Queens Full: Stories

Ellery Queen

jul 2015 · Open Road Media

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“Three novellas and two short stories featuring the prince of American detective fiction . . . He’s one of the great who never palls” (Kirkus Reviews).

The amateur theater company of Wrightsville is dying a slow and painful death. Every production is worse than the last, and the backers are about to pull the plug when the director reaches for his ace in the hole: the always-reliable production TheDeath of Don Juan. For the lead, he digs up faded Broadway star Foster Benedict, whose name is enough to sell out the run. But on opening night, Benedict makes a hash of the first act, and doesn’t show up for the second. When he’s found in his dressing room with a knife buried in his back, it’s clear that the libertine’s death has come a bit too soon. World-famous detective Ellery Queen is in the audience, and in this novella—as well as in the other stories collected in Queens Full—he proves that Don Juan doesn’t have a monopoly on adventure.
 

Acerca del autor

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.