Tragedy of X

Author Ellery Queen

Introduction by Otto Penzler

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A retired Shakespearean actor plays his new role—amateur sleuth—after a murder in a New York streetcar.

Born during intermission in a seedy New Orleans playhouse, Drury Lane has spent the better part of his life in the theater. A majestic old-fashioned thespian, he made his name in London, where his record-breaking run as Hamlet defined the role for a generation. When hearing loss forces him to retire, he turns his attention to human drama—specifically crime. Using his powers of disguise, knowledge of human nature, and an occasional dash of theatrical combat, Lane is the most fantastic detective of all time—onstage or off.

In The Tragedy of X, a man is poisoned in the middle of a crowded New York streetcar and not…

Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing the greatest puzzle-mysteries of their time, gaining the duo a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery. Eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1929 when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Besides co-writing the Queen novels, Dannay founded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by…