The Roman Hat Mystery has been chosen from more than 100 selected manuscripts to represent the Stokes contribution to the mysterio-detective literature of 1929. Because we believe it to be in a class by itself we are publishing no other detective novel this season. Following no hackneyed formula, conveying to the public an entirely new experience in this popular type of fiction, The Roman Hat Mystery offers a foolproof plot of fascinating complexity, a theatrically romantic setting and a most ingenious deductive pattern that is plausible, gripping throughout and wholly original in weave. The essential clue is a missing silk tophat. On the surface it appears to be of minor significance, yet about this elusive thread the entire amazing tale revolves. The reader is given every fact necessary to the solution; and yet we challenge your most ardent amateur criminologists to deduce the startling dénouement. Not only in plot but in protagonist does this novel offer something “different.” You will like the old snuff-taking Inspector, Richard Queen, a shrewd and human manhunter; you will more than like his son Ellery, whose keen intellect dominates every situation. A brilliant analyst, a convincing maker of miracles, Ellery Queen bids fair to join that immortal group to which Sherlock Holmes, Lupin and few others belong

At crowded noon, in front of Fifth Avenue's most fashionable department store, while hundreds of sidewalk onlookers watch a demonstration of modernistic furniture in the window, the demonstrator touches a button regulating a concealed wall-bed — the bed swings out of the wall — and from its dark recesses tumbles the distorted, crumpled corpse of a beautiful woman... Ellery Queen moves vitally and refreshingly through his own story — a slender, cynical young man with a genius for piercing the veil of commonplaces and arriving at foolproof conclusions. Old Inspector Queen, his father, again takes you through the complicated process of a police investigation, although it is Ellery who is responsible for the solution of one of the most stimulating and baffling detective stories ever written. And the denouement is surprising and yet inevitable

An eccentric millionairess is lying in a diabetic coma on a hospital bed in an anteroom of the surgical suite of the Dutch Memorial Hospital, which she founded, awaiting the removal of her gall bladder. When the surgery is about to begin, the patient is found to have been strangled with picture wire. Although the hospital is crowded, it is well guarded, and only a limited number of people had the opportunity to have murdered her, including members of her family and a small number of the medical personnel. The apparent murderer is a member of the surgical staff who was actually seen in the victim’s vicinity, but his limp makes him easy to impersonate. Ellery Queen examines a pair of hospital shoes, one of which has a broken lace that has been mended with surgical tape. He performs an extended piece of logical deduction based on the shoe, plus such slight clues as the position of a filing cabinet, and creates a list of necessary characteristics of the murderer that narrows the field of suspects down to a single surprising possibility

From the very beginning, the Khalkis case struck a somber note. It began, as was peculiarly harmonious in the light of what was to come, with the death of an old man. Georg Khalkis, internationally famous art dealer and collector, died of heart failure. After his funeral, his attorney found that the will was missing and immediately called in the district attorney. When Inspector Queen and his son, Ellery, are brought in to solve the mystery of the missing will, Ellery mentions the one place they have not searched for the will... the coffin! Upon exhumation of the Khalkis coffin they find that it contained not one body — but two!

The Egyptian Cross Mystery has been characterized as “Ellery Queen’s weirdest adventure.” The shuddery, breathless plot plus Ellery Queen’s brilliantly logical solution mark the peak of Mr. Queen’s new famous “analytico-deductive” method. Ellery Queen has pitted his brain against many murdered but nowhere in his career has be applied his diamond-keen with to a murder as eerie and as puzzling as the crime which open The Egyptian Cross Mystery

Something entirely new in the field — a Wild West mystery in the heart of NYC. Ellery Queen's now-famous and much-imitated analytico-deductive method of solving crimes is brought to the acme of its development. Through logical reasoning and brilliare deduction, Mr. Queen narrows the field from literally thousands of potential suspects to the one and only possible murderer — the ultra-clever plotter who performed the seeming miracle of causing a gun to vanish before the eyes of twenty-thousand spectators!

THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY is superlatively “different.” It accomplishes the difficult task of combining provocative clues, thought-compelling logic and an amazing and inexorable mathematical solution with sheer story — the story of a bewildered group of people isolated on a mountain-top by a forest fire below... menaced by a murderer within and a flaming death without — truly caught between two fires. Mr. Queen handles his story elements — the growth of fear, the interplay of emotion, the delineation of common people helpless before an uncommon situation — equally as superbly as he docs his mystery and detective elements, in the concoction and treatment of which he is a past master

After seven consecutive best-sellers — Ellery Queen poses an eight problem more bizarre than “The Egyptian Cross Mystery”, more ingenious than “The Siamese Twin Mystery”; more amazing than any crime ever conceived in fiction. We do not hesitate to predict that THE CHINESE ORANGE MYSTERY will be hauled by Mr. Queen’s thousand of ardent fans as the most original of his analytico-deductive novels. What Inspector Richard Queen wanted to know was the identity of the murdered man. How could he be expected to solve a murder mystery without knowing who was murdered? The body of the slain man was found on the 22nd floor of the Hotel Chancellor in a private room; no one even remotely connected with the investigation had ever seen the man before. His name, where he came from, why he was there — remain a baffling mystery to the end. Yet all who found themselves enmeshed in the web of the tragedy — Donald Kirk, millionaire publisher and collector; his invalid father; his younger sister; the young novelist from China; the adventurers from abroad — found their lives warped and changed by the death of this nameless nobody from nowhere! But what perplexed Ellery Queen even more was the incredible appearance of the scene of the crime. Everything had been turned backwards! The victim’s clothing had been turned backwards, the rug upside down, the pictures facing the wall — everything movable in the room had been turned backwards. And what was the explanation of those grotesque ramrods stack up the victim’s back?

JOHN MARCO, the dashing and handsome Spaniard, the great lover, despoiler and betrayer of women, sat quietly on the beach terrace of Spanish Cape that ghostly night, apparently musing on his many iniquities, on the hold he had over the frantic desperate women in the house above him. Hat on head, hand on stick, long black opera cloak draped about his virile figure... that is the way they found him the next morning — dead, strangled, murdered... and when they removed the opera cloak they found him without shoes or socks, without trousers or coat or shirt or necktie or underwear — completely nude! Daring, clever, extraordinarily exciting, here is Ellery Queen at his best. And, as you might expect, again a stunning surprise at the end!

Ellery Queen is asked by a lawyer friend to help protect the interests of a pretty young heiress. They meet her, along with an unpleasant physician who is a friend of her family, as she disembarks in New York from an ocean liner arriving from England. She learns that her father, from whom she has been separated since her toddler years, has died just as she is to be reunited with her eccentric family and inherit her father’s fabled hoard of gold. The group drives for hours to reach an ugly and sinister Victorian house called the Black House at nightfall. The Black House, where her father died, is uninhabitable — the group meets the family and beds down in a small stone house next door. When they awake, the Black House has vanished as though it never existed. Ellery must shake off the Gothic trappings and the suggestions of black magic in order to figure out what has happened to the Black House and the gold

Halfway House, where a strange man finds final rest on his tortured journey through life... Halfway House, where under the grim shadow of a sensational murder, opposites meet and clash — common peddler and financier, young housewife and cold society woman, struggling lawyer and millionaire debutante... Halfway House, where Ellery Queen, crime consultant to the world-at-large, returns to his old love of pure and pungent deduction in what is unquestionably his most fascinating narrative of real people and subtle violence to date — a modern Tale of Two Cities by the master mystery-teller

In THE DOOR BETWEEN Ellery Queen again achieves this apparently impossible and produces something entirely new in the mystery field. The weapon he was in the most deadly, most universal and the head known among all the wide variety of weapons ever employed by criminals and murderers. The subject and the theme of THE DOOR BETWEEN give the thousands of Queen readers yet another kind of trill. The skill and brilliance Queen’s writing show in each succeeding Queen novel the steady growth of a master hand

