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Sound of Detection: Ellery Queen's Adventures in Radio
Fully indexed with appendixes, this book offers a full documentary and origin of Ellery Queen, how the radio series evolved over the years, and most notably, a complete episode guide to each radio broadcast with plots for most of the episodes. Also includes three unused radio script treatments and proposals authored by Anthony Boucher!
- GenresNonfiction
Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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April 20, 2017
Ellery Queen is one of fiction’s Great Detectives, up on the same level as Holmes and Poirot. Queen’s novels are written by “Ellery Queen”—the pen name for co-writers (and cousins) Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee.
{In that corner of my brain where I believe that all the Great Detectives exist in the real world, I think of the novels as Queen’s 3rd person narrative accounts of his actual cases.}
One of the neat things about the novels is that they played fair with the reader—all the clues are there for us and the early novels actually paused just before Ellery reveals the killer’s identity to let us have our chance to solve it.
When Ellery Queen was on radio from 1939 to 1948, the same conceit was used, usually with a celebrity guest in the studio to play armchair detective and get a chance to solve the crime before Queen did. It was a wonderful premise for a great show.
“The Sound of Detection” does a superb job of taking us through the history of this show. The first part of the book gives us brief biographies of Lee and Danney. We learn how they came to love mystery fiction and eventually create Ellery Queen. We then follow along with them as they become involved in writing “The Adventures of Ellery Queen” on radio.
The prose is clear and entertaining as Francis Nevins provides us with facts and anecdotes, building a clear and comprehensive history of the radio show. He includes plot summaries for a lot of episodes to help give us a real taste of what the show was like. Nevins also proves himself to be a true fan when he does not hesitate to criticize the occasional weak episodes, but does so without sacrificing his respect for the overall high quality of Lee and Danney’s work. On page 31, Nevins is talking about how the authors would often reuse clues and plot devices from older stories to meet deadlines. He writes: “It’s no wonder that the cousins borrowed liberally from themselves, nor that some of their scripts were routine and mechanical in nature. What is astonishing is that so many Queen dramas were so good. In the memories of fans in the forties who became writers later, it was the best whodunit on the air.”
The rest of the book is wonderfully comprehensive in the information it gives us. There are several plot summaries written for the show by mystery writer/critic Anthony Boucher (who took over for Danney as co-writer late in the show’s run); a complete episode guide that also identifies the celebrity playing armchair detective for each episode; a list of what shows were on other networks during its run; and brief biographies of both the actors AND the armchair detectives. If I wanted to nitpick, I probably would have wished for a list of what episodes still survive and might be available commercially or online, but that’s simply not enough of a nitpick to knock off a star. If you are a fan of Ellery Queen, mystery fiction in general or Old-Time Radio, you will love this book.
I think it’s an indication of how much I loved it to mention that I had to pause several times while reading the book: Once to read one of the original short stories that had just been reference; twice to listen to episodes of the radio show; and once to listen to an episode of “The Shadow” in response to a short chapter written by William Nadel theorizing about what episodes of that show Lee and Danney wrote in the late 1930s.
{In that corner of my brain where I believe that all the Great Detectives exist in the real world, I think of the novels as Queen’s 3rd person narrative accounts of his actual cases.}
One of the neat things about the novels is that they played fair with the reader—all the clues are there for us and the early novels actually paused just before Ellery reveals the killer’s identity to let us have our chance to solve it.
When Ellery Queen was on radio from 1939 to 1948, the same conceit was used, usually with a celebrity guest in the studio to play armchair detective and get a chance to solve the crime before Queen did. It was a wonderful premise for a great show.
“The Sound of Detection” does a superb job of taking us through the history of this show. The first part of the book gives us brief biographies of Lee and Danney. We learn how they came to love mystery fiction and eventually create Ellery Queen. We then follow along with them as they become involved in writing “The Adventures of Ellery Queen” on radio.
The prose is clear and entertaining as Francis Nevins provides us with facts and anecdotes, building a clear and comprehensive history of the radio show. He includes plot summaries for a lot of episodes to help give us a real taste of what the show was like. Nevins also proves himself to be a true fan when he does not hesitate to criticize the occasional weak episodes, but does so without sacrificing his respect for the overall high quality of Lee and Danney’s work. On page 31, Nevins is talking about how the authors would often reuse clues and plot devices from older stories to meet deadlines. He writes: “It’s no wonder that the cousins borrowed liberally from themselves, nor that some of their scripts were routine and mechanical in nature. What is astonishing is that so many Queen dramas were so good. In the memories of fans in the forties who became writers later, it was the best whodunit on the air.”
The rest of the book is wonderfully comprehensive in the information it gives us. There are several plot summaries written for the show by mystery writer/critic Anthony Boucher (who took over for Danney as co-writer late in the show’s run); a complete episode guide that also identifies the celebrity playing armchair detective for each episode; a list of what shows were on other networks during its run; and brief biographies of both the actors AND the armchair detectives. If I wanted to nitpick, I probably would have wished for a list of what episodes still survive and might be available commercially or online, but that’s simply not enough of a nitpick to knock off a star. If you are a fan of Ellery Queen, mystery fiction in general or Old-Time Radio, you will love this book.
I think it’s an indication of how much I loved it to mention that I had to pause several times while reading the book: Once to read one of the original short stories that had just been reference; twice to listen to episodes of the radio show; and once to listen to an episode of “The Shadow” in response to a short chapter written by William Nadel theorizing about what episodes of that show Lee and Danney wrote in the late 1930s.
Displaying 1 of 1 review