Crime Fiction Alphabet: Letter Q

This week in the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme, the Letter Q is up. For the rules one may visit Kerrie's website at Mysteries in Paradise to view the rules and other contributions. This week I will profile the classic Ellery Queen.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: Q is for Ellery Queen

Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and a pseudonym used by two American cousins from New York, Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (October 20, 1905 – September 3, 1982) and Manford Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee (January 11, 1905 – April 3, 1971). The fictional Ellery Queen created by Dannay and Lee as a mystery writer and amateur detective who help his father, a New York City police inspector, solve baffling murders.  They were also responsible for co-founding and directing Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, generally considered one of the most influential English Language crime fiction magazines of all time. The fictional Ellery Queen was the hero of more than 30 novels and several short story collections written by Dannay and Lee and published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym. They allowed the Ellery Queen name to be used as a house name for a number of novels written by other authors, as paperback originals, and not featuring Ellery Queen as a character. Ellery Queen was created in 1928 when Dannay and Lee entered a writing contest sponsored by McClure's Magazine for the best first mystery novel. The Ellery Queen novels are examples of the classic whodunit mystery, textbook examples of what became known as the "Golden Age" of the mystery novel. Because the reader obtains clues in the same way as the protagonist detective, the book becomes an intellectually challenging puzzle.

Novels

• The Roman Hat Mystery — 1929
• The French Powder Mystery — 1930
• The Dutch Shoe Mystery — 1931
• The Greek Coffin Mystery — 1932
• The Egyptian Cross Mystery — 1932
• The American Gun Mystery — 1933
• The Siamese Twin Mystery — 1933
• The Chinese Orange Mystery — 1934
• The Spanish Cape Mystery — 1935
• The Lamp of God — 1935
• Halfway House — 1936
• The Door Between — 1937
• The Devil to Pay — 1938
• The Four of Hearts — 1938
• The Dragon's Teeth (aka.The Virgin Heiresses) — 1939
• Calamity Town — 1942
• The Quick and the Dead — 1943
• 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 Origin of Evil — 1951
• The King is Dead — 1952
• The Scarlet Letters — 1953
• The Glass Village — 1954 (neither Ellery Queen nor Inspector Queen in book)

• Inspector Queen's Own Case — 1956 (Inspector Queen only)

• The Finishing Stroke — 1958
• The Player on The Other Side — 1963 (ghost-written with Theodore Sturgeon)

• …and on the Eighth Day… — 1964 (ghost-written with Avram Davidson)

• The Fourth Side of The Triangle — 1965 (ghost-written with Avram Davidson)

• A Study in Terror — 1966 (Movie tie-in)

• Face to Face — 1967
• The House of Brass — 1968 (ghost-written with Avram Davidson) (Sequel to Inspector Queen's Own Case with a minimal appearance by Ellery.)

• Cop Out — 1969 (neither Ellery Queen nor Inspector Queen appear)

• The Last Woman in His Life — 1970
• A Fine and Private Place — 1971

Injury update

This morning I had an appointment with my orthopedic surgeon and my collar bone injury is healing fine. Not fully healed yet. The doctor said I am at what he had expected at 6 weeks. Looking at the X-rays I could see how the breakage had healed thus far. I go back in another 6 weeks. I also start physical therapy next week.

Burden Of Guilt by Carter Brown

Every bedroom door opens for Al Wheeler.

But behind one waits a woman who likes her sex mixed with murder!

Robert McGinnis Cover

 Death By The Dollar

It started with a naked corpse of a call girl by a pool. It looked like the usual vicious mixture of sex and murder until the trail of blood led Al Wheeler into the gold-plated world of corporate executives and crooked labor unions.

Horwitz Photo Cover

Wheeler knew that where there was big money, every man's life had a price tag, his own included. And every woman's invitation to bed might be an invitation to murder!

Signet Photo Cover

 Printing History

Written by Alan G Yates (1923-1985)

Horwitz Publications

Horwitz Group Books

Numbered Series #152 (1971)

ISBN 7255 0076

New American Library

Signet Books

P4219 (April 1970)

Y7885 (January 1978)

Trivia

Al Wheeler's sidekick through most of his adventures was a Sergeant Polnik. Polnik is killed in this title.

