a Queen novel of Nikki Porter as Ellery’s Girl Friday, that fiery, faithful, and long-suffering secretary of the Queen radio and short-story adventures. But THE SCARLET LETTERS is full of surprises, not the least of them the astounding pay-off of as exciting and clever a mystery as Ellery has ever gone a-hunting.

Uncle Slater O’Shea was loaded. Uncle Slater was supporting the lot of them — five freeloaders. And in spite of liberal daily applications of whisky, Uncle Slater had his health. He intended to keep it, so he had made a new will. So long as he continued to enjoy life, he would continue to maintain them. But the minute he died, his estate would be cut up among them, plus seventeen additional assorted O’Sheas. Cut up into twenty-two pieces, the freeloaders wouldn’t get enough from Uncle Slater O’Shea’s estate to live in the manner to which they had become accustomed. Several weeks later, benevolently trailing a fragrant haze of good Irish whisky behind him, Uncle Slater went upstairs for a nip and a nap. He never came down. Which of them had been foolish enough to do the old boy in?

Tutter King had it made. Every time he spun a platter on “The King’s Session,” gold came out: TV earnings, returns on his secret holdings in recording companies, the old payola that some bright young men think only their rightful due. Tutter was a gay young man-around-town. He was also involved in some highly romantic hanky-panky with his pretty blond assistant, Lola Arkwright. And then the roof started to cave in. Senate Investigating Committees. The angry emergence of the wife who Lola never knew existed. The canceling of his network contract. Poor Tutter, it looked like he was going to lose everything. Even his life!

The 9-word clue was one of 9 cryptic notes that had been sent to taunt Inspector Queen and Ellery 9 days after the murder. Nino Importuna had been obsessed with the number. He had lived by it. Now the killer who brought a trio of gory deaths to Nino's 9th-floor penthouse at No. 99 East was camouflaging his identity in a jungle of 9s. And daring Ellery to find him. The case was destined to be a dazzling contest of wits-to the 9th degree!

It all begins when Ellery Queen receives a manuscript that appears to be a genuine Sherlock Holmes novel written by John H. Watson, M.D. Where did it come from? The manuscript itself tells the long-concealed story of how Holmes stalked Jack the Ripper—and discovered who he was! Now you can follow Ellery Queen—the logical successor to Sherlock Holmes—as he literally follows the greatest detective of them all. The story of “Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper” is presented with the full approval of the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and is a legitimate addition to the Holmes canon.

Who are you, Malone? Just a little while ago you were a cop. That was before the two punks and their girl hit town. That was before they boosted a payroll and shot down a man and took your 9-year-old daughter as insurance to cover their getaway. Now you're just a man. Scared. Not for yourself-that would be easy. But for your child, the only thing in the world you love enough to make you play ball with the kind of scum you've hated all your life.

"Zufall?" Ellery seufzte. "Würden Sie es auch als Zufall bezeichnen, wenn ich Ihnen erzählte, daß vor einem halben Jahr in West Virginia ein Mord verübt worden ist, zu dessen Besonderheiten die Kreuzigung des zuvor enthaupteten Opfers an einem T­förmigen Wegweiser zählte, der widerum an eine T-förmigen Kreuzung stand. Nicht zu vergessen das T, das der Mörder mit dem Blut des Toten an die Tür seines kaum hundert Meter entfernten Hauses geschmiert hat?"

Ellery Queen ist das gemeinsame Pseudonym von Frederic Danney (1905 - 1982) und Manfred Bennington Lee (1905 - 1971), die zu den einflussreichsten und produktivsten Kriminalromanautoren gehören.

Die der Übersetzung zugrundeliegende amerikanische Originalausgabe erschien 1932 unter dem Titel »The Egyptian Cross Mystery« bei Frederick A. Stokes, New York.

`Heredera que huye, padre implacable, madre angustiada, novio en un aprieto. ¿Qué más se puede pedir para empezar?`. Pues aún hay más: una escritora empeñada en contar una buena historia, un hombre dedicado a la adoración del cuerpo, a quien le diagnotican un cáncer, quizás, un impostor, un cadáver fugitivo y un detective kantiano de los que piensan que la razón pura es el bien esencial para descubrir las trampas de este caótico mundo.

