The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries

THE ELLERY QUEEN-TENNIAL!!!!! Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who wrote under the pseudonym “Ellery Queen,” and whose fictional sleuth was also named “Ellery Queen,” were probably the most important American mystery writers from 1929 until the early 1970’s. “Ellery Queen is the American detective story,” wrote Anthony Boucher – and he meant not only their detective novels, but also their critical writings, their editing, and their appearance on television and the radio. From 1939 until 1948, Lee and Dannay wrote a hugely popular radio mystery show, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, which like the EQ books stopped the action toward the end and challenged the audience to deduce whodunit. From the more than 350 surviving scripts, we have chosen fourteen of the most • The case of the Tontine whose members die off one by one • The disappearance of Napoleon’s Razor on a cross-country railroad train • The case that Sherlock Holmes failed to solve • The strangling in a haunted cave with only the victim’s footprints leading to the corpse • A dying message which seems to name all the suspects • The clue of the dead moth • and 8 other extraordinary mysteries This book is published in honor of the centennial of the births of Lee and Dannay, and (n the fictional world of EQ), the centennial of Ellery himself. The Founded in 1994 as the only publishing house to specialize in mystery short story collections, Crippen & Landru has been described as “a monument in the making” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) and “the best edited, most attractively packaged line of mystery books introduced in this decade” (Mystery Scene), and even “God bless Crippen & Landru” (The Strand). In many ways, however, in introducing completely unknown EQ detections to a new generation of readers, The Adventure of the Murdered Moths may be our most important book.