Foreword by Rand B. Lee

My father, Manfred B. Lee, would have loved Eliminate the Impossible. Co-author with our cousin Frederic Dannay of the Ellery Queen mysteries, Dad was a Sherlock Holmes fan from boyhood. Born Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky in 1905 to a poor blue collar Jewish family in Brownsville, a suburb of Brooklyn, New York, young Manny’s early world was not that different from Holmes and Watson’s. Gaslight illuminated the neighborhood where he grew up. “Iceboxes” kept food from spoiling, cooled not by electricity and chemicals but by chunks of ice delivered by the iceman. Automobiles, airplanes, and motion pictures were still thrilling novelties, and communication was accomplished by letter writing, telephone, or telegraph. There were no ATM’s - if you wished to get cash from your banking account, you needed to visit the bank, in person, before closing Monday through Friday.

My father’s early years were marked not only by the humiliations of poverty and anti-semitism, but also by the horrors of World War I, the global influenza epidemic, and the Great Depression. I have always felt that the logic-driven rationalism of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, in which Holmes’s observational skills and scientific acumen brings balance and closure to even the most gruesome puzzles, satisfied Dad’s craving for justice and the triumph of reason over chaos. In the character of Ellery Queen, the gentleman detective, Holmes’s powers of reasoned observation were reincarnated, softened a bit by Dr. Watson’s capacity for empathy.

Rand B. Lee

May 2017