Ellery Queen is a fictional name of two cousins: Frederick Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred Lee (1905–1971). Their pen produced 25 detective novels in which one character appears everywhere—the detective and writer of crime novels Ellery Queen, whose popularity is on a par with that of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. The brothers’ co-authored work mostly fits into the classic detective genre, where there are plenty of tangled logical turns, false leads, and ingenious traps.
Ellery Queen is not only the pseudonym of the two writers, but also a character in their many works—a professional writer of detective stories and an amateur detective who comes to help his father, police inspector Richard Queen, when the next “crime puzzle” turns out to be too tough for him.