Ellery Queen y su padre deben poner todo su ingenio a trabajar para resolver un caso en el que todo parece duplicado: los muertos, los hermanos, las claves, las soluciones y quizá incluso los culpables. Pero no hay nada que se resista a la sagacidad e imaginación de los Queen.

No suspense collection is complete without this anthology. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the stories in this volume represent many of the biggest names in detective and suspense fiction: Ellery Queen, Harold Q. Masur, Celia Fremlin, Jack Ritchie, Patricia Highsmith and Bill Pronzini are only a few of the prize-winning authors in this amazing volume.

Ellery Queen, il famoso giallista-detective, decide di trasferirsi nella pacifica cittadina di Wrightsville in cerca di tranquillità e colore locale per il suo prossimo romanzo; il posto sembra ideale, quieto fino alla noia, e gli abitanti sono una splendida fonte di ispirazione, con i loro tic e i piccoli vizi da provincia americana. Ellery passa il tempo leggendo e passeggiando, ma ama anche ascoltare le chiacchiere dei cittadini del piccolo centro. I pettegolezzi più gustosi ruotano intorno al matrimonio, improvviso quanto imprevedibile, tra la ricca Nora Wright e Jim, il giovane che anni prima l’aveva abbandonata a due passi dall’altare. Quando Nora inizia a soffrire di un male misterioso, l’intera città si trasforma in un covo di vipere e tutti sono pronti ad accusare l’uomo di avere avvelenato la moglie. Ma è possibile che Jim abbia sposato il suo antico amore solo per ucciderla? Naturalmente Ellery non riuscirà a scrivere una sola riga, impegnato come sarà a scoprire l’insospettabile verità nascosta dietro il primo delitto che la sonnacchiosa Wrightsville abbia conosciuto da molto tempo.

Ellery Queen is asked by a lawyer friend to help protect the interests of a pretty young heiress. They meet her, along with an unpleasant physician who is a friend of her family, as she disembarks in New York from an ocean liner arriving from England. She learns that her father, from whom she has been separated since her toddler years, has died just as she is to be reunited with her eccentric family and inherit her father’s fabled hoard of gold. The group drives for hours to reach an ugly and sinister Victorian house called the Black House at nightfall.

The Black House, where her father died, is uninhabitable — the group meets the family and beds down in a small stone house next door. When they awake, the Black House has vanished as though it never existed. Ellery must shake off the Gothic trappings and the suggestions of black magic in order to figure out what has happened to the Black House and the gold.

Ellery Queen’s arrival in Hollywood did not pass unnoticed. It Brought a pretty, nineteen-year-old girl to his apartment with a tale of murder so strange as to be irresistible to that connoisseur of bizarre crime. the story of a man who scared to death... murdered by a dead dog!..

This Ellery Queen’s 25th Detective Mystery, unfolds with a mounting tension as a dead fish, strangled frogs and the skin of an alligator become fantastic components in a grand design for murder.

Hillerman, author of the Joe Leaphorn mysteries, and Herbert, editor of The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, trace this short-story genre from its beginnings in the hands of Edgar Allen Poe through its development by the likes of Erle Stanley Gardner, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Anthony Boucher to its current practice by such masters as Marcia Muller. Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which established a great many of the whodunit conventions, is indispensable to such an overview. Raymond Chandler's "I'll be Waiting" emits a doom-laden atmosphere right from the first line; William Faulkner shows unexpected economy of language?and a transparent plot?in "An Error in Chemistry." Ed McBain scores high marks in "Small Homicide," in which the tiny details of a baby's untimely death resonate uncomfortably. As represented in this competent, unstartling collection, Linda Barnes ("Lucky Penny") easily outsasses Sue Grafton ("The Parker Shotgun"). Hillerman makes a solid appearance with "Chee's Witch," and in "Benny's Space" Muller captures the full subtle force of her novel-length vision.