Ellery Queen was the pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, two cousins from Brooklyn who became America's most successful authors of crime and detective fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. It is also the name of the celebrated character they created.

From 1929 to 1971, Dannay and Lee published 36 novels under the Ellery Queen name, establishing the pair as the leading detective writers of the genre's golden age. They also collected stories and published several anthologies of detective fiction by other writers, including this one.