Monday, September 27: Mystery Masterclass
I was out of town this weekend, but my absence was more than compensated by this timely essay by Ellery Queen Expert (and Author!), previous CB contributor Dale Andrews. —JLW
THE ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERIES
by Dale C. Andrews
This week the December edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine hit my mail box on the same day that the temperature in Washington, D.C., spiked to 90 degrees. We subscribers have long since become accustomed to these monthly episodes of time warp dictated by the publishing world’s conclusion that an “old” magazine will not sell on the news stands. But while the front cover of EQMM, as usual, defied the season in which it arrived, the back cover was completely timely. It announces in a full color spread that on September 28, 2010, NBC’s 1975 Ellery Queen series will be released in a six DVD set, containing all 22 original episodes, the two hour pilot, and an interview with William Link, who, along with his long-time writing partner the late Richard Levinson, created this one-year television gem.
Some of you who have read my sporadic contributions to Criminal Brief may remember that it was just a little over a year ago that I offered up a piece on the NBC Ellery Queen series. That ode to the series accompanied the publication in EQMM of my Ellery Queen pastiche “The Mad Hatter’s Riddle”, EQMM March/April 2009, which featured Ellery as a consultant to the series and takes place during the filming of “The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party”. That episode, originally aired on October 30, 1975, was the only episode of the series (aside from the two hour pilot) that was based on an Ellery Queen story, the classic 1935 short story of the same name. “The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party” has been heralded by Ellery Queen fans and mystery critics alike as probably the finest filmed version of an Ellery Queen work, but this is not to disparage the other episodes of the NBC series. They are uniformly fine—tight writing, clever plots, nice acting, and a wonderful theme by Elmer Bernstein (The sheet music is on my piano as I type!) I have always loved the series, but little did I suspect one year ago when I wrote that last Criminal Brief piece that 2010 would bring forth remastered DVDs of this wonderful portrayal of Ellery.
So it seems to me this event is a cause for some reflection and, perhaps, a bit of nostalgia. It’s been a long 35 years since we last encountered Mr. Hutton’s portrayal of Ellery Queen.
Television (and the movies, for that matter) fretted a long time trying to get Ellery right. The movie attempts of the 1930s and 1940s are basically unwatchable, portraying Ellery comically as a slap-stick blunderer. As my friend and sometimes collaborator Kurt Sercu, proprietor of “Ellery Queen, a Website on Deduction” has observed, “None of the films in the series is really worthwhile, a distinct disappointment to the mystery fans who came to regard the Ellery Queen stories as top-grade in the mystery genre.”
Early television attempts to bring Ellery and the Inspector to the small screen on the Dumont network and ABC were more successful, but it took Levinson and Link, long-time EQ fans, to finally get it right. And even they took two tries.
I pause here to note what is already evident to those who have read my few contributions to this site and my fewer-still published short stories. I am an Ellery Queen fan. My fiction successes thus far have been works that feature Ellery Queen. Thankfully we have a name for these—pastiches. (It sounds so much better than “fan fiction.”) I did not come to this affection for the works of Queen late in life; I’ve been a fan since my early teens. So it was with great expectation in November, 1971, when I was a senior in college, that I tuned in to the first attempt by NBC to bring Mr. Queen to the small screen. It should have been a dead give-away that trouble was brewing, however. Even though the pilot had been announced as a Levinson and Link production, the credits indicated that it had been written by “Ted Leighton.” It was not until years later that Messrs. Levinson and Link admitted that they had been so under-whelmed by NBC’s re-working of their script, originally based on the EQ novel Cat of Many Tails, that they had insisted the project could only go forward under the banner of a non-existent script writer. Hence the birth (and death) of Mr. Leighton.
It is difficult to imagine a worse Ellery Queen than Peter Lawford, who portrayed Ellery in that pilot as a mod Brit sporting a constant Nehru jacket. Harry Morgan (earlier of Pete and Gladys, later of M*A*S*H) was more credible as the Inspector, but since he was only seven years older than Mr. Lawford he had to be cast not as Ellery’s father but as his “American uncle.” The script took the basic and rather dark premise of the book, referenced it once as a throw-away line, and otherwise abandoned it. The totality of the result was terrible. Thankfully this sorry exercise never made it to its intended berth as one of the recurring series under NBC’s Sunday Night Mystery umbrella. (It was MacMillan and Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan St. James, that instead got the nod.)
