Queen on the Scene

Maybe it’s my imagination, but there seems to be a lot of talk lately about the two cousins--Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay--who grew famous writing dozens of 20th-century mystery novels under the pseudonym Ellery Queen.

Just this last weekend, I posted a selection of vintage Queen book jackets in my other blog, Killer Covers.

At the same time, the blogger known as Puzzle Doctor has announced that he or she is planning to review, one by one, the more than 40 Queen books that also feature the amateur sleuth Ellery Queen. (Links to Puzzle Doctor’s critiques will be catalogued here.)

And then today I received a notice from TV Shows on DVD, telling me that a collection of four episodes from the 1975-1976 NBC-TV series Ellery Queen will be released at the end of this month under the title Ellery Queen Mysteries. This follows the release, last September, of all 22 episodes from that same too-short-lived production by William Link and Richard Levinson. Ellery Queen Mysteries contains the first two and last two shows from the series, and will set you back only $9.98, compared with $59.98 for the entire set.

If this isn’t coincidence, it’s one hell of a mystery.