Editing Ellery Queen (section)

==Ellery Queen, the fictional character==
{{Infobox character
| name = Ellery Queen
| series = 
| image = Jim Hutton Ellery Queen 1976.JPG
| caption = [[Jim Hutton]] as Ellery Queen
| first = ''[[The Roman Hat Mystery]]''
| last = ''A Fine and Private Place''
| creator = Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (writing as Ellery Queen)
| portrayer = [[Donald Cook (actor)|Donald Cook]]<br>[[Eddie Quillan]]<br>[[Ralph Bellamy]]<br>[[Hugh Marlowe]]<br>[[Carleton G. Young]]<br>Sydney Smith<br>[[William Gargan]]<br>[[Lawrence Dobkin]]<br>[[Howard Culver]]<br>[[Richard Hart (actor)|Richard Hart]]<br>[[Lee Bowman]]<br>[[George Nader]]<br>[[Lee Philips]]<br>[[Bill Owen (writer and announcer)|Bill Owen]]<br>[[Peter Lawford]]<br>[[Jim Hutton]]
| gender = Male
| occupation = Amateur detective, Author
| nationality = American
| family = Richard Queen (father)
| first_date = 1929
| last_date = 1971
}}

Ellery Queen, the fictional character, is the hero of more than thirty novels and several short story collections, written by Dannay and Lee and published under the Ellery Queen pseudonym. The creation of Queen was probably inspired by [[Philo Vance]], the detective created by the writer [[S. S. Van Dine|S.S. Van Dine]].<ref name=":5" /> According to the critic H.R.F. Keating, "Later the cousins [Dannay and Lee] took a sharper view of Vance, Manfred Lee calling him, with typical vehemence, 'the biggest prig that ever came down the pike'."<ref name="KEAT" />

As Van Dine had done earlier with Philo Vance, Dannay and Lee gave Ellery Queen an extremely elaborate back story that was rarely mentioned after the first few novels. In fact, Queen goes through several transformations in his personality and his approach to investigation over the course of the series.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />

In the earlier novels, he is a snobbish [[Harvard University|Harvard]]-educated intellectual of independent means who wears [[pince-nez]] glasses and investigates crimes because he finds them stimulating. He supposedly derives these characteristics from his unnamed late mother, the daughter of an [[Aristocracy (class)|aristocratic]] New York family, who had married Richard Queen, a bluff and short [[Police officer|policeman]].<ref name=":2" />

Beginning in the 1938 novel ''[[The Four of Hearts]]'', he spends some time working in [[Hollywood, Los Angeles|Hollywood]] as a screenwriter. Soon, he has a slick façade, is part of Hollywood society and hobnobs comfortably with the wealthy and the famous. Beginning with ''[[Calamity Town]]'' in 1942, he becomes less of a cypher and more of a human being, often becoming emotionally affected by the people in his cases, and at one point quitting detective work altogether. ''Calamity Town'' and some other novels during this period are set in the imaginary town of Wrightsville, where subsidiary characters recur from story to story as Queen relates to the various strata of American society as an outsider.<ref name=":2" />

However, after his Hollywood and Wrightsville periods, he returns to his New York City roots for the rest of his career, and is then seen again as an ultra-logical crime solver who remains distant from his cases. In the very late novels, he often seems a near-faceless, near-characterless persona whose role is purely to solve the mystery. So striking are the differences between the different periods of the Ellery Queen character that [[Julian Symons]] advanced the theory that there were two Ellery Queens — an older and younger brother.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Symons |first=Julian |title=Great detectives: Seven Original Investigations |publisher=Abrams |year=1981 |isbn=978-0810909786 |pages=66–70}}</ref>

Queen is said to be married and the father of a child in the introductions of the first few novels, but this plot line is never developed and he is portrayed as a bachelor in all of his later appearances. Nikki Porter, who acts as Queen's secretary and is something of a love interest, is first introduced in the radio series ''[[The Adventures of Ellery Queen (radio program)|The Adventures of Ellery Queen]]'' in 1939. Her first appearance in a written story is on the final pages of the 1943 novel ''[[There Was an Old Woman (novel)|There Was an Old Woman]]'', when a character with whom Queen has had some flirtatious moments suddenly announces that she will change her name to Nikki Porter and will work as Queen's secretary. Nikki Porter appears sporadically thereafter in the novels and short stories, linking the character from radio and movies to the written canon.<ref name=":1" />

Paula Paris, an [[agoraphobia|agoraphobic]] gossip columnist, is linked romantically with Queen in the 1938 novel ''The Four of Hearts'' and in some short stories in the 1940s but does not appear in the radio series or films and soon vanishes from the books. Queen is not given any serious romantic interests after Nikki Porter and Paula Paris disappear from the books.<ref name=":1" />

The Queen household, an apartment on West 87th street in New York City, is shared by Ellery Queen and his widowed father, Richard Queen. (Very late in the series, Richard Queen remarries, but how this affects his living arrangement is never spelled out.) The household also contains a houseboy named Djuna in the earlier novels. Possibly of [[Romani people|Roma]] origin, Djuna appears periodically in the canon, apparently ageless and family-free, in a supporting role as cook, receiver of parcels, valet, and occasional comedy relief.  He is the protagonist in most of the juvenile novels ghost-written under the pseudonym Ellery Queen Jr.<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":5" />