After that debacle in 1971 I figured that would be it for Ellery on television.
But Link and Levinson were determined, unbowed and undaunted. It was four years later, when I was a second year law student, that their second attempt was screened in March of 1975 as a two hour NBC movie. This pilot for the series that followed was based on Queen’s The Fourth Side of the Triangle, published in 1965. (That novel, while edited by Manfred Lee, was written during his famous “writer’s bloc” era, and in fact, was “ghosted’ by science fiction writer Avram Davidson from a 71-page detailed outline by Frederic Dannay.) The pilot re-set the story in 1947, casting Jim Hutton as Ellery and David Wayne as the Inspector. The pilot also removed an awkward element from the novel—there Ellery, Mycroft Holmes-like, solves the mystery largely from a hospital bed. In the NBC version, Ellery is present front and center for all of the action.
Joyously, NBC responded to the decent ratings the pilot garnered by picking up the series and giving it a then-coveted berth at 9:00 on Thursday nights.
The series opened on September 11, 1975, with “The Adventure of Auld Lang Syne”. This may not have been the wisest gambit since Ellery has less of a rôle in the episode than in subsequent ones. In fact, production notes indicate that the first episode filmed was likely the previously-discussed “Adventure of the Mad Tea Party”, an episode that was not aired until October 30. In any event, the series gained good reviews but attracted a mediocre audience. Its ratings climbed, however, and in October NBC renewed it for a full season. But then, in an ultimately disastrous decision, the network moved the show to Sunday nights at 8:00. There the series was scheduled opposite The Six Million Dollar Man on ABC (a perennial top-ten show at the time) and (unbelievably) also opposite CBS’s revamped Sonny and Cher show, which to much anticipation, paired the then newly-divorced singing duo in a remake of their previous top 10 series.
NBC had previously tested the Sunday night berth with one Ellery Queen episode, titled, perhaps presciently, “The Adventure of Miss Aggie’s Farewwell Performance”, on October 19th. The regular Sunday night episodes began on January 4, 1976 with “The Adventure of the Black Falcon”, which, opposite a re-run of Six Million Dollar Man, scored number 11 in the weekly Nielsen ratings. This proved, however, to be the high water mark for Ellery Queen. One week later The Six Million Dollar Man offered a new episode, Sonny and Cher premiered, and Ellery Queen’s ratings sank to unreported depths. At the end of 1976, after 22 episodes, the series was cancelled.
So, other than luck of the draw, why did this series, one of the most nimbly executed whodunits ever, fail to find an audience? As I noted in my article last year, the belief of Levinson and Link was that the show was simply too well done, too cerebral for its intended audience. It demanded a lot if you were intent on watching it over a beer.
In his 2002 article “Confessions of a Mystery Writer”, William Link wrote: “Thinking back, the Queen series was too complicated for its own good. I remember spending an entire afternoon with Dick [Levinson] trying to figure how keys on a keychain would fall into what configuration in one’s pocket when placed there.” When audiences didn’t respond the lesson was learned: “[o]ur failure with Ellery Queen was our template” for future efforts, Levinson observed. “We deliberately made the clues on Murder She Wrote easier to decipher, including a very guessable murderer now and then. Part of our psychology was to reward the focused viewers because they might then be motivated to return the following week. Another unexpressed reason was that it was far easier to come up with facile clues than sweating bullets over keys in a pocket…. The upshot was that Murder She Wrote thrived for 12 seasons, Ellery Queen [only] one.”
In short, the Queen show simply refused to write to wide denominator. It played to a higher appreciation level.
And now, after so long, the series is back. How long has it been? Well, speaking personally, the college student who watched Mr. Lawford in 1971, and the law student who faithfully watched Mr. Hutton every week, is now retired.
While I have attributed the memories set forth above to my personal experience with the series, my recommendation that fans of this site purchase the new DVD set is not based solely on 35-year-old memories. In my family room I have a set of DVDs with all episodes of the series, purchased some years back on eBay and recorded from the A&E network re-broadcasts of approximately 15 years ago. My copies are grainy and have bad edits; in some instances the commercials were not even removed. Some of the introductions are missing as well. But I can promise you that even in that sorry state all of the episodes are gems—at times they outshine Queen’s own stories in cleverness and fair-play. And the production values hold up amazingly well in 2010 (which should be even more the case with re-mastered originals instead of the grainy recordings I and everyone else until now has been relegated to). Somewhat paradoxically, even though the series is set in 1947 it is not at all dated. In other words it doesn’t look like a 1970s series since it was never intended to be a 1970s series.
