The following essay discusses Dannay and his frequent collaborator, Manfred B. Lee.

Ellery Queen was the pseudonym of cousins and collaborators Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee and the name of detective they created. As Queen, they wrote mystery novels and edited two magazines and many story collections during a period of approximately forty years. They also wrote original radio plays under that name and about that character. The cousins were both born in Brooklyn in 1905, and their initial collaborative work as Queen was undertaken in 1928, when Dannay was a copywriter and art director for a Manhattan advertising agency and Lee was a publicity agent for the New York branch of a film studio. That first collaboration was The Roman Hat Mystery. Dannay and Lee had responded to a contest sponsored by McClure's which offered a prize of seventy-five hundred dollars for the best detective novel submitted. Their...