IN WHAT REMAINS one of the most brilliant marketing decisions of all time, the two Brooklyn cousins who collaborated under the pseudonym Ellery Queen, Frederic Dannay (born Daniel Nathan) (1905–1982) and Manfred Bennington Lee (born Manford Lepofsky) (1905–1971), also named their detective Ellery Queen. They reasoned that if readers forgot the name of the author, or the name of the character, they might remember the other. It worked, as Ellery Queen is counted among the handful of best-known names in the history of mystery fiction.
Lee was a full collaborator on the fiction created as Ellery Queen, but Dannay on his own was also one of the most important figures in the mystery world. He founded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1941, and it remains, more than seventy years later, the most significant periodical in the genre. He also formed one of the first great collections of detective fiction first editions, the rare contents leading to reprinted stories in the magazines and anthologies he edited, which are among the best ever produced, most notably 101 Years’ Entertainment (1941), which gets my vote as the greatest mystery anthology ever published. He also produced such landmark reference books as Queen’s Quorum (1951), a listing and appreciation of the 106 (later expanded to 125) most important short-story collections in the genre, and The Detective Short Story (1942), a bibliography of all the collections Dannay had identified up to the publication date. More than a dozen movies were based on Queen books. There were several radio and television shows as well as comics; it was not far-fetched to describe the ubiquitous Ellery Queen in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as the personification of the American detective story.
“The House of Haunts” was first published in the November 1935 issue of Detective Story; it was retitled “The Lamp of God” when it was collected in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (New York, Stokes, 1940). It was also published in 1951 as a single story by Dell in its short-lived ten-cent series.