Ellery Queen is a pseudonym created in 1929 by American crime fiction writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee and the name of their main fictional character, a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve baffling murders. Dannay and Lee wrote most of the more than thirty novels and several short story collections in which Ellery Queen appeared as a character, and their books were among the most popular of American mysteries published between 1929 and 1971. In addition to the fiction featuring their eponymous brilliant amateur detective, the two men acted as editors: as Ellery Queen they edited more than thirty anthologies of crime fiction and true crime, and Dannay founded and for many decades edited Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has been published continuously from 1941 to the present. From 1961, Dannay and Lee also commissioned other authors to write crime thrillers using the Ellery Queen nom de plume, but not featuring Ellery Queen as a character; several juvenile novels were credited to Ellery Queen, Jr. Finally, the prolific duo wrote four mysteries under the pseudonym Barnaby Ross.
John Dickson Carr was an American author of detective stories, who also published using the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn.
Brett Halliday is the primary pen name of Davis Dresser, an American mystery and western writer. Halliday is best known for the long-lived series of Michael Shayne mysteries he wrote, and later commissioned others to continue. Dresser also wrote westerns, non-series mysteries, and romances under the names Asa Baker, Matthew Blood, Kathryn Culver, Don Davis, Hal Debrett, Anthony Scott, Peter Field, and Anderson Wayne.
Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson, an English crime writer and a cousin of actor-screenwriter Miles Malleson. She also wrote fiction and a 1940 autobiography, Three-a-Penny, as Anne Meredith.
Hugh Milburn Stone was an American actor, best known for his role as "Doc" on the CBS Western series Gunsmoke.
Millard Mitchell was an American character actor whose credits include roughly 30 feature films and two television appearances.
Tom Conway was a British film, television, and radio actor remembered for playing detectives and psychiatrists, among other roles.
Jay Novello was an American radio, film, and television character actor.
Douglas Fowley was an American movie and television actor in more than 240 films and dozens of television programs, He is probably best remembered for his role as the frustrated movie director Roscoe Dexter in Singin' in the Rain (1952), and for his regular supporting role as Doc Holliday in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. He was the father of rock and roll musician and record producer Kim Fowley.
John Francis Regis Toomey was an American film and television actor.
Lloyd Corrigan was an American film and television actor, producer, screenwriter, and director who began working in films in the 1920s. The son of actress Lillian Elliott, Corrigan directed films, usually mysteries such as Daughter of the Dragon starring Anna May Wong, before dedicating himself more to acting in 1938. His short La Cucaracha won an Academy Award in 1935.
Mignon Good Eberhart was an American author of mystery novels. She had one of the longest careers among major American mystery writers.
Richard Orson Lockridge was an American writer of detective fiction. Richard Lockridge with his wife Frances created one of the most famous American mystery series, Mr. and Mrs. North.
Craig Rice was an American writer of mystery novels and short stories, described by book critic Bill Ruehlmann as "the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction, she wrote the binge and lived the hangover."
James William Flavin Jr. was an American character actor whose career lasted for nearly half a century.
Michael "Mike" Shayne is a fictional private detective character created during the late 1930s by writer Brett Halliday, a pseudonym of Davis Dresser. The character appeared in a series of seven films starring Lloyd Nolan for Twentieth Century Fox, five films from the low-budget Producers Releasing Corporation with Hugh Beaumont, a radio series under a variety of titles between 1944 and 1953, and later in 1960–1961 in a 32-episode NBC television series starring Richard Denning in the title role.
Emory Parnell was an American vaudeville performer and actor who appeared in over 250 films in his 36-year career.
Mr. and Mrs. North is a 1942 American comedy mystery film directed by Robert B. Sinclair, starring Gracie Allen and William Post Jr. as detectives Pam and Jerry North. The screenplay was based on a 1941 Broadway play by Owen Davis, which in turn was based on a series of mystery novels by Frances and Richard Lockridge. Pam North, a dizzy socialite, and her husband Jerry return home from a vacation to find a dead body in their apartment. All the suspects are close friends of the Norths, a fact that encourages Pam to gently interfere in the ongoing murder investigation conducted by Lt. Weigand.
In Agatha Christie's mystery novels, several characters cross over different sagas, creating a fictional universe in which most of her stories are set. This article has one table to summarize the novels with characters who occur in other Christie novels; the table is titled Crossovers by Christie. There is brief mention of characters crossing over in adaptations of the novels. Her publications, both novels and short stories, are then listed by main detective, in order of publication. Some stories or novels authorised by the estate of Agatha Christie, using the characters she created, and written long after Agatha Christie died, are included in the lists.
