I went on an Agatha Christie binge last year sometime. I truly didn’t know she was that good of a writer. Yes, some cringy moments due to racism and terrible ideas about women, but great to read overall.
I haven’t heard of the other lady.
Ha! .
Good choice. Also Too Many Cooks.
I did say entertaining. He is classified by many critics as a “hack” due to his output (and a couple accidentally had the same plots). I mean, he did put out like 600 books. Mind you, he devised a great template for his stories.
His Tecumseh Fox books are okay, but they dont have quite the magic of those Archie “wrote”. Red Threads stars Inspector Cramer.
Right and a great team up. Not to mention Cramer is a solid detective also, not a bumbler.
Why “ha”? I’d never heard of Ellery Queen until this poll, and assumed it was a woman until I looked it up just now.
Turns out it was the pseudonym for two male writers (collaborating cousins), and also the name of the male detective in their stories.
Oh, I shared in the joke. It’s pretty obvious you never heard of someone if you get their gender wrong.
“Never heard of that lady” sounds like the punchline to an Alice Cooper joke. Ellery Queen is fairly well known as a team of male writers and the male character is even more well known. I thought your comment was almost certainly a joke.
It was my comment, and not a joke, but I was amused when I googled Ellery Queen.
I literally lost the thread on this one.
Among mystery fans, I would believe this. Among the general public, probably not so much.
The last new Ellery Queen story was published 55 years ago, and the last significant media adaptation of the character and the stories was 50 years ago (the TV series starring Jim Hutton). It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the name, and the series, has largely faded from general public knowledge.
I was hoping to get a pass because I’m a Millennial.
One of the things I’ve noticed on these boards, as well as elsewhere, is that it’s almost never safe to assume that everybody else shares your knowledge of whatever you think is basic information.
“I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know, I know too well—
I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.”
—apparently you’re not alone!
Oh, you should definitely get a pass! I know Ellery Queen’s output because I was a) a mystery fan and b) devouring mystery stories as a teenager in the seventies, when the cousins were dying and the novels and short stories came to an end—leaving a LOT for an obsessive kid like me to read though.
and for many years I continued to read Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which had stories, some of them excellent, and reviews of novels.
But that really was a long time ago, and many better mystery writers have come (and gone in some cases) and so it’s no surprise to me that Queen is an unfamiliar name for tons of people these days.
I was a fairly avid mystery reader years ago, and I’d heard of both Ellery Queen and the magazine. But I’d never read any of that series. I just learned that it was written by a pair of men. (I’d never really wondered about the gender of the author, but had assumed it was a single person.) And i just learned that the books featured a detective of that name, i thought it was the name of the author.
I once turned in a paper with something like this as one of the answers:
Magister Fell, non amo te
Et something something nec quare
Sed eto scio, et scio bene,
Magister Fell, non amo te.
Got me a check mark, but not a higher grade.
There was an Ellery Queen TV series back in the 70s, created by the same team who made Columbo. I remember it being pretty terrible, and had no idea they made this many episodes.
Oops, I see it is mentioned up thread. Anyway, have a link!
Aw, I’d have given you a higher grade!
Thanks! You might have liked my translation of Patti Smith’s “Birdland” into Latin, amateurish as it was.
I’m sure I would’ve!
in HS I translated a chapter of Alice in Wonderland into German. I think I got a good grade. It was a great deal of fun and I thought for maybe fifteen seconds about becoming a translator.
Nice.