An exotic movie actress, the swivel-hipped blonde, Winni Moon, and her scented chimpanzee; a murder which, already precious, became a managing editor’s dream; Pink, who came from Flatbush, Brooklyn; Solly Spaeth who was spawned in New York... These are only some slight hints of what you will find in THE DEVIL TO PAY and it is fair to say that here again is evidence that for ingenuity, surprise and original setting no mystery writer today can equal Ellery Queen. He never has failed to play fair with his reader. The amazing deductions of his stories are always in accord with the science of the streamlined murder. If crime is the subject of reader interest no mystery fan can commit a greater crime than to neglect the two-to-three-hour revel which THE DEVIL TO PAY provides

A STATEMENT TO THE PUBLIC Since 1929 we have the exclusive privilege of publishing the detective stories of Ellery Queen in the United States. In our years publishing Queen’s thirteen books we have refrained from the usual and monotonously extravagant publishers’ claims, preferring to let the books speak for themselves. They have spoken so eloquently — each has been an instant best-seller here and abroad — that Queen is now recognized by the world’s press and public as one of the greatest writers of detective stories. Now, with our publication of Ellery Queen’s fourteenth book and latest novel, THE FOUR OF HEARTS, we feel compelled to break our silence. We honestly believe that THE FOUR OF HEARTS is not only Ellery Queen’s finest novel to date, but is destined to be ranked as a classic by those familiar with this type of fiction. We ask you to compare it mercilessly, point for point — in plot, in characterization, in atmosphere, in style, in ingenuity, in excitement and bafflement and as a source of sheer reading pleasure — with any detective story you have ever read. We ask you to judge for yourself whether our claim is even slightly overmagnified. We feel confident that your judgement will substantiate our opinion

Ellery Queen has now opened his own detective agency, Ellery Queen, Inc., on Times Square, New York, and his very first case develops into a complex and spell-binding tale of crime, intrigue, and extraordinary deduction. In its telling, the author has returned to the style and method of such earlier great successes as THE DUTCH SHOE MYSTERY, THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY, etc. Here again we meet Inspector Queen, Sergeant Velie and other earlier favorites and again Ellery Queen applies his analytical deductive methods to one of the most puzzling murder plots ever uncovered in the annals of crime. Six months after paying Ellery a handsome retainer, a retired munitions magnate, worth many millions, dies on his yacht in the Caribbean. Peculiar circumstances! An important man is quickly buried at sea with no medical certificate and no autopsy! Crew quickly dispersed before they can be questioned! Only Ellery’s diamond sharp wits could cut through the web of tangled events and arrive at the dramatic solution

At last another full-length mystery story by Ellery Queen — his first in three years. Observe Queen, detective, as he realizes that a murder is to be committed, as he watches the supposed murderer before the crime, as be sees the death but even then isn’t sure of the who and the why. Follow the intensely dramatic trial scene, then unravel with Queen the solution which bring happiness to those who should be happy and punishment to those who deserve it. Of course, Ellery Queen didn’t want to get into all this trouble, for the went to the small town of Wrightsville under a pseudonym to write a novel. Neither did he intend to fall for Patricia nor did he want to get in the middle of malicious gossip with wicked results in a town turned topsy-turvy by a murder. “Calamity Town” has action, excitement, novelty, atmosphere. With some security, the publisher queries: “Will this be considered a minor classic in the field of the American mystery novel?”

