Mystery Men.

THE fact that hardly anybody reads Ellery Queen today indicates the depths to which American mystery fiction-has fallen, and the cultural politics that have afflicted it. The genre's attempts to plunder the commercial strengths of science fiction and horror have only corrupted it, replacing order and reason with ideology and sensationalism. Queen, by contrast, represented above all a love for mysteries, and through that a passion for truth. Thus his decline, and that of the traditional American mystery, in this time of widespread belief that there are no real truths.

The first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, appeared 70 years ago, and it's no exaggeration to say that Queen set the standard and form of the modern American crime story. Yet the anniversary passed with little fanfare. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine dedicated an issue to its founder and namesake, and a small publisher released the outline of a final, unpublished Queen novel and other oddments, but that was about it. Almost none of Queen's books is now in print, and the few that are, are very hard to find. This is a shame. Ellery Queen was the single most important figure of the Golden Age of the American mystery, which ran from the 1930s through the '50s. Ellery Queen, as critic Anthony Boucher put it, is the American detective story.

Actually, Queen was a pair of young Manhattan ad-men, cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, whose first novel was composed for a mystery-writing contest. They showed ingenuity and foresight in using their detective's name as nom de plume, thereby giving readers only one name to remember, and the series became immediately popular. Their books have sold over 100 million copies. Between 1929 and Lee's death in 1971, they wrote 39 novels, hundreds of short stories, and countless radio scripts and film treatments. Lee typically wrote the books and stories following detailed outlines (often more than a hundred pages) created by Dannay, who formulated the plots, puzzles, characters, and themes. And though their early novels were clearly influenced by S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance books and built on a solid tradition including Doyle, Chesterton, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Earl Derr Biggers, and Melville Davisson Post, they combined these influences in a unique way that set the standard for the Golden Age of mysteries.

Before Queen, there were two distinct types of crime fiction in the U.S.: the puzzle mystery and the hard-boiled story. The puzzle form began with Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841 and was the dominant type of crime fiction until the late 1920s. These mysteries typically have a limited group of suspects and a detective who reasons out the solution based on observation and knowledge of human nature. The author "plays fair" with the reader, supplying all the clues necessary to solve the mystery before the detective reveals the answer.

The hard-boiled style started in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and tried to reflect seamier aspects of American life. The typical protagonist was a loner who lived by a strict but highly idiosyncratic moral code and outlasted the (often corrupt) police, power brokers, and criminal class to bring a small measure of justice to the weak and unprotected. Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer are among the best-known hard-boiled detectives. Whereas puzzle mysteries tended toward conservatism in their depiction of a rational world in which justice is possible, the hard-boiled form was popular among liberals for its intimation that American society was essentially unjust (and thus ripe for political change).

Queen's innovation was to give the puzzle mystery an infusion of reality from the nascent hard-boiled form. This is particularly evident in the main characters of the series. Ellery is the classic amateur detective, a la Philo Vance--an intellectual snob who wears a pincenez--but his connection to the police is plausible, for his father is Inspector Richard Queen of the NYPD. Queen pere is wise, decent, and dedicated, and their relationship is affectionate, mutually respectful, and reasonably complex. Inspector Queen's assistant, Sergeant Velie, is a stolid, trustworthy cop. This was quite a contrast to Sherlock Holmes's humorous contempt toward Scotland Yard, an attitude which had become rampant in the genre by the 1920s.

Queen soon dropped the Vance affectations, and the series became a perfect fusion of the puzzle mystery with the rising realism and toughness of the hardboiled story. One can even see the roots of the police procedural (still a staple of the genre, as evident in Ed McBain's continuing popularity) in Roman Hat, much of which is devoted to a detailed description of the NYPD's investigation of a murder in a Broadway theater. Like a police investigator, Queen arrived at his solutions through meticulous logical deduction from empirical evidence, rather than intuition or psychological insights. Dannay created the genre's most complex puzzles and fairly presented all the clues, even stating explicitly when Ellery and the reader had enough information to solve the riddle. Of course, only geniuses needed apply, but that was part of the fun.

Queen's influence is hard to overestimate. Roman Hat and its successors established what quickly became known as the "traditional" American mystery (rather ironically, given its newness). Immensely popular authors such as Rex Stout (creator of Nero Wolfe), Cornell Woolrich, Erie Stanley Gardner, and Craig Rice (FDR's favorite) quickly created their own variations on Queen's fusion of toughness and intellect. Even Dashiell Hammett, the most prestigious of hard-boiled authors, tried it, with his last and most likable novel, The Thin Man, from 1934. And Dannay began a long, influential career as critic, editor, historian, and anthologist, tirelessly promoting the genre, establishing its pedigrees and clarifying its history, finding and championing new authors (such as Jorge Luis Borges, whom he was the first American editor to publish), and bringing the new tradition to radio, film, and eventually television.

Perhaps most importantly, Dannay restlessly sought innovations in his own fiction. Queen quickly became a pioneer in the use of religious motifs, complex character relationships, black humor, and ambitious subject matter such as racism, eugenics, and original sin. No less important was the great detective's emotional attachment to his cases, another characteristic incorporated from hard-boiled fiction. In some of the books, notably Ten Days' Wonder (1948) and Cat of Many Tails (1949), Ellery's actions cause additional deaths, and his anguish over his presumption and intellectual arrogance gives these stories additional depth and lasting interest.

Cat of Many Tails, concerning the strangulation murders of six people during a hot summer in New York City, shows the amount of action, psychological insight, and social observation Queen brought to the puzzle mystery. While Ellery and his father try to discern the pattern behind the murders and identify the killer, sensational newspaper and radio coverage whips the public into a frenzy, vigilante groups rise up, and the city bursts into lethal riots. After an exhaustive police investigation and some bravura reasoning by Ellery, the police set a trap for the killer, but before Ellery realizes that they have captured the wrong person, more deaths occur. Ellery resolves to quit his "glorious career of [bumbling] masquerading as exact and omnipotent science," but a wise professor dissuades him, avowing that the "great and true lesson" the detective should learn from the story is, quoting from the Gospel of Mark, "There is one God; and there is none other but He."

Ellery's initial unquestioning belief in rationalism is undermined and ultimately destroyed in these middle-period fictions, especially the novelette "The Lamp of God" and the Wrightsville mysteries set in a fairly typical American hamlet, of which 1942's Calamity Town is a classic. Although Queen's devotion to the puzzle sometimes hindered character development and philosophical depth, his best books meticulously explored the limits of human ingenuity and free will. As critic Francis Nevins Jr. noted of Queen's Tragedy of Y, "Although rooted in a genre that has traditionally been oriented to reason, order, and optimism, Y evokes depths of tragic despair that are virtually without parallel in the history of crime fiction."

The hubris behind these tragedies is humanism, especially the notion that people can create valid moral systems without God, which Dannay saw as the great danger in reason divorced from religious faith. Queen's fiction makes it clear that this is exactly what we too are meant to learn. The Nietzschean manipulator who considers himself above conventional morality is a common element, and the amount and intent of the religious imagery throughout the series are undeniable. Though Nevins and others have tried hard to explain away these attributes, Dannay made his intentions very clear, stating, for example, that he conceived 1964's And on the Eighth Day after reading about the Dead Sea Scrolls and noting their parallels to the Gospels. Queen's religious themes remind us that popular, escapist fiction can be meaningful while it entertains, and his writings merit a revival and serious reassessment. Such a revival might also be our best hope for a renewal of the genre that Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee did so much to build and sustain.

Mr. Karnick is editor-in-chief of the Hudson Institute's magazine, American Outlook.