The Ellery Queen Omnibus

Looking for trouble, Ellery Queen descends on a small town At the tail end of the long summer of 1940, there is nowhere in the country more charming than Wrightsville. The Depression has abated, and for the first time in years the city is booming. There is hope in Wrightsville, but Ellery Queen has come looking for death. The mystery author is hoping for fodder for a novel, and he senses the corruption that lurks beneath the apple pie façade. He rents a house owned by the town’s first family, whose three daughters star in most of the local gossip. One is fragile, left at the altar three years ago and never recovered. Another is engaged to the city’s rising political star, an upright man who’s already boring her. And then there’s Lola, the divorced, bohemian black sheep. Together, they make a volatile combination. Once he sees the ugliness in Wrightsville, Queen sits back—waiting for the crime to come to him.

Contending that a mythology of race consisting of themes of sex and savagery exists in the United States and is perpetuated in popular culture, Frankie Y. Bailey identifies stereotypical images of blacks in crime and detective fiction and probes the implied values and collective fantasies found there. Out of the Woodpile is the first sociohistorical study of the evolution of black detectives and other African American characters in genre fiction. The volume's three divisions reflect the evolution of the status of African Americans in American society. The three chapters of the first section, From Slaves to Servants, begin with a survey of the works of Poe and Twain in antebellum America, then discuss the depiction of blacks and other natives in British crime and detective fiction in the days of the British Empire, and lastly focus on American classics of the pre-World War II period. In Urban Blues, Bailey continues her investigation of black stock characters by zeroing in on the denizens of the Black Metropolis and their Black Rage. Assimilating, the final section, contains chapters that scrutinize The Detectives, Black Lives: Post-War/Post Revolution, and the roles assigned to Black Women. The results of survey questions carried in The Third Degree, the newsletter of the Mystery Writers of America, as well as the views of fourteen crime writers on the creation of black characters in genre fiction are followed by the Directory, which includes a sampling of cases featuring black characters, a list of black detectives, relevant works of fiction, film, television, and more. The volume's informed analyses will be important reading for students and scholars in the fields of popular culture, American popular fiction, genre fiction, crime and detective fiction, and black and ethnic studies. It is also a timely resource for courses dealing with race relations and blacks in American literature or society.

Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) was--with his partner Manfred Lee--the creator of the Ellery Queen detective novels and short stories. Dannay was also a literary historian and critic, and the editor of the renowned Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Queen--both a pen name and the fictional protagonist of the stories--was also a vital force behind the continuing popularity of crime fiction in the early to mid-20th century, after the deaths of Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Melville Davisson Post, and other Old Masters of the genre. This book presents the first critical study of Ellery Queen's role in the preservation of the detective short story. Many of the writers, characters and stories EQMM championed are covered, including such celebrated authors as Allingham, Ambler, Ellin, Innes, Vickers, and even William Butler Yeats.

As a counterpart to research on the 1930s that has focused on liberal and radical writers calling for social revolution, David Welky offers this eloquent study of how mainstream print culture shaped and disseminated a message affirming conservative middle-class values and assuring its readers that holding to these values would get them through hard times. Through analysis of the era's most popular newspaper stories, magazines, and books, Welky examines how voices both outside and within the media debated the purposes of literature and the meaning of cultural literacy in a mass democracy. He presents lively discussions of such topics as the newspaper treatment of the Lindbergh kidnapping, issues of race in coverage of the 1936 Olympic games, domestic dynamics and gender politics in cartoons and magazines, Superman's evolution from a radical outsider to a spokesman for the people, and the popular consumption of such novels as the Ellery Queen mysteries, Gone with the Wind, and The Good Earth. Through these close readings, Welky uncovers the subtle relationship between the messages that mainstream media strategically crafted and those that their target audience wished to hear.