Kiss and Kill

Ellery Queen

Sep. 2015 · Open Road Media

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When his wife disappears without a trace, a desperate man turns to Chicago’s toughest PI for help in this classic hardboiled mystery.

Elizabeth Tollman puts the roast in the oven, goes out to buy a loaf of bread, and never comes home. Half an hour later, her husband finds the bread outside their front door, but his wife is nowhere to be seen. Edward Tollman calls her friends, combs the streets, even pokes his head into local bars—but Elizabeth has vanished into thin air. The police can’t help him without evidence of a crime, so Tollman turns to the one man in Chicago who’s mean enough to get results: Barney Burgess, PI.
 
Burgess is strapping and tough, with an ugly mug that’s almost handsome in a Humphrey Bogart sort of way. In fact, everything about him seems straight out of a B movie—right down to his spit-shined shoes and his itchy trigger finger. Burgess is used to dealing with killers, but Tollman’s case will be the most dangerous of his career.

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Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing, editing, and anthologizing under the name, gaining a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery.
 
Although eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1928, when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that was later published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Their character was an amateur detective who uses his spare time to assist his police inspector uncle in solving baffling crimes. Besides writing the Queen novels, Dannay and Lee cofounded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired Queen upon Lee’s death.