Miscellaneous Monday—Number Forty-three

"The Ellery Queen Mystery - Why Is the Corpus No Longer Alive?"

By Jon L. Breen (born 1943; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; FictionMags HERE; The West 87th Street Irregulars HERE; and

The Open Library HERE).

First appearance: The Weekly Standard, October 10, 2005.

Article (3 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).

   "How did Ellery Queen fall so far? I’ll advance five possible explanations."

MYSTERY FICTION expert Jon L. Breen explains "the precipitous decline" and fall of a once-enormously-popular detective fiction character, coming to some grim conclusions about just who might be the culprit—or, should we say, culprits?

Random snippets:

  "Literary reputation is as fragile in crime fiction as anywhere else, but the precipitous decline of Ellery Queen may be unique, one of the most total, and in some ways inexplicable, cases of devalued stock in the annals of American letters."

  "Through the early 1930s, the team took the intellectual game that was the formal detective novel to greater heights than any American writer, arguably raising it from a craft to an art."

  "Through it all, they never renounced their allegiance to the pure fair-play puzzle that was their early hallmark. While they were quite capable of creating effective sequences of action, menace, and pursuit, they knew readers relished the intellectual pleasure of those extended scenes in which Ellery explained his reasoning in careful, painstaking detail."

  "Both cousins loved the English language, strove for the perfect word to convey their meaning, and wanted to reflect their times vividly and accurately."

Resources:

- Another popular sleuth also suffered a decline in popularity that was possibly more complete than EQ's; see John Loughery's "The Rise and Fall of Philo Vance" in the 

Winter 1987 issue of The Armchair Detective (7 pages; HERE).

- A listing of postings on Steve Lewis's Mystery*File that are by, about, or otherwise involve Jon L. Breen begins (HERE).

- Consult Book Series in Order for a list of EQ's HB and PB publications (HERE).

- Our encounters with Jon L. Breen's short fiction comprise his S. S. Van Dine spoof "The Circle Murder Case" (HERE) and his Ellery Queen pastiche-parody "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" (HERE).

The bottom line:

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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