It is interesting that while the intricate and intelligent whodunits that comprise the NBC series were too much for audience demographics in 1975, when all television was comprised of three networks and PBS, they likely will play very differently today. Unlike the 1970s, multiple cable outlets and affordable DVDs tempt producers to play to niche markets rather than abandon them. I hope that is the case with The Ellery Queen Mysteries, but I know that it will, in any event, be the case in the niche market that is my family room.
The Ellery Queen Mysteries should be in video stores tomorrow. The set is also available for on-line ordering from Amazon.com. Welcome back, Mr. Queen!
Thank you Dale. You just made my day! I’ve been waiting since the 70s to see this show again. It was one of my very first appointment television shows.
>Welcome back, Mr. Queen!
And welcome back, Mr. Andrews. Ah, I do love a good mystery!
Thanks, Dale. Great column! And great news about the new EQ DVD set — I’ll be adding it to my collection. (As if I need yet more DVDs . . .)
I all but danced on my front porch when I found this DVD was coming out! I was about 15 when the series premiered and I loved it! (Oddly, I didn’t get into reading Queen ’till years later.) As for “old” magazines not selling on the stands, a store I was in once had a stack of T.V. Guides from two weeks earlier. The clerk told me that her boss wasn’t going to put the new ones out “until we sell all the old ones…”
Thanks for the comments, folks!
There’s a funny post-script to the article. Last week when I was trolling for background information I noted that there is now a Wikipedia article on the NBC series — there wasn’t the last time I looked. So I read the article and thought “Hmmm . . . Fairly well done.” Then I looked at the notes at the bottom of the article and found out, to my complete surprise, that the primary source was me!
How cool is that!
This is something that’s been with me for a long time now, and thank you for giving me an excuse to share it.
Here in Chicago we had a sort of “tradition” of having TV critics who believed that they were God’s gift to literature. To a man (sometimes woman) they disdained television as beneath everybody, but especially beneath themselves. To that end, they were forever showing off thier “erudition” in various matters, all of it self-inflicted and much of it pure bluff.
The worst of these was Gary Deeb, who blew in from Buffalo NY, and promptly set himself up as a reigning expert not only in TV, but also in all things about Chicago. No matter what the topic, Deeb Knew It All.
When it came time to review Ellery Queen in 1975, Deeb delivered a blast against the show, claiming that it was a desecration of the character (or words to that effect). He tried to show off his own “expertise” on EQ – and in so doing, showed that if he had ever read any EQ at all, it was from the pince-nez period. I seriously doubt that Deeb ever heard of Frederic Dannay or Manfred B. Lee, but that didn’t stop him from showing off knowledge he didn’t actually have.
But an even more egregious example was a few years earlier. This wasn’t Deeb, but a guy on a competing paper (I can’t recall this guy’s name after all these years).
This was when NBC showed the Peter Lawford Queen movie. In his negative review (admittedly deserved), this guy wrote something to the effect that it was a good thing that NBC picked MCMillan And Wife for the Mystery Moviewheel instead of EQ.
I’ve followed the TV businessfor years, and when the Mystery Movie was announced, it was always Columbo, McCloud,and McMillan.. I’d heard of the EQ project, but only in terms of a weekly.
When I read that bad review (which I agreed with), I didn’t think anything of the McMillan assertion.
Imagine my surprise to read, years later, in respected critical and reference books, that McMillan was a last-minute replacement for EQ in the Mystery Movie wheel.
Whoever wrote that first simply misread that dumb critic’s lousy writing.
An honest mistake, but it’s appeared in countless sources ever since.
For what little it’s worth, I humbly offer this correction.
Anyhow, it’s good to hear from Dale again.
That was a great piece, Dale. And thanks, Mike, for the added sidelights. A few footnotes:
1) Donald Cook in the 1935 film of THE SPANISH CAPE MYSTERY made a pretty good Ellery.
2) So did Richard Hart, in the early live-TV series, though he died suddenly during the show’s run. The one episode I’ve seen, based on “The Hanging Acrobat” keeps the story’s main clue but kind of throws it away, favoring physical action over cerebral.
3) Florenz Ames, of the not-very-good 1950s filmed series in which Hugh Marlowe played Ellery, has always struck me as the perfect Inspector Queen.
