The Tragedy of Errors and Others: With Essays and Tributes to Recognize Ellery Queen's Seventieth Anniversary (1999) by Ellery Queen

Author:Ellery Queen [Queen, Ellery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781885941367
Google: wsXzAQAACAAJ
Amazon: 1885941366
Publisher: Crippen & Landru Publishers
Published: 1999-01-14T22:00:00+00:00

broth, and the thin golden sheen of the fat that haloed each morsel. With the cruelty of adolescence, 1 was deeply contemptuous of his bulk and nonathleticism, both of which I inherited (he had been a slender and rather beautiful young man).

But I was proud of Ellery Queen, and the rare glimpses I got into his working life thrilled me. Once I got to audit a workshop, held on a northeastern university campus, at which the Queen partners were featured lecturers. I sat in the back of the room, basking in reflected glory, impressed with the look of awe on the faces of the adult students as Dan (politely) and Dad (sourly; he was wearing a suit and he loathtd formal dress) fielded questions about fiction-writing. Dan was short and bald like Dad, but much slimmer, and courtly. I liked him, though I knew him very slightly. My older sister Kit remembers him with fondness as always having been very kind to her, and after Dad’s death, when I sold my first science fiction story to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Dan paid me the high compliment of expressing the wish that he, not Asimov, had been the one to publish the piece.

Dad and Dan always had a contentious relationship. By the time I was a teenager, they had fallen into the routine of working long-distance between Connecticut and Larchmont, New York, and frequently I would pick up the extension phone to hear them arguing with one another. Dan was my father’s first cousin, from a somewhat better-off side of the family, born Daniel Nathan (hence "Cousin Dan’’); he had, by his account, an idyllic rural boyhood in upstate New York. Dad came from Brownsville, New York and was raised Brooklyn-poor. Everybody knows how, fresh out of college and working as admen in New York, they had originally collaborated on The Roman Hat Mystery in an attempt to win a mystery-writing contest sponsored by the now defunct McClure’s magazine. The first prize was awarded to them; then McClure’s was bought by a new publisher, who turned it into a women’s magazine and awarded the prize to someone else. Frederick A. Stokes picked up the manuscript, which received fair reviews. Emboldened, they wrote another, then a third, and by the fifth, Dad told me, they had quit their jobs and were collaborating full-time.

They tried a number of ways of working together. Eventually, Dan ended up doing the primary editing on the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and writing detailed plot outlines for the Queen books; Dad fleshed out the plot outlines and did the bulk of the actual writing of narrative, characterization, and dialogue. Or so my father told me; when I revealed this after his death in an article in TV Guide (it was an official secret for many years), Dan would not confirm it to reporters. But by his own admission, my father could not plot to save his life, and in my opinion Dan’s great gifts were as an editor, anthologist, scholar, and puzzle-crafter.

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