Queen's literary ancestors include Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. C. Bentley, and closer to home, S. S. Van Dine. Like these writers, Queen emphasizes the principles of rational deduction, and creates a detective-hero who is intelligent, eccentric, and infallible. Like Poe's Dupin and Conan Doyle's Holmes, Queen possesses extraordinary deductive abilities and a creative imagination which, in concert, enable him to penetrate almost insoluble mysteries. Yet Queen is less antisocial than either of these figures, less sardonic in his response to the world. He is, like E. C.

Bentley's Philip Trent, a gentleman accepted by the upper levels of the society in which he moves. However, it is to Van Dine's Philo Vance that the early Ellery Queen bears the closest resemblance. S. S. Van Dine, the pseudonym of the journalist and art critic Willard Huntington Wright, wrote eleven novels featuring his detectivehero...