So, that’s it. The novels, short stories and media empire created by Frederic Danny and Manfred Lee, dba Ellery Queen.
It’s been fun reading the novels and short stories in chronological order, and writing this blog to keep me on task. Thanks for joining in.
I was going to make 10 best lists, but found I needed to be a little bit more fluid with the numbers, since there were some novels I just could not delete from such a recommendation list.
So, here we go.
My favorite was actually the second Drury Lane mystery, by Barnaby Ross, The Tragedy of Y (1932). By favorite, I mean, the one which traumatized itself into my memory the most. Drury Lane’s Last Case (1933) is also a great read.
The next favorite 16 Ellery Queen novels, in chronological order, are:
The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932)
The American Gun Mystery (1933)
The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935)
Halfway House (1936)
The Four of Hearts (1938)
Calamity Town (1942)
There Was An Old Woman (1943)
The Murderer is a Fox (1945)
Ten Days Wonder (1948)
Cat of Many Tails (1949)
Double, Double (1950)
The Glass Village (1954)
The Finishing Stroke (1958)
And on the Eighth Day (1964)
Cop Out (1969)
And from that list, my personal favorite novels are Cat of Many Tails and Calamity Town.
Moving on to short stories, here are my top nine:
“The Glass-domed Clock” (Mystery League, 1933)
“The Hanging Acrobat” (Mystery, 1934)
“The Mad Tea Party” (Redbook, 1934)
“The Telltale Bottle” (EQMM, 1946)
“The Ides of Michael Magoon” (EQMM, 1947)
“The Emperor’s Dice” (EQMM, 1951)
“GI Story” (EQMM, 1954)
“Terror Town” (Argosy, 1956)
“The Case Against Carroll” (Argosy, 1958)
I also enjoyed Frederic Dannay’s The Golden Summer (1953).
Favorite motion picture? No. Just, no.
Other fave? The 1975-1976 television series.
The Ellery Queen mysteries were all very much products of their times. Lee and Dannay were able to change with their times, which kept the character of Ellery Queen alive for so long in so many formats. The problem, though, is determine which Ellery Queen you mean when talking about the character. Other fictional detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot come to mind, all are well-defined. But they were well-defined within the well-defined strictures of British society. Ellery was free to change with the times, which made him pliable enough for several platforms, but hard from a distance to define. But, really, we don’t need to define Queen: he stands as a testament to the changes in popular culture, neither timeless nor of a specific time, but of many particular times and platforms. His stories fit equally well in magazines as diverse as Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Muscular Development & Playboy. The cousins, in the end, were talented writers and clever businessmen who succeeded in working together at something they loved, even while not always loving each other.
Reading Ellery Queen 
What about the radio plays? There was a book in 2005 on the best radio plays? Adventure of the Murdered Moths.
Just a bit beyond the limited scope of the blog. While I did include the short stories based on radio plays, I did not concentrate on the original scripts/episodes of the radio or television shows.
As an Ellery fan since age 13, I enjoyed your trip through the novels. My “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” blog is similar, each post focusing on one episode of the 1964-1968 spy series. Two later episodes in particular have an EQ flavor. “The Summit Five Affair” sports a locked room murder, a false solution (that turns out to be partly true!), and at last the identity of the mastermind, all at a breakneck pace.
The second is “The J for Judas Affair.” Its story of who wants to kill the patriarchal industrialist (and his son — but which one?), the red herrings of the identity of “J,” and the final double surprise (with the identity of the puppet master held until the last few *seconds*) is much like EQ’s “The King Is Dead” minus the locked-room element.
Here’s the blog: https://benzadmiral-uncle.blogspot.com/ You can find most of the episodes on the Web, I think, but don’t read the review until you see the episode itself. As you’ve done here now and then, I felt I had to occasionally give away the final surprise to truly evaluate the story.
Instead of endless Agatha Christie adaptations, it’s time for a new period-piece Queen — say, “Siamese Twin”! How about Alexis Denisof as Ellery?
Oh, and any true Ellery fan would enjoy the 1974 mystery film “The Last of Sheila.” It was written by (of all people) Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, and it’s the best evocation ever of the EQ spirit (the puzzle that reveals more mysteries, the search for the answer, and the false solution followed by the true). There is even a scene, late in the film, when one character is performing a test that reminds you of Ellery’s tests with the playing cards in “Siamese Twin.” Try it!