Fri 14 Jan 2011
Mike Nevins on ELLERY QUEEN (DANNAY & LEE) & PATRICIA HIGHSMITH.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns , Old Time Radio , TV mysteries[11] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
I recently unearthed an Ellery Queen mystery, or more precisely a mystery about EQ, which will not be solved easily if at all. The September 2002 issue of Radiogram, a magazine for fans of old-time radio, includes “In the Studio with Ellery Queen,†a brief memoir by Fred Essex, who was a producer-director for the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency in the early 1940s when one of the programs the agency brought to the air every week was The Adventures of Ellery Queen.
At this time Ellery’s creators, the cousins Fred Dannay and Manny Lee, were working out of an office in mid-Manhattan but asked the agency not to disturb them while they were in the throes of creation. “[T]he boys in the mail room who would deliver two mimeographed copies of the finished script each week were instructed not to enter the office…but to throw the fat envelope through the transom above the door.â€
At the time in question, Essex recalled, “Carleton Young played Ellery….†We know that Young took over that role in January 1942, when the series returned to the air after a 15-month hiatus, and kept it until August or September 1943 when he was replaced by Sydney Smith. Essex occasionally directed an EQ episode, and in his memoir described a segment where the murder “was committed in a radio studio that was supposedly rehearsing a crime program.â€
Essex recalled that the guest armchair detective that evening was radio comedian Fred Allen, and that he failed to solve the mystery. What’s wrong with this picture? Simply that The Sound of Detection, my book on the Queen series, lists no episode during Young’s tenure where Ellery solved a crime in a radio studio and no episode at any time where Fred Allen was the armchair sleuth!
Either Essex misremembered radically or there’s still some information on the Ellery of the airwaves that hasn’t been unearthed. I hope to live long enough to find out which.
Anyone in the market for another EQ mystery? As most mysteryphiles know, roughly between 1960 and 1966 Manny Lee was suffering from some sort of writer’s block and unable to collaborate with Fred Dannay as he’d been doing so successfully since 1929.
Ellery Queen novels and shorter adventures continued to appear during those years, with other authors expanding Fred’s lengthy synopses as Manny had always done in the past. We know who took over Manny’s function on the novels of that period but not on the short stories and not on the single Queen novelet from those years.
“The Death of Don Juan†(Argosy, May 1962; collected in Queens Full, 1965) is set in Wrightsville and deals with the attempt of the town’s amateur theatrical company to stage a creaky old turn-of-the-century melodrama.
Could this be a clue to the identity of Fred’s collaborator on the tale? In his graduate student days Anthony Boucher had worked in the Little Theater movement, and on his first date with the woman he later married the couple went to a creaky old-time melodrama.
This is hardly conclusive evidence but, if I may borrow a Poirotism, it gives one furiously to think. Between 1945 and 1948 Boucher had taken over Fred’s function of providing plots for Manny to transform into finished scripts for the EQ radio series. Might he also have performed Manny’s function a dozen or more years later?
The first publisher of the hardcover Ellery Queen novels and anthologies was the Frederick A. Stokes company, with whom Fred and Manny stayed from their debut in 1929 until 1941. A few months before Pearl Harbor they moved to Little, Brown and stayed there through 1955.
After a few years with Simon & Schuster (1956-1958) they moved to Random House and the aegis of legendary editor Lee Wright (1902-1986), who among other coups had purchased Anthony Boucher’s first detective novel and the first “Black†suspense novels by Cornell Woolrich.
What was behind their earlier moves from one publisher to another remains unknown, but when I interviewed Wright more than thirty years ago she explained why Queen left Random House. The year was 1965, a time when Manny was suffering from writer’s block and Fred called most of the shots for the two of them.
He left Random, Wright told me, â€literally because Bennett Cerf didn’t invite him to lunch. His feelings were hurt….I said: ‘Fred, Bennett isn’t your editor. I am. You’re sort of insulting me. My attention isn’t enough for you, it has to be the head of the house, is what you’re saying.’â€
Fred tended to be hypersensitive to any hint that mystery writers were second-class literary citizens, while Manny over the years had come to hate the genre and his own role in it, to the point that he described himself to one of his daughters as a “literary prostitute.â€
That he and Fred could have disagreed about this and everything else and still have collaborated successfully for so long is nothing short of a miracle.
When I was ten years old, for no particular reason I began squirreling away the weekly issues of TV Guide as my parents threw them on the trash pile with the week’s newspapers. The result is that today my bookshelves are weighed down by a week-by-week history of television from the early Fifties till the end of 2000, a goldmine of information unavailable elsewhere.
One such nugget is buried in the listings for Thursday, June 14, 1956. One of the top Thursday night programs broadcast that season was the 60-minute live dramatic anthology series Climax!
That particular evening’s offering was “To Scream at Midnight,†in which a wealthy young woman breaks down and is placed in a sanitarium after being thrown over by her lover. Her psychiatrist becomes suspicious when the man reappears and claims he wants to marry her.
