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...

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first book, Ellery Queen takes a long step forward. He has written a novel expressed only incidentally in terms of mystery, a novel whose theme is uppermost in the minds of all thoughtful Americans today. For thirty years old Judge Shinn has delivered the Fourth of July oration on the little village green. He has said again and again: “There is no liberty without justice,” and “Let one man be deprived of his liberty, or his property, or his life without due process of law, and the liberty and property and lives of all of us are in danger.” When mere accusation takes the place of evidence, freedom is in peril. To Shinn...

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...

In his spirited Introduction to a topnotch collection of Great American Detective Stories, Anthony Boucher says: “The detective short story belongs to us. It started in America and it started off magnificently. In five stories, Edgar Allan Poe created the form and almost all its possible variants... There are as many kinds of detective short stories as there are of detective novels — and you’ll find most of them here, from the ethical poetry of Melville Davisson Post to the brash foolery of Frank Gruber.” A glance at some of the titles of the stories included confirms Boucher’s modest words and guarantees that you’ll find plenty of good reading here.

A collection of suspense stories, puzzle stories, whodunits and tricky whydunits involving police detectives, private eyes, talented and sometimes lucky amateurs, armchair detectives, and ethnic detectives.

Have yourself a crooked little Christmas with The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories — many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant. Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey...