We know almost from the start who the killer is – a handyman of limited intellect known as Walt, but we also know that Walt is getting instructions telling him what to do – in effect, he is a human weapon, while the person using him to kill is hidden. You may recall that Ellery Queen (the author) was a collaboration between Fred Dannay and Manfred Lee, but this book was the first of a sequence produced when Lee had writer’s block. The book was ghost-written by science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon from a Dannay 42-page outline. It was then extensively revised by Manfred B. Lee, to which Dannay also added some revisions.
Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn, New York: Daniel (David) Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (October 20, 1905–September 3, 1982) and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee (January 11, 1905–April 3, 1971), to write detective fiction.
In a successful series of novels that covered 42 years, Ellery Queen served as both author's name and that of the detective-hero. Movies, radio shows, and television shows have been based on their works. The two, particularly Dannay, were also responsible for co-founding and directing Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, considered one of the most influential English crime fiction magazines of the last sixty-five years. They were also prominent historians in the field, editing numerous collections and anthologies of short stories such as The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. The cousins also wrote four novels about a detective named Drury Lane using the pseudonym Barnaby Ross, and allowed the Ellery Queen name to be used as a house name for a number of novels written by other authors.
Under their collective pseudonym, the cousins were given the Grand Master Award for achievements in the field of the mystery story by the Mystery Writers of America in 1961.