The Moving Finger by Milton Bass

Benny's Blues

You're Benny Freedman, and you have a few little problems. You have the gruesome death of your beautiful you wife to handle, You have her six million dollar legacy in your hands to spend. And now you have to crack a case involving a murdered used car mogul with a missing finger, a gorgeous widow who believes that sex is the best medicine for mourning, and a religious cult that worships money and makes a sacrament of slaughter..........

Benny Freedman

Half Jewish, half Irish, Benny Freedman is not everyman's image of a cop. A poetry reading martial arts disciple with a great appreciation for beautiful language and beautiful women. Benny has a special gift for finding and fighting trouble in California's fast lane. It's not easy, but being hard is another one of those things Benny does very well........

Printing History

Written by Milton Bass

New American Library

Signet Books

ISBN 451-14110

February 1986

Captives of Corruption by Reuben Paul

Captives of Corruption

Professor Kiedmuth Booker had disappeared by assuming another identity. He had had to escape from the consequences of his own work on viruses, which the Nazi regime wanted to develop into a vile and horrifying weapon to be used against civilian populations. As the only man capable of completing the work, Professor Booker had refused to go down in history as mankind's betrayer. By a quirk of fate, Booker, in his new identity, had been caught up with others and thrown into a concentration camp. Had the Nazis discovered that they actually had Booker in their own hands, the only solution to him would have been death. But out of love for his beautiful daughter, Freda, he had not only to survive the camp, he had to escape from it. Soon, Kiedmuth, Freda, and her lover, Dr Kurt Jager, were plotting an escape from Germany. An escape that could only be carried out by the deaths of all the workers at the laboratory.

Printing History

Written by Reuben Paul

Calvert Publishing Company

Sydney Australia

No date.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: Letter P

Another week gone by and another letter in the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme sponsored over at Kerrie's blog at Mysteries in Paradise. The rules are simple. Our posts must be related to either the first letter of a book's title, the first letter of an author's first name, or the first letter of the author's surname, or even maybe a crime fiction "topic". So this week my contribution will be................Perry Mason and Phillip Marlowe. This week I could not decide what to post. But over the long weekend I watched a lot of Perry Mason made for TV movies and today I watched Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet from 1944.So I decided to do a double entry of two of the memorable characters in crime fiction.

P is for Phillip and Perry

Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler in a series of novels from 1939 to the author’s death in 1959. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas". Some of those short stories were later combined and expanded into novels featuring Marlowe. Philip Marlowe's character is foremost within the genre of hardboiled crime fiction that originated in the 1920s in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Chandler's treatment of the detective novel exhibits an effort to develop the form. His first full length book, The Big Sleep, was published when Chandler was 51, his last, Playback at 70. Seven novels were produced in the last two decades of his life, with an eighth being posthumously completed by Robert B. Parker and published in 1989.

The Novels

The Big Sleep (1939)....

Farewell, My Lovely (1940).

The High Window (1942)...

The Lady in the Lake (1943)...

The Little Sister (1949)...

The Long Goodbye (1953)...

Playback (1958)...

Poodle Springs (1959/1989 (completed by Robert B. Parker)

 Perry Mason is a fictional character, a defense attorney, authored by Erle Stanley Gardner. Perry Mason was featured in more than 80 novels and short stories, most of which had a plot involving his client's murder trial. Typically, Mason was able to establish his client's innocence by implicating another character, who then confessed. Gardner had over 135 million copies of his books in print in America alone in the year of his death in 1969, made him one of the bestselling authors of all time. The character of Perry Mason was portrayed each weekday on a long-running radio series, followed by well-known depictions on film and television, including Television’s most successful and longest-running lawyer series from 1957 to 1966 starring Raymond Burr.

