cover image Fifty Years of the Best from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Fifty Years of the Best from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

. Carroll & Graf Publishers, $22.95 (642pp) ISBN 978-0-88184-632-4

Culling from 8000 stories published during the 50-year existence of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine , Sullivan presents 50 outstanding selections. Frederic Dannay and Manred Lee, who pseudonymously wrote mysteries under the Ellery Queen name, edited the magazine with hopes of lifting the detective genre to its rightful place as a literary form. There is enough ratiocination from distinguished writers to please the most demanding buffs of not only whodunits but brain-teasing how dunits. The variety of sleuths is mind-boggling: a psychiatrist solves a puzzle in Hugh Pentecost's ``The Fourth Degree''; a French newswoman's fashion savvy decodes ``The Clue of the Red Wig'' by John Dickson Carr; a seminarian manages to avenge the betrayal and death of his sister while maintaining his sacred vows in David Alexander's ``The Gentlest of the Brothers.'' Murder and gore are present in force, thanks to a cast of low-life and highbrow killers (including a crafty professor in Robert Bloch's ``Life in Our Time''). All are full of twists and turns, locked doors and secret passions--and most are short enough to be read in minutes. (Mar.)