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 n the late
thirties the influence of two new media began to influence the work of the two
cousins pulpmagazines: (Red Book, Cosmopolitan,...) and movies. They were lured
into thinking that more love-interest, a more loose construction would please both those
media and result in a more profitable income. So they let go of their
highly developed technique to take on some more modern form. This included a more
individualistic approach to problems, placing them in a new and different light. Gone was
the symbolism in chapters, finished were the diagrams, citats, list of
characters,...the patterned title was dropped, the murder scene was less bizarre,
there was a recognition of the world outside the story, the solution was arrived at more
by intuition than logic,... Together with the Ellery
Queen books the character of Ellery Queen
changed. And what did we get? Romance... they treated us to affaires of the heart. Our by
Queen battered brain got some romantic elements to consider. The first novels being very
down to earth, the subsequent were very grave and metaphysical and at a certain moment Ellery
Queen gave his stories a warm heartbeat. Some of the less cerebral readers had
stated a wish for Ellery not being so alienated from day to day life. The murderer must be
very shrewd but there had to be a limit somewhere for human mechinations and a criminal's
strategy. Queen's speech pattern was more American slang than American formal, and
he began to worry that he might be too quick with his solutions. His investigations began
to affect other people's lives.
They only published five novels and the stage play Danger, Men Working (base for
the movie 'The Crime Nobody Saw")written
with Lowell Brentano for producer Jed Harris and it closed after a few nights in Baltimore
and Philadelphia. The reason for the rather thin output was the fact that they had been
hired by Hollywood as screenwriters at the story departements of three
different studios: Columbia, Paramount and M.G.M. Their highly
argumentative methods of working together caused friction with people in
the neighbouring offices and, while the pay was lucrative, they did not
write anything that earned them a screen credit. So after trying
their luck on stage and movies another medium would come to their rescue. A medium for the
masses about to hit his own 'Golden Age': radio.
 On a more personal note by 1939 Fred and
Mary Dannay together with their children Douglas (6) and newborn Richard lived in the
suburbs of Great Neck, Long Island. Fred continued collecting stamps and writing poetry.
He also set out to collect all detective crime-short stories, and who's to
say he didn't succeed.
Manny had divorced his first wife and lived with his daughters, Jacqueline and Patricia in
a New York apartment at 1050 Park Avenue. In his spare time he continued to play violin or
listen to his collection classical records. But mostly they were putting in 12 hours a day
at home and met once a week to compare material in an office rented under the name of
"Ellery Queen". Both men alternated between Pall
Malls and pipes, with the occasional cigars, which probable accounts for
the fact that Ellery, as a character, is one of the great connoisseurs of
tobacco in detective fiction. They were contacted by a young executive at the
Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) who was looking for someone who could write a new sort
of radio-drama: an hour-long detective serie. George Zachary offered them 25$ a week and an own
radioshow, still they felt reluctant to accept. One can only suspect they finally
preferred the vast potential audience it offered. The learned the ropes writing for radio
writing for several radioshows some known some forgotten (even by themselves). Meanwhile
preparations where on the way for the Ellery Queen- radioseries. During
1939 they must have spend nearly every minute on the radioseries, the hectic task of
delivering an one-hour original drama each week! So it was no surprise that seven weeks
(with two reruns) into 1940 the show was cut to half an hour.
Then... Dannay had a near-fatal auto accident in late November 1940 which
left him in critical condition with several broken ribs, severe internal
injuries, and shock. On 15 January 1941 Variety reported Dannay on his way
to Florida for a month's vacation to recuperate. The cousins had started
work on a new novel and stayed in touch by telephone and wire. However the
proposed novel employed the same basic plot as Agatha Christie's And
then there were none (1939) and had to be re-scheduled (as the 1943
release There was an Old
Woman). It was during this
time the cousins agreed to have the plots of the first two motion pictures
fictionalized and published. They may have been unsatified with the movies
it was not above them to pass these plots off as the work of Ellery
Queen.
During the fifteen months the radioshow was off the air they wrote one of their finest novels Calamity Town (1942), the start of the
Wrightsville-periode. Dannay had somewhat completed his collection of short stories and
wrote 101 Years Entertainment (1941). He also launched Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
during this time.
 s Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee became
frustrated with the limitations of the formal deductive puzzle,
they tried to break away from tradition and experiment with something else. Why not use
the detective story format in a novel that would explore human motivations and
relationships? Calamity Town began a new
era, the first in a subseries within the Queen canon: the Wrightsville Stories. Read in
sequence, the novels of the third period show an inevitable change in Ellery Queen
from solver of artificial puzzles to something of a philosopher-detective. Introduced is
the angst that infuses the series - especially the Wrightsville novels - of the same
period. No more are these "problems in deduction," as the earliest works were
defined. Ellery suffers over his cases and their consequences now. He even fails,
at times.
When Calamity Town was turned down for
pre-release by a national magazine for no apparent reason they returned to radio
considering it safe to place their bet on several numbers. Theater and movies had proven
unsatifactory and although it was hard work they had much more impact over their radio
work.
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