Newsletter June 2026

Ellery Queen was an amateur detective who proved week after week that he was smarter than the professionals.  Assisting Ellery were three people he could rely on: Nikki Porter, his secretary; Inspector Queen, his father; and Sergeant Velie, the gruff cop.  Ellery’s cases ranged from assassination attempts and blackmail to diamond smuggling and, of course, murder.  This however, was a detective show with a difference: series creators Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee added an interactive element.  At a predetermined point, when all the clues to the mystery had been set out, the narrative was stopped.  Listeners were encouraged to phone in and a panel of celebrity guests acted as armchair detectives in an attempt to solve the puzzle.  Very few of the celebrities displayed any talent for sleuthing so participants were selected from the audience.  But the producers quickly discovered that the average man or woman contributed very little and back came the well-known personalities — a mix of Hollywood actors, newspaper columnists, radio celebrities, and famous authors.  Milton Berle, Orson Welles, Gypsy Rose Lee, Guy Lombardo, Norman Corwin, Bela Lugosi, Arthur Godfrey, Mel Blanc, Spike Jones, John Wayne and many others were called on to make deductions and entertain listeners.  By 1946, the celebrities received a complimentary one-year subscription to the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine for participating.  Each episode of The Adventures of Ellery Queen was dramatized twice, once for the East Coast and again for the West Coast, with different celebrity guests for each broadcast.  At first there was just one panel of guests but some of them weren’t above indulging in a little foul play themselves.  One armchair detective was heard to remark that he’d solved the mystery by tuning in to the East Coast program hours before he went into the studio to appear as a guest.  The radio program was popular enough to convince Columbia Pictures to produce a series of movies based on the Ellery Queen characters.  A radio microphone was featured on the title screen of each film.  Actors over the radio run to portray Ellery Queen included Hugh Marlowe, Marion Shockley, Howard Smith, Ted de Corsia, Carleton Young, Sydney Smith (pictured) and Santos Ortega.  The series came to radio in 1939 and lasted until 1948.