October 20, 1905

Ellery Queen is the hero of a series of detective stories. Ellery Queen was the fictional creation of two authors who also were cousins, Frederic Dannay (October 20, 1905 to September 3, 1982) and Manfred Bennington Lee (January 11, 1905 to April 3, 1971). These author names are also aliases for the writers. Ellery Queen, following the classic detective profile, is sketched as a cerebral type, a writer himself. There were regular Ellery Queen books from 1929 to 1971, and a huge amount of media spin-off.

Cat of Many Tails was published in 1949. There were many editions. Here is the cover art for some of them.


If you saw this edition cover, you might think cats played a big part in the story.

But no, this cover is by far 
the most common --



This cover is more about the city, always an  important milieu for the detective story.





And good reasons to forget the cat on the cover completely, since cats are not a big part of the story.






And we get even more abstract----





and abstracter





The best cover may be the Spanish--- where the tails and the feline both  feature

Here are our authors: Manfred Bennington Lee  (left) and Frederic Dannay.  Ellery Queen wasn't the only detective hero these cousins created and wrote about together. Nor are Lee and Dannay actually their own real names. 

Layers of mystery to sort. And others have wondered about the connection between reading or writing about terrible things, made up things that are meaningful because they have or could, really happen, and how such descriptions yet function to divert, amuse, entertain. Now that is  a mystery.