4) Jim Hutton’s Ellery struck me as a unique take on the character, quite likeable and amusing but not really all that much like the character in the books, though closer of course than Peter Lawford, Eddie Quillan, and other miscastings.
5) Link’s account of why the EQ series failed to hold an audience illustrates my view that the decline of EQ as a public icon illustrates the dumbing down of American culture and may explain while I was never able to warm up to MURDER, SHE WROTE.
6) Ellery had a long and successful career in radio in the 1940s, with scripts actually written by Dannay and Lee (and later by Lee and Anthony Boucher, an early example of the third collaborator/ghost.
Good Gravy! I haven’t thought of Gary Deeb in at least 30 years!!!
Nice to see that the article has sparked some discussion!
Since I last posted my boxed set has arrived on the front stoop. (Thank you, Amazon — and by the way, why would anyone pay for **fast** shipping when the free shipping gets the package to you on the release date?)
Anyway, the set is beautiful. There is a nice essay by Janet Hutchings, EQMM editor in chief, and another by Andrew Gulli of the Strand.
I watched the pilot yesterday — “Too Many Suspects” based on Queen’s “Fourth Side of the Triangle.” It had been some years since I had watched this episode, and I have to say it is marvelous. The pictures are crisp, they look good on wide screen, and the story and acting are great. In fact, I had to marvel that in many respects (beyond the one discussed in the article) the story, in my view, improves on the original. Enuf said, since I hate to dish out spoilers!
A postscript — As usual I am in complete agreement with Jon. I, too, could never get in to Murder She Wrote. There is one episode, however, that I would love to see — some seasons in they filmed a left-over script from the Ellery Queen series. It was one of those stories “introduced” by Angela Landsbury but otherwise it was a stand-alone episode. Mike Doran, in a post concerning my previous article on the NBC series described this episode as follows:
QUOTE
The EQ leftover episode that morphed into Murder She Wrote can be found in the 6th season DVD set. The Ellery character is played by Gary Kroeger (late Saturday Night Live) and the Inspector is John Karlen (Cagney & Lacey. Also Robert Vaughn plays a pompous radio sleuth. Does it bug you as it does me that this second-hand episode is more readily available than the genuine article?
UNQUOTE
Some notes:
— When I started reading EQ in the ’60s – I was in high school then – I gave a lot of thought to possible TV-movie casting of the parts.
Ultimately, I came to the belief that Bradford Dillman would be the best possible Ellery – he had sufficient range to cover the various aspects of Ellery’s character from all the years, which would have to be amalgamated into a modern-day portrayal.
Inspector Queen was a tougher call.All the older actors who fit the physical profile of the Inspector were deceased by the mid ’60s (I was thinking in terms of James Gleason or the like). Of the actors available at that time, the closest I could come up with was Vaughn Taylor (he was Janet Leigh’s boss in Psycho, among many other roles), but he would have had to play tougher than was his norm.
Sgt. Velie could have been any big, blocklike character man; Tom Reese would have been just as good then as he was in the Hutton show.
Nikki Porter – regardless of how she was written in various of her (too few) appearances, I always thought of her as afeisty redhead. In the ’60s that meant Kathleen Nolan (late of The Real McCoys). There were other possibilities, of course – Suzy Parker was married to Bradford Dillman then, to point out one publicity potential.
So those were my ideas. What were yours?
— Casting EQ for 2010?
In my recent rereadings, I seem to keep coming to Kevin Kline as a likely Ellery.That was about five years back, and I guess I’d have to think younger.
As to Inspector Queen, remember that today’s older actors were yesterday’s younger actors. Bear that in mind when I suggest that the best choice today for Inspector Richard Queen would be —
Robert Morse. (Check him out in Mad Men)
Sgt. Velie could be a wonderful Chicago-based actor named Mike Starr -physically perfect.
And Nikki Porter?
Cady McClain. She was Dixie onAll My Children, and Rosanna on As The World Turns.(Soaps. I know. Anybody got a problem with that?)
Feisty redhead, good actress (two daytime Emmys).And handled right, Nikki could be a starmaking role.
So those are my choices as of now.
Suggestions?
An interesting spin on these casting ruminations is presented by Episode 17 of the NBC series, The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario. There Ellery and his father are present in Hollywood for the filming of an Ellery Queen movie. The episode opens with Troy Donahue playing Ellery and Noah Beery as a (quite good!) Inspector. The audience is confused until the camera pans back and we see Ellery and the Inspector watching the actors.
