Ellery Queen
The Hollywood Murders

"Ellery Queen IS the American detective story." — Anthony Boucher

In the pantheon of fictional sleuths, there at the right hand of God sits Ellery Queen. Ellery Queen is a detective's detective: intellectually razor-sharp, eagle-eyed for minute details, and revving, racing brain cells exceeding the sound barrier. Ellery is a lifelong New Yorker and he is accustomed to the pace and criminal mind-set of the Big Apple. Ellery would rather be prowling the mean streets of Manhattan for clues than cooling his heels as a contract screenwriter in Tinseltown. Yet the tinseliest of towns is where he finds himself in these three mysteries.

In The Devil to Pay, Ellery finds himself thrusting and parrying with an avaricious archer with murderous aim. A purloined poison arrow hits the bull's-eye of a corrupt financial hotshot, leaving his son, his ruined partner, his fiancé, a shady lawyer, and a gentleman's gentleman as suspects. Ellery must sort out alarums and excursions, the affairs of a chap called Anatole, a filched receptionist, and in the end a threat against his own life, all of which he does with nary a drop of perspiration. After calmly deducing the motive and the culprit in this classic closed-room tale, Ellery returns to his primary concern: cornering the head of the film studio and giving him the what-for.

At last, in The Four of Hearts, Ellery reaches the inner sanctum of the Boy Wonder, head honcho of Magna Studios. He endures story conferences and temperamental stars, only to have his stint as a "plot man" come to a screeching halt. Hollywood's honeymooning golden couple are found dead on their private plane, compatibly holding his and hers thermoses of lethal cocktails (a sidecar for him, and a dry martini for the lady). The answer is all in the cards, for Ellery Queen, as only he can decode the odd collection sent to one of the victims anonymously. Ellery outmaneuvers a battle royal, dispatching each in turn: a missing character actor, a hypochondriac, an agoraphobic gossip columnist, and a dipsomanic "idea man." He exposes a long brewing concoction of deceit, impersonation, and homicide.

"Fair Hollywood. Murdered, ran the post-mortem, by Television." In The Origin of Evil, Ellery Queen returns to a Hollywood past her prime to work quietly on his next book. But his California idyll is terminated by a plea from a sweet young thing in zebra striped culottes. Before he realizes it, he is knee-deep in a bizarre murder-the weapon is a dead dog. So the unlikely becomes the surreal as Ellery has to outthink a mastermind dropping clues in the form of frog corpses; tainted tuna; alligator accessories; and a disabled typewriter key. A sultry, cuckolding wife, her Tarzan-like son, and the loyal retainer fall under suspicion until Ellery works his way up the food chain and proves himself as the surviving fittest.

Ellery Queen is the pseudonym of cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Ellery Queen is also the name of their famous detective who has appeared in more than 30 novels and 70 short stories. He has been on the radio, in the movies, on television, and in comic books. The Mystery Writers of America gave Queen 7 Edgar awards and its coveted Grand Master award. Dannay and Lee also founded and edited Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine which, at 61 years and still going, is the longest running mystery anthology magazine in American history. They wrote Queen's Quorum, a scholarly examination of the detective short story, and edited more than 90 books of detective fiction. Worldwide, their books have sold more than 150 million copies.