Before the last echo of the shot had trailed down Riverside Drive, Ellery Queen realized that he had just witnessed a murder. Robert Potts lay shot through the heart. Not only had Ellery Queen been a witness but also Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie. Yet not one of them knew who committed the murder. This is the story of the Old Woman (Cornelia Potts), who lived with all her children (six) in the incredible Potts “palace” on Riverside Drive — on its front lawn a great, bronze Oxford complete with trailing bronze shoelaces. Over the household hovers a ruthless killer who fits his cold-blooded crimes into the pattern of a Mother Goose rhyme. There are amusing and queer characters galore Thurlow, who spent his life bringing fruitless lawsuits; Louella, the would-be inventor; Horatio, the Philosopher of Escapism. And in addition there is the lovely, red-haired Sheila, revolted by the actions of her family. Here is murder as weird and baffling as Ellery Queen has yet encountered — a stiff dose of murder in the best Queen fashion

Ellery Queen’s subtle attack on his longest and most complicated ease to dale developed out of a baffling series of murders in New York City. Victim followed victim with no apparent connection except that each was found strangled by a cord of India silk. The city’s tension mounted to mob hysteria. First in a cartoonist’s drawing, then in the feverish minds of the citizens, especially in that of Ellery himself, stalked the CAT, adding a new tail with each new murder, brandishing also a huge question mark — who would be the next victim? Clues were nonexistent. Ellery had to employ all his canny skill and play every hunch before he could find even a hopeful direction in which to move. Then he opened the throttle, using the police, the mayor, the psychiatrists, even the enamored heirs of two of the CAT’S victims, to speed into a climax as astounding as it is incontrovertible

Ellery Queen’s arrival in Hollywood did not pass unnoticed. It Brought a pretty, nineteen-year-old girl to his apartment with a tale of murder so strange as to be irresistible to that connoisseur of bizarre crime. the story of a man who scared to death... murdered by a dead dog!.. This Ellery Queen’s 25th Detective Mystery, unfolds with a mounting tension as a dead fish, strangled frogs and the skin of an alligator become fantastic components in a grand design for murder

Armed men invade the Queen apartment. At their head is Abel Bendigo, brother of one of the world’s most powerful men, King Bendigo of Bodigen Arms, industrial monster whose tentacles embrace the planet. Someone is threatening to kill King Bendigo, and Ellery must undertake to save that hated life! Virtual prisoners, the Queens are rocketed a sealed plane to the headquarters of the Bendigo empire — a mysterious island believed to be “somewhere in the Atlantic.” On Bendigo Island — in a frightening atmosphere of concentration camp, industrial slavery, and brute militarism — Ellery comes to grips with a baffling murderer who calmly announces not only the exact date of the assassination, but the exact hour and minute as well! He finds himself matching wits with the fascinating American-born King, handsome, cynical, an absolute monarch; with King’s disturbing wife Karla, from a European royal family; Abel, King’s Prime Minister, of acute intelligence; and Judah, the saturnine little third brother with an inexhaustible thirst for $50-a-bottle cognac. Ellery solves a difficult locked-room puzzle with classic brilliance and at the same time grapples with the life-and-death problem of the democratic world today — how to deal with the violent threat of totalitarian power

“A Problem in Adultery” might aptly be the subtitle of Ellery’s latest case. Who is pretty Mrs. Lawrence’s lover? And how can the young, rich Broadway producer be saved from the folly of her infidelity and the fury of her husband Dirk, the unsuccessful author who cannot control his morbid attacks of jealousy? These are Ellery’s major problems. Beginning with a night rendezvous in the park and a punch in the jaw from Irate Husband, Ellery finds himself hot on the trail of an unknown Casanova... suspected lover, home-wrecker, and likely target for a .45. And making the trail all over the jungle of New York City — from Chinatown and The Bowery to the upper reaches of Bronx Park — are the tantalizing Scarlet Letters, an alphabetical puzzle that keeps Ellery — and the reader — cudgeling his wits to the very end. Ellery has a special surprise for you in a case as sensational as the front page of tomorrow’s tabloid — the first appearance in a Queen novel of Nikki Porter as Ellery’s Girl Friday, that fiery, faithful, and long-suffering secretary of the Queen radio and short-story adventures. But THE SCARLET LETTERS is full of surprises, not the least of them the astounding pay-off of as exciting and clever a mystery as Ellery has ever gone a-hunting