Heading the cast were Diana Lynn (Hilde Fraser), Dewey Martin (Emmett Shore), Karen Sharpe (Peggy Walsh), and Richard Jaeckel (Hordan). John Frankenheimer directed from a teleplay by John McGreevey which, according to TV Guide, was based on something by Highsmith.
But what? I can recall no novel or story by her from 1956 or earlier (or later either) that remotely resembles this plot summary, but I am no authority on Highsmith. Joan Schenkar, author of the Edgar-nominated The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009), has read every word her subject ever wrote, including hundreds of thousands of words in her diaries.
When I sent her a photocopy of the relevant TV Guide page, she too couldn’t connect the description with any Highsmith novel or story.
That makes three mysteries about mysteries in one column, all of them probably unsolvable. If any readers have suggestions I’d love to see them.
Breaking News! My chance encounter last Thanksgiving with that website devoted to William Ard has borne fruit. Ramble House, a small publisher with which every reader of this column should be acquainted, has arranged with Ard’s daughter to reprint a number of her father’s novels of the Fifties, probably in the two-to-a-volume format pioneered by Ace Books back when Ard was turning out four or more paperback originals a year. More details when I have them.
January 15th, 2011 at 7:10 pm
Really interesting stuff on Ellery Queen. I’ve recently read two (for the Vintage Mystery Challenge) and rejected two Ellery Queen books but I didn’t note the dates of the rejects. It was an amazing partnership, no doubt.
I have some old TV Guides as well, Mike. Ha!
But only ones having to do with Star Trek. The rest I got rid of over the years. Foolish me. Still, the Star Trek ones are fun to look at. 😉
January 15th, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Mr. Nevins’ speculations on all things Queenian are, as always, fascinating. I would tend to doubt that Anthony Boucher had a hand in ‘The Death of Don Juan’, however. Dannay and Lee had theatre experience of their own (with the ill-fated 1935 play DANGER, MEN WORKING, co-written with Lowell Brentano), and they were the product of an age in which the theatre played a far greater role in the general culture. We need look no further than 1929’s ROMAN HAT MYSTERY for illustration. And a theatre producer is one of the main characters in 1953’s THE SCARLET LETTERS. Other examples could be cited.
The information about Lee Wright, Bennett Cerf and the vagaries of the publishing world is just super.
I look forward to more items on Dannay, Lee and their brainchild Ellery.
January 16th, 2011 at 1:11 am
Mike –
Out of curiosity I checked the imdb.com page for the episode of Climax! (I’m sure you’ve already done this.) But there is no info mentioning that the episode is an adaptation of ANYONE’s story, let alone Highsmith’s. Granted imdb.com is not exactly the be-all-end-all source for TV credits, but it is often extremely accurate.
John
January 16th, 2011 at 6:50 am
If memory serves, Anthony Boucher included ‘The Death of Don Juan’ in one of his annual Best of the Year anthologies. If he had written it, that would be a bit of an ethics conflict!
I had no idea that the Queen short stories of the 1960’s had ghosts.
January 18th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
My name is Mike, and I have a TV GUIDE collection of my own.
I mentioned this little habit of mine on other sites that I send stuff to. I’ve even mentioned here when David Vineyard bestirs himself with memories of this or that old show.
But I never dreamed that one of my favorite writers (and a retired professor at that) would share my peccadillo.
I feel strangely relieved at this.
My collection is Chicago-centered and maddeningly incomplete, dating from 1948 (when it was known as TV FORECAST) and thinning out around the late ’60s. I can claim to have at least one of every Fall Preview issue from the first one in 1953 up to the present day.
The “archive” rests in an old chest of drawers in my home, where I can pull out random issues and remind myself how old I’m getting.
Now I must go back and read Mike’s entire post, with the promise that the next one I write won’t be anywhere near this self-serving.
March 17th, 2011 at 5:49 pm
By chance I came across your column quoting a piece I wrote for Radiogram re Ellery Queen. The show in question was in the early ‘40’s when Fred Allen was the guest “solver†one night. I remember it well for when I met him when walking to the NBC studio, for the sake of conversation I mentioned I had been in a high school orchestra (Muro Brothers) appearing on his program in the Amateur portion of his show the night before Thanksgiving Day in 1935 and we won first prize, a week at the Roxy Theater in NY. Without skipping a beat his answer was typical Allen: “At least you’ve gone somewhere since then. I’m doing the same old thing!†So that exchange is a pleasant memory.
I’m 91 and my recall is still strong. On that show, the engineer solved the problem of the voices of the actors sounding different when they were supposed to be on the air, by filtering out the lows in their voices so the listener at home could follow the story.
March 24th, 2011 at 12:16 am
The mystery of whether “To Scream at Midnight†(Climax!, 14 JUNE 1956) is based on a story by Patricia Highsmith involves the all-too-common factor of mis-direction: the TV Guide write-up is simply wrong. TV Guide’s editors distilled hundreds of network synopses into pithy program descriptions on a weekly basis; invariably, they got the plots of different shows mixed up, or merely chose to highlight certain elements and phrases at the expense of others.
