The periodical we all received had a reddish-brown cover marked at a reasonable twenty cents, presumably a promotional price for the first issue since the subscription information inside said it would cost a quarter for each quarterly issue, a dollar for one year. The cover illustration showed a man wearing a brimmed hat, his hand to his face, wearing glasses that reflected a newspaper headline with the word KILLER prominent. The paper seemed to me high quality, not pulp. The contributors included some major names — Dashiell Hammett leading off, Margery Allingham, Cornell Woolrich, the Queen team themselves — but all the stories were reprints. It was a handsome production, to be sure, and suggested the possibility of good things to come.
I noticed Gordon Maltravers on the edge of the group, peering at the copy he’d been handed. He appeared to have it open to the table of contents or maybe the first story, and he had an odd expression on his face. Pondering or plotting or darkly amused? I was reminded of his unlikely claim.
Was the old actor nuts, or just a drunken fabulist, or had he really seen what he said? Certainly there had been battles in the last year of the so-called Great War that involved both British and American troops. And it was quite likely that an American officer would not remember an anonymous British enlisted man. So could it be true? And if it was, was one of the men in this crowd that American officer who’d deserted his troops? There were plenty of guys here in their middle forties or older who might very well have been officers in World War I.
“Aaron, I know you did this just to embarrass me,” Phil Devine said, kiddingly but possibly on the square.
Wimbush looked genuinely surprised and puzzled. “What do you mean?” Several of the other writers in attendance moved closer to the feuding pair, maybe to be peacemakers or maybe looking forward to fireworks.
“Could be Aaron had purer motives, Phil,” said Sherry Kendall. “Give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“In the event you have any doubt,” Gus Fischburn chimed in.
“I, for one, see this new magazine as a good reprint market,” Sherry said. “Some of my stories about Mayor Fiffleton are really mysteries, you know.”
“Except they got no crime and no detection,” Gus said.
“Many of my millions of readers find them very amusing,” Sherry said, feigning hurt.
“The only funny thing I see is that they pay you for them.”
“If you knew how much they pay me, you’d gaze at your own checkbook and cry instead of laugh.”
While these two guys played out their usual routine, I tried to picture them as World War I officers. They were the right age for it, that’s for sure. Come to think of it, so were the two A.P. Windsor collaborators, and our host, for that matter.
Jeremy Glass, definitely not old enough to have been in World War I, apparently thought the mock feud of Sherry and Gus was not nearly as interesting as the possibly real one of Phil and Aaron. “Come on, Phil. Seriously, why are these Ellery Queen guys such a sore point with you?”
Phil drew a deep breath before he said, “Our whole career, our whole collaboration, Aaron’s been throwing that Ellery Queen team at me. Every move they make is great, terrific. And we can never duplicate what they do, but what he doesn’t realize is that we aren’t like them. Not at all. For one thing, we used to fight so much, it’s amazing we got anything done. Those Queen guys are cousins, and really more like brothers. They probably get along great.”
“Not what I hear,” said Max. “One of their jobs they had an office right under the mimeograph room, machines running all day long. You know how deafening an operation that is. But the people who worked there complained about the noise the two Queens made yelling at each other.”
“Good story,” said Sherry. “Was that at Columbia, Paramount, or Metro?”
“Who cares?” said Gus.
“Nobody, I hope,” Max said, “because I don’t know.”
“May I say something?” Aaron said. Odd he should ask permission, but he didn’t wait for it. “I didn’t come here to embarrass Phil, and yes, we had our differences, but everything I suggested was meant for the good of the team. I did think maybe the anthology market would be a beneficial sideline for us, but Phil never went for it, and that was okay.”
“The anthology market is a hell of a lot of work and it isn’t all that lucrative,” Phil said. “One of those two Queen cousins built the greatest collection of mystery short stories known to man, so he can put together an anthology of great obscure stuff standing on his head. But did anybody here see their first one, Challenge to the Reader?”
“I remember that,” said Sherry. “The idea was they’d hide the author’s byline, change the names of the detective and other continuing characters, and ask the reader to guess who they were. A great gimmick, you gotta admit.”
“Oh, sure, a great gimmick,” said Gus. “If you knew the writers and characters, it was too easy; if you didn’t, it was impossible.”
Wimbush said, “Maybe you haven’t seen the new one, 101 Years’ Entertainment, best mystery anthology I ever saw. And they’ve done better in pictures than us, Phil. You gotta admit that.”
“No, Aaron, I don’t admit that. We’re still working here, and they aren’t. Did they ever even get a screen credit?”
“Maybe not screenplay credit, but some of their books got made into movies,” Wimbush said.
“And those movies of the Ellery Queen novels have all been lousy, so they’re not exactly a silver-screen success story. Oh yeah, and radio. They had some kind of a quiz show that got nowhere.”
“It was called Author, Author, and it was darned clever,” Wimbush said. “Of course, thinking up plot ideas on your feet is a rare talent. The Queen lads appeared on that show together. And earlier they did a lecture tour together, wearing masks, one playing Ellery Queen debating the other playing Barnaby Ross. They really knew how to seize the spotlight, turn their byline and their detective into household words. A.P. Windsor could have done the same, but you were never open to it.”
“And how, I ask, could you and I ever appear together on a radio show or a lecture circuit? Know the real difference between Ellery Queen and A.P. Windsor? Those two guys obviously get along like two halves of the same person. I don’t care if they drowned out the mimeograph machines.”
Sherry Kendall raised a conciliatory hand. “Guys, your personal row is a lot of fun to eavesdrop on, but let’s talk a little more about the magazine. Say, from the viewpoint of a guy like me who’d like to see his stories reach a new audience. Is this mag going to last or is it a pipe dream?”
“Or is them buying anything of yours the pipe dream?” Gus said. “Seriously, though, didn’t Ellery Queen have a magazine before?”
Phil was ready to pounce on that. “Yeah, they edited Mystery League back in the early thirties, rejected a short story from us, as I remember. And that big ambitious pulp died after four issues.”
“Deep in the Depression,” Aaron pointed out.
“Sure, lousy time to start a magazine,” Phil agreed. “But what about now, Aaron? There’s war all over Europe and Asia, and we’ll be in it any day. The war may be short once we get in it. I hope it will. But short or long, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine hasn’t a prayer of surviving the war. And I’ll put money on that. I’ll bet anyone here who will agree to get together after the war to settle up that the Queen team’s great ambitious experiment will end before the war does.”