Ellery Queen was the pen name of Frederic Dannay (born Daniel Nathan) and Manfred Bennington Lee (born Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky, and also the name of their detective. Their first joint venture under the name was The Roman Hat Mystery, published in 1929. The first of the Ellery Queen mysteries has features that don’t last: an introduction by someone only identified with initials, supposedly a family friend, who visits Richard Queen, his son Ellery, Ellery’s wife and child in retirement in Italy, and gets the details of the mystery he’s about to tell us. Richard Queen is a detective inspector in the New York Police Department who solves cases with the help of his tireless Sergeant Velie but mainly using the brains of his son Ellery, a detective story writer himself, who here is a pince-nez wearing esthete who tediously lards his conversations with literary tags and quotes. He gets humanized in further novels.
The plot starts with a dead lawyer in one of the back seats of the Roman Theatre, killed during a performance of a popular gangster play. The dead man turns out to be a blackmailer, and his missing hat is the key element in the plot. The Queens have a full audience as suspects. Progress is made when the Queens figure out that the hat and the blackmail are connected.
The plot moves slowly, and slows even further when Papa Queen is explaining the solution to the mystery. There is a plodding quality that makes one yearn for Christie or Sayers. A notable feature is a challenge to the reader, who is supposedly in command of all the facts necessary to solve the crime, late in the book, before the climactic apprehension of the murderer and the subsequent explanation.
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