For the archaeologist of television, such misinformation only compounds the challenge of documenting the era of the live dramatic anthologies. But it also pushes one to dig deeper.
Climax!’s live production of “To Scream at Midnight†would have been in rehearsals when that issue of TV Guide went to print. No kinescope is known to exist; therefore, a check of on-screen credits is not possible. Some years ago I put together a retrospective of John Frankenheimer’s television work. Among his papers, “To Scream at Midnight†is indeed listed as “based on a story by Patricia Highsmith.†But which one?
A look at the post-broadcast Variety review (18 JUNE 1956) of “To Scream at Midnight†reveals a totally different story than the one described by TV Guide. To paraphrase: Poor-little-rich girl played by Diana Lynn marries a money-mad no-good (Dewey Martin) who has every intention of killing his new wife, collecting her fortune, and running away from his scheming girlfriend (Karen Sharpe). The newlyweds move into a house in the country, where the husband discovers a fugitive (Richard Jaeckel) hiding in the cellar. Without telling wife about his discovery, husband plots with fugitive: amnesty in exchange for killing wife. Wife eventually catches on to the doing, kills her husband in self-defense, and comes out the wiser.
The review concludes with: “John McGreevey teleplay from a Patricia Highsmith original was overly-distraught meller.†“Original,†in Variety-speak, typically means “original-for-television†(as opposed to a previously published work.) Had Highsmith been hired by CBS to produce an original story for Climax!, perhaps on the strength of the network’s previous adaptation of “The Talented Mr. Ripley†(Studio One, 9 JAN 1956)? The answer lies in Highsmith’s own work.
In Chapter III (“The Suspense Short Storyâ€) of her Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966), Highsmith writes: “I was once asked to try an eighty-page original for Cosmopolitan. I had never tried creating anything in this way, on order, as it were, but I gave it a try by sitting with pencil and paper and racking my brains for an idea.†Highsmith came up with two storylines, the second of which she describes thusly:
“A newly married couple, the girl rich, take their honeymoon in a country cottage belonging to the girl’s family. The husband has a girl friend on the side, and his plan is to kill his wife for her money and marry the girl friend. The wife, a nervous type, thinks she misses food from the kitchen and that she hears noises in the cellar. When the husband investigates the cellar, he finds a fugitive from the law in hiding. He immediately sees that he can make use of the fugitive, promises not to betray him, and says he will bring him food. The husband reports to his wife that there is nothing in the cellar, that she is imagining the noises. This situation continues for several days. The husband plots with the fugitive: The fugitive must pretend to rob the cottage, and the husband will permit him (by pretending to be knocked out) to leave the cottage and make his escape in the husband’s car. The husband really means to kill his wife and blame it on the defective fugitive. The wife discovers the man in the cellar and learns of her husband’s plan. She then plots with the fugitive against the husband, turning the tables.â€
Highsmith goes on to note that her story idea was “received coolly at Cosmopolitan, and was never written as a novelette, but was bought for television and performed in the United States.†This leads one to conclude that Highsmith sold the story that Cosmopolitan had rejected to CBS. Thematically, it would have fit in well with the Climax! ethos: Woolrich, Chandler, and other writers of Highsmith’s noir-ish sensibility were adapted for the series as well.
According to Andrew Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, Highsmith subsequently expanded this same story into a teleplay, titled “The Cellar,†which aired on the BBC series The Wednesday Thriller (22 SEP 1965).
My familiarity with Highsmith’s work is regrettably limited to the Ripley novels. A summary search of her published short stories reveals a reference by a character in “The Mightiest Mornings†to a wife being killed by a fugitive hiding in the cellar, but beyond that I am unable to place this story. Perhaps someone on more familiar terms with Highsmith’s writing can determine whether the plot of her rejected-by-Cosmopolitan story ever made it to print.
March 24th, 2011 at 8:22 am
Fascinating research, Allen. Thanks for going in such detail in telling us about it. I’m no expert on Highsmith either, but perhaps one of these days someone will come along who is. For now, I suspect that the wording that she used in saying ““received coolly at Cosmopolitan, and was never written as a novelette, but was bought for television and performed in the United States†means exactly that — that it was never written as a novelette. Until we learn otherwise, someday, perhaps!
March 24th, 2011 at 8:33 am
Fred
I apologize for not replying before now. Sometimes comments left on older posts slip by me while my mind’s somewhere else.
In any case Mike Nevins will be glad to hear from you. You know something about the EQ radio show that he’s not aware of, and I don’t imagine that that happens very often!
— Steve
August 13th, 2011 at 9:41 am
On June 6. 1943 the following episode of The Fred Allen show had “Ellery Queen” as guest. This was Carleton Young and Fred Allen was armchair detective (along with a couple of him comedy characters).
Series: “THE FRED ALLEN SHOW” -Texaco Star Theater 9:30 – 10:00pm
It was however on CBS… and chances are this episode was not a genuine EQ adventure but a spoof… Still close enough to post here… The show is available for purchase on the net. Tempting isn’t it?
August 13th, 2011 at 10:45 am
It almost had to be a spoof, but one I’d like to hear. Thanks for letting us know about it!