A side note after “The Book Case” was published I originally tried to interest the Dannay and Lee families in letting me take my hand at a novel, and the basic plot would have been an expanded version of what ultimately became “The Mad Hatter’s Riddle.” They (understandably) were only willing to let me do a short story, so the abbreviated version was that published in EQMM. In the longer version I envisioned an epilogue in which the real Ellery and Inspector were watching the filming of this episode behind both Donahue and Beery and Hutton and Wayne. Perhaps Mike could have cast them.
For me, this will qualify as a mild dissent to some of the other comments. Nonetheless, I must speak up:
— Contrary to the Messrs. Link, Breen, and Andrews, I still maintain that Ellery Queen was not “too good for the mass audience”, or “over their heads”, or “Caviare to the general”, or any other expression you wish to use here.
I also still maintain that its rating failure can be laid solely at the feet of the most ludicrously overrated entertainer of the ’70s, Cher.
It was CBS’s determination to keep Cher as an asset of the network, even in the face of her declining ratings, that led to the shotgun reconciliation with Sonny Bono.
Between the end of Cher’s solo show and the reconstituted S&C hour, there was a month’s window, the month of January 1976. During that month, EQ ran a very respectable second to ABC’s Six Million Dollar Man, good enough in those three-network days to earn at one more season.
But this was the onset of the Tabloid Era in news, which persists to the present day.The S&C hostile merger got press play to rival a presidential election or a moon shot. What chance did a merely well-written and acted and purely entertaining show have in that atmosphere?
It need only be pointed out that S&C’s numbers faded as fast as they rose the following season.
And anyway, what happened to them afterwards?
Cher won an Oscar and Sonny was elected to Congress.
OK, bad example.
My point is, had CBS put anything else in that time slot, Ellery Queen had a decent shot for a few more seasons (at least until Jim Hutton’s cancer kicked in).
— I also don’t go along with the dissing of Murder She Wrote.
Maybe it wasn’t Ellery, but in the absence of anything else on TV in the straight whodunit line, I liked it just fine.
In my movie-buff mode, I also got a kick out of the all-star guest casts, at least in the early years of the show.
As for the stories, I believe that “dumbed-down ” is scarcely justified. Perhaps the plots weren’t as complex as they might have been, but offhand I don’t recall any that were telegraphed as some shows did over the years. To borrow from crossword magazines, if Elery Queen was
Hard, Murder She Wrote was Intermediate. No disgrace in that.
Give me some more time on the casting business. Be back whenever.
For once I know exactly what I was doing that first quarter of 1976, up and down the Atlantic seaboard from New England to the Caribbean, and I wasn’t watching television.
That was probably one of those long periods when I didn’t have a television, so I’m at a comparative disadvantage. Without knowing the Sonny and Cher drama, I’d be willing to accept Ellery Queen as hard and Murder She Wrote was intermediate. What I really miss is a good mystery to sink my teeth into.
Apologies for two posts in one day,but I just remembered something.
Mention of the EQ script that was recycled into a Murder She Wrote (“The Grand Old Lady” in season 6) brought to mind a rumor I’d heard of and on through the years.
After EQ went off in ’76, Peter Fischer went on, a year or so later, to launch a series called The Eddie Capra Mysteries, about a lawyer who solved whodunits to the consternation of his stuffy senior partner (these roles played respectively by Vincent Bagetta and Ken Swofford). The story went that Fischer might have used a couple of leftover EQ stories as material for Capra.
Fast forward to the 80s: Fischer, Levinson and Link, fresh from their Murder She Wrote success, sell a new show called Blacke’s Magic, wth Hal Linden as a magician and Harry Morgan as his con-man father, who solve impossible crimes.
The pilot reused a murder gimmick from a Burke’s Law that L&L had written more than 20 years before.
A subsequent episode employed an imossible crime scenario that its writer, Lee Sheldon, used in the final episode of Edge Of Night when that venerable mysterysoap had been cancelled after 28 years.
In the face of these, rumors rose that the EQ unused files might again be in play.
There is no solid documentation of any of these stories, but I would to see either or both of these short-lived series (half a season each, roughly 10 years apart) on DVD, just to compare.
That’s it for now. I’d love to know if anyone else is as curious as I am about these.