The creative journey of Ellery Queen

Quinn's early novels, from The Roman Hat to The Mystery of the Spanish Shawl (1935), are often considered Quinn's first period. In addition to the nine works represented by the Country Names series. Under another pen name, Barnaby Ross, they also wrote the Deaf Detective Cherry Lane series, including The Tragedy of X, The Tragedy of Y, and four others***. Initially, the author refused to disclose the true identities of the two pen names, and created dramatic scenes in which a masked Quinn and a similarly masked Ross competed on stage at the same time in a test of deductive reasoning. During this period, they targeted traditional mystery novels, many of which can be considered among the finest works of the Golden Age. The novels are characterized by meticulous, detailed reasoning and analysis, a meticulous layout, a set of rings, fair and reasonable clues, and interesting puzzles. Needless to say, anyone who is a fan of mystery detective novels is bound to fall in love with their works.

Quinn's second period began with The Halfway House (1936), the first Ellery case whose title did not include the name of the country. During this period Dannay and Lee were largely influenced by women's glossy magazines, and around the mid-1930s they began selling novels to glossy magazines as well as to Hollywood.In the late '30s they had worked as screenwriters for Columbia, Paramount, and MGM. Compared to the earlier masterpieces, the second-period novels are weak on mind games, have too much female emotion, and humanize the characters for the sake of film adaptations. On the other hand, a wide range of views are elaborated, and throughout this period we see a struggle throughout the second period to humanize the world of Ellery and Quinn, and to set the stage for the masterful third period, which ended with The Dragon's Tooth in 1939.

It was in the third period that Quine's personal creative vision became fully realized, namely, that a detective novel is not only a story about a detective case, but can be written as a novel with serious themes. In this period, The Town of Murder (1942), Ten Days of Wonder (1948), and The Cat with Nine Tails (1949) are not only detective novels in the traditional sense, but also serious novels of literary standard because of the deep-rooted social, religious, and humanistic thoughts contained in them. The relationship between Laura and Jim in Murder Town, and the relationship between Howard and his stepmother in Ten Days of Wonder are not elements of love in the pure sense of the word, but issues that the authors try to explore. These novels should not be read only once, but should be read again and again to draw out the author's deeper thoughts. In addition, Quinn brings into the novel the idea that "the sleuth is dead," giving Ellery a kind of rebirth.

The fourth installment is less serious and heavy-handed than the third, and is more playful. But unlike the first issue, which boasted a challenge to the reader, the fourth installment brings a sense of fun to the reader, which is more evident in the short stories, where the trickery seems simple but ingenious, and seems to signal that the Quinn combo is coming to an end.Lee died on April 3, 1971, and although Dannay continued his career in detective fiction after that, no more full-length Quinn detective novels were published. On September 3, 1982, Dannay died in New York City, and Ellery Queen brought his half-century of detective work to an end.