The Novels

The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933)

The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933)

The Case of the Curious Bride (1934)

The Case of the Howling Dog (1934)

The Case of the Lucky Legs (1934)

The Case of the Caretaker's Cat (1935)

The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935)

The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece (1936)

The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1936)

The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (1937)

The Case of the Lame Canary (1937)

The Case of the Shoplifter's Shoe (1938)

The Case of the Substitute Face (1938)

The Case of the Perjured Parrot (1939)

The Case of the Rolling Bones (1939)

The Case of the Baited Hook (1940)

The Case of the Silent Partner (1940)

The Case of the Empty Tin (1941)

The Case of the Haunted Husband (1941)

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)

The Case of the Drowning Duck (1942)

The Case of the Buried Clock (1943)

The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito (1943)

The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde (1944)

The Case of the Crooked Candle (1944)

The Case of the Golddigger's Purse (1945)

The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife (1945)

The Case of the Borrowed Brunette (1946)

The Case of the Fan-Dancer's Horse (1947)

The Case of the Lazy Lover (1947)

The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948)

The Case of the Vagabond Virgin (1948)

The Case of the Cautious Coquette (1949)

The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom (1949)

The Case of the Negligent Nymph (1950)

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness (1950)

The Case of the Angry Mourner (1951)

The Case of the Fiery Fingers (1951)

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952)

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink (1952)

The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953)

The Case of the Hesitant Hostess (1953)

The Case of the Fugitive Nurse (1954)

The Case of the Restless Redhead (1954)

The Case of the Runaway Corpse (1954)

The Case of the Glamorous Ghost (1955)..

The Case of the Nervous Accomplice (1955)

The Case of the Sun Bather's Diary (1955)..

The Case of the Demure Defendant (1956; AKA The Case of the Missing Poison)

The Case of the Gilded Lily (1956)

The Case of the Terrified Typist (1956)

The Case of the Daring Decoy (1957)

The Case of the Lucky Loser (1957)

The Case of the Screaming Woman (1957)

The Case of the Calendar Girl (1958)

The Case of the Footloose Doll (1958)

The Case of the Long-Legged Models (1958; AKA The Case of the Dead Man's Daughters

The Case of the Deadly Toy (1959; AKA The Case of the Greedy Grandpa)

The Case of the Mythical Monkeys (1959)

The Case of the Singing Skirt (1959)

The Case of the Waylaid Wolf (1959)

The Case of the Duplicate Daughter (1960)

The Case of the Shapely Shadow (1960)

The Case of the Bigamous Spouse (1961)

The Case of the Spurious Spinster (1961)

The Case of the Blonde Bonanza (1962)

The Case of the Ice-Cold Hands (1962)

The Case of the Reluctant Model (1962)

The Case of the Amorous Aunt (1963)

The Case of the Mischievous Doll (1963)

The Case of the Step-Daughter's Secret (1963)

The Case of the Daring Divorcee (1964)

The Case of the Horrified Heirs (1964)

The Case of the Phantom Fortune (1964)

The Case of the Beautiful Beggar (1965)

The Case of the Troubled Trustee (1965)

The Case of the Worried Waitress (1966)

The Case of the Queenly Contestant (1967)

The Case of the Careless Cupid (1968)

The Case of the Fabulous Fake (1969)...

The Case of the Crimson Kiss (1970)

The Case of the Crying Swallow (1971)

The Case of the Fenced-In Woman (1972)

The Case of the Irate Witness (1972)

The Case of the Postponed Murder (1973)

 

Slaughter In Satin by Carter Brown

With a gun in her hand she was.......

Printing History
  Transport Publishing Company Pty. Ltd

Novelette Series
as A Genuine "Lovely" Mystery
  1954

Horwitz Publications, Inc
for and on behalf of  Transport Publishing Company Pty. Ltd
First Collectors' Series #14
w/ Pagan Perilous and Moonshine Momma
July 1955

Bernard Blackburn Cover

Second Collectors' Series Volume 1 #9
w/Fraulein Is Feline and Moonshine Momma
1958

The Blue Ice Affair by Ron Felber

A coveted diamond leads Agent N3 into a jungle trap.

And an entire army ready for war.

George Gross Cover

Killmaster #197

Diamonds may be forever, but certain of these precious jewels may lead to a global crisis. Especially when Soviet backed troops plan to invade Namibia and seize the great boron diamond mine, the key to laser weaponry. With a handful of mercenaries and the aid of a beautiful South African geologist, Nick Carter must beat the odds of the Angolan jungle and bring the world back from the brink of destruction.

Printing History

Written by Ron Felber

Berkley Publishing Group

Charter Books

Published by arrangement with The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.

ISBN 441 06861

February 1985