The Tragedy of Errors and Others

Rating:
Summary: A must for all Queen fanatics!
Review: There's been far too little written about Ellery Queen--truly the master of American detective fiction. This book from Crippen and Landru is a great step forward. In addition to the full outline of Dannay and Lee's final but never finished novel "The Tragedy of Errors," there's also a selection of EQ short stories and best yet, a collection of appreciations and essays by collaborators and contempraries to EQ, covering the early period of the pince-nez Ellery to the later ghost-written (but plotted and edited by Dannay and Lee) psychological and religious thrillers--and even the Ellery of radio and the comics! EQ's been sadly out of fashion in the mystery field over the last 20 years--following a resurgence in 1976 with the NBC-TV series, various publishers have reissued several books but let them go out of print quickly; the essays in "The Tragedy of Errors" remind me how much I wish all the EQs were still available for today's new mystery readers. This is the best book I've yet seen on the *history* of Ellery, the cousins who created him, and the groundbreaking "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine." The very best compliment I can give this book? It makes me *need* to go back and re-read all my EQ favorites. Now, if I can only figure out those cryptic dying clues...