In a land where most magazines have the lifespan of a fruit fly, how is it possible for one magazine to survive — and thrive — for 75 years? Janet Hutchings has a theory: “The great power that Frederic Dannay gave this magazine was its variety and its reach.”
Hutchings was referring to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and she was invoking the name of its founding editor, Frederic Dannay, who, along with his cousin Manfred B. Lee, collaborated to produce the short stories and novels of the pseudonymous mystery writer Ellery Queen, selling somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million books. Hutchings is now the magazine’s editor, and she offered her theory about its longevity at a symposium that launched a delightful new show, “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 75th Anniversary Exhibition,” which is now at the Butler Library at Columbia University in New York.
The exhibition is a little gold mine for mystery fans in particular and book lovers in general. There are typed manuscript pages by Patricia Highsmith, P.D. James, Isaac Asimov, and others. Sitting there behind glass, they have the look of Scripture. There are letters, photographs, and book and magazine covers, including the inaugural issue of EQMM from the fall of 1941, which featured stories by Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and, of course, Ellery Queen. The cover illustration of the 75th anniversary issue is by venerable Milton Glaser, whose very first published illustration was a cover for EQMM in 1954. Among its many delights, the anniversary issue features a new story by Joyce Carol Oates, a frequent contributor, and a classic from 1948 by Stanley Ellin, “The Specialty of the House.”
Dannay made no secret during his lifetime that he and his collaborating cousin had their disagreements — “We fight like hell,” was how he put it — and this show offers an amusing glimpse into their creative differences. As a rule, Dannay cooked up the plots, Lee did the storytelling, then Dannay did the editing. When Lee complained about Dannay’s heavy use of the blue pencil, a letter in the exhibition at Columbia reveals Dannay’s indignant reaction: “Do you know that I am considered one of the most perceptive and astute detective-story editors in the business? By everyone but you.” In another letter, Dannay added, “Manny, you are emotionally, physically and mentally incapable of taking criticism.”
For all the friction, the magazine was a smooth-running machine from day one. The inaugural issue sold more than 90,000 copies, and it contained a note from Dannay that expanded on Janet Hutchings’s “variety and reach” recipe for its success: “We propose to give you stories by big-name writers, by lesser known writers, and by unknown writers. But no matter what their source, they will be superior stories.”
True to Dannay’s word, the magazine has published the work of more than 40 Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, countless mid-listers, and more than 800 writers who broke into print in the magazine’s Department of First Stories. The Passport to Crime series has showcased the work of international writers. Jorge Luis Borges was first published in English in the pages of the magazine.
“One of the things about EQMM is that it made a major change in publishing,” Hutchings told me. “The only criterion for inclusion in the magazine was quality. Dannay was determined that the magazine be general — with hard-boiled stories, classic English mysteries, noirs, suspense, cozy mysteries, the work of literary writers. That really hadn’t been done before, and it had the effect of mainstreaming the mystery. Now academics are starting to write articles about this.”
Indeed, EQMM can be seen as a pioneering force in what is now a fact of life in American fiction — the blending of supposedly “high” and “low” literary forms, the blurring of genre boundaries, the growing sense among writers and readers that the old strictures and snobberies hampered free and fruitful cross-pollination. Now, writers of every stripe gleefully plunder one or more genres, stitching together scraps or horror, pulp, crime, fantasy, ghost stories, mysteries, westerns.
In 2011, the literary novelist Colson Whitehead published Zone One, in which a plague has turned most of the world’s population into zombies. A decade earlier, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon’s exuberant mash-up of comic books and high lit, won the Pulitzer Prize. Loren D. Estleman, primarily a writer of crime and western fiction, just published a short story collection called Desperate Detroit that features a western with vampire cowboys. In a related vein, the movie Cowboys & Aliens sets extraterrestrials loose in the Wild West. Elmore Leonard and Stephen King, unapologetic genre writers, both penned well-regarded advice on how to write well. “Nowadays,” Kurt Anderson recently wrote in The New York Times, “esteem isn’t much withheld from people who write thoughtful, first-rate novels that also happen to be page-turners, like [Jonathan Lethem’s] A Gambler’s Anatomy. The boundaries between high and low — or between serious fiction and ‘entertainments,’ in Graham Greene’s binary classification of his work — are no longer prissily enforced. That’s progress.” I agree. All the while, such literary writers as Joyce Carol Oates, William Faulkner, and P.G. Wodehouse have made rich contributions to EQMM. The magazine’s 75th anniversary edition features a story by Charlaine Harris, who, in Hutchings’s estimation, “has done more than any other recent writer to break down the boundaries between mystery and fantasy.” On and on it goes, to the delight of every reader who hates the formulaic and loves unfettered, unpredictable writing.
“There’s still some snobbery left in certain areas,” Hutchings said, “but there’s much more openness, and I do think EQMM played a role in that. And still does.”
Don’t take her word for it. Go see “Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s 75th Anniversary Exhibition” at Columbia. It will be open through Dec. 23.