A quarter of a century’s requests from many thousands of Ellery Queen fans all over the world have finally borne fruit. At long last, here is a full-fledged murder mystery investigated and solved by Inspector Richard Queen without so much as a single deduction’s help from his celebrated son. But Inspector Queen’s Own Case is far more than a baffling murder mystery. It is also a tender, understanding story of middle-aged people everywhere who find themselves put out to pasture on a pension to face an empty old age. Ellery’s father was spending the summer with friends at their beach house on the Connecticut shore. It should have been a golden summer, but all the Inspector could think about was his enforced uselessness. The old pro had been retired — the Administrative Code made no exceptions when a New York police officer reached the age of 63. How was he to occupy the endless days? He was still vigorous, still useful. A man needed more than security. He needed something to do. Richard Queen found one man’s answer on Nair Island, and he was soon plunged into the most challenging and dangerous case of his long career. And he found something else, too — that life can even be sweet at 63. Her name was Jessie Sherwood, a registered nurse in her late 40s, lonely, still pretty, and all woman. Jessie had been hired by the blueblood Humffreys to take charge of their newborn infant. When queer, frightening things began to happen in that multimillionaire home... A helpless baby, a unique romance, and a tensely plotted tale of multiple murder mounting to a shocking climax make Inspector Queen’s Own Case one of the most superb novels to come from Ellery Queen’s typewriter

Dane McKell, millionaire socialite, was planning an exhilarating summer when he discovered to his horror that his father was having an affair with another woman. The McKells were not only very, very rich, they were also very, very respectable, and Dane’s mother was a gentle and lovely lady. Dane forced a meeting with the woman in the case with the full intent of breaking up his father’s relationship. Then, helplessly, he himself fell in love with her. After that — murder. This is the basic situation, a brilliantly plotted detective story that only the old master, Queen, could devise, and that only Ellery, working with his father, Inspector Queen, could solve. As always with classic Queens, the reader will have it solved three times before he discovers that he has been outwitted as usual

It all begins when Ellery Queen receives a manuscript that appears to be a genuine Sherlock Holmes novel written by John H. Watson, M.D. Where did it come from? The manuscript itself tells the long-concealed story of how Holmes stalked Jack the Ripper—and discovered who he was! Now you can follow Ellery Queen—the logical successor to Sherlock Holmes—as he literally follows the greatest detective of them all. The story of “Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper” is presented with the full approval of the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and is a legitimate addition to the Holmes canon

Who are you, Malone? Just a little while ago you were a cop. That was before the two punks and their girl hit town. That was before they boosted a payroll and shot down a man and took your 9-year-old daughter as insurance to cover their getaway. Now you're just a man. Scared. Not for yourself-that would be easy. But for your child, the only thing in the world you love enough to make you play ball with the kind of scum you've hated all your life

The green wig belonged to a redheaded Vegas show girl. The sequined gown had highlighted the bouncy silhouette of a blonde off-Broadway actress. The long evening gloves were the property of a bosomy smalltown nurse. These were more than an inventory of ladies’ wear. For they were found on the scene of a brutal crime during a hideaway weekend, near the body of an internationally known jet-setter notorious for his pursuit of beautiful women. What did they mean? The question plagues Ellery and Inspector Queen — and it will plague you — throughout the Queens’ newest murder case, most of which takes place in Queen fans’ favorite New England town, Wrightsville. But it is far from the only missing piece of the puzzle. There is the victim’s dying message. There is the mysterious woman to whom the trail is long and difficult. Above all there is the question: Who was THE LAST WOMAN IN HIS LIFE? Follow Ellery as he works his way through a typically labyrinthine Queen maze, from one surprise to another, with the most stunning surprise of all waiting for you at the end

The 9-word clue was one of 9 cryptic notes that had been sent to taunt Inspector Queen and Ellery 9 days after the murder. Nino Importuna had been obsessed with the number. He had lived by it. Now the killer who brought a trio of gory deaths to Nino's 9th-floor penthouse at No. 99 East was camouflaging his identity in a jungle of 9s. And daring Ellery to find him. The case was destined to be a dazzling contest of wits-to the 9th degree!