From our 75th anniversary programming, we’d like to share an essay from Jeffrey Marks that highlights a bit of the intriguing story of how EQMM came to be first published by Lawrence Spivak!

Lawrence Spivak is best remembered today for his two-decade stint on Meet the Press, but his media career predated television. Spivak, who would be the first to publish Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, had begun as business manager and circulation director for various magazines. In 1934, he became business manager of The American Mercury, a literary magazine. H.L. Mencken· had founded the magazine ten years earlier and edited it until 1933. Ironically, Mencken, who considered himself a literary author, had also overseen the beginnings of The Black Mask magazine. In 1937, Spivak established Mercury Publications, which included Mercury Mysteries, a line of heavily abridged versions of popular mysteries in digest format. In 1939, he also purchased The American Mercury. Unfortunately, like many of Mencken’s projects, the magazine bled money. Other means were required to support the literary venture.

Spivak saw a way to salvage The American Mercury magazine through publishing additional magazines to help defray costs. Two genre digests published by the company were Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the latter edited by Anthony Boucher. Records showed that Spivak was pumping nearly $100,000 a year into The American Mercury to keep it afloat, with the genre magazines helping to pay the tab.

In an oral history conducted by the American Jewish Committee, Spivak indicated that he initially had no interest in publishing mystery fiction. It came about when a friend, who’d studied at Harvard, left a pulp mystery magazine with him. The friend expressed embarrassment that he read the magazine for relaxation. Pulps were so named because they were printed on cheap paper that often still smelled of the wood pulp and deteriorated rapidly.  The covers were brightly colored and often gaudy. Authors typically received two cents a word for works that would never be considered literature.  After reading the pulp magazine, Spivak was intrigued by the idea of publishing a respectable mystery magazine.

Spivak approached Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the cousins who collaborated as Ellery Queen. They were well known at the time for their radio show, and Spivak thought the other media platforms were a selling point. Spivak had attended the same high school, Boys’ High School in Brooklyn, as the cousins, at about the same time, though that connection was never listed as a reason for the business proposition.

Dannay and Lee were skeptical, having tried magazine publishing before, but Spivak assured them that the new magazine would be different from their previous attempt. Their first effort, Mystery League, had lasted only four issues. In that early publication, which began in 1933, a full-length novel was reprinted alongside several short stories. The magazine was 160 pages long, rather substantial for that era. Mystery League was priced at 25¢, which placed it in the same bracket as the other pulps on the market.

The magazine touted that it published only complete, unabridged novels. At the time, this was an important distinction. Eighty-thousand-word novels were often pared down to twenty to thirty thousand words, the equivalent of keeping every fourth word. These abridged titles lost minor characters, subplots, and, at times, the mystery’s solution, since the detective’s explanation was not especially cogent due to the editing.

For Mystery League’s first issue, the cousins opted to run a Drury Lane novel. The Drury Lane books were not known as being the work of Ellery Queen in 1933, and so their publication did not have the appearance of nepotism.’

Interestingly, in the early 1930s, the truth regarding the Queen’s pseudonym was not widely known, and the cousins used “I” when writing as Queen to indicate that the author was a single person. Indeed, one cousin would portray Ellery Queen at marketing functions· while the other would portray Drury Lane. This would not be the case in 1941, when Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine appeared. By that time, the names of the two authors had been publicly released, and they had worked on Queen projects separately. They used the first-person plural pronoun “we” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Spivak’s proposition was for a vastly different publication than Mystery League. He envisioned a more respectable mystery magazine, a digest rather than a large pulp magazine. He hoped to include three unique types of stories in the magazine.

1)         Familiar and well-loved pieces by famous authors

2)         Stories by what Spivak called “literary lights” (He cited a detective story by Mark Twain as an example.

3)         Works by new authors

Spivak also recognized that Fred Dannay was a “real student of mysteries,” whose collection of works would prove helpful to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine as a source for reprints. However, Dannay foresaw a time when the magazine would also serve as a market for new mystery stories. The magazine’s premier issue fulfilled Spivak’s first condition by including stories by Woolrich, Allingham, and Hammett.

In addition to reprinting well-loved stories by famous authors, Dannay published unknown or rarely seen stories by Dashiell Hammett and the pulp works of Erle Stanley Gardner, including his rarely reprinted Lester Leith stories.

The magazine would have no trouble meeting the second criterion established by Spivak. Dannay believed that every great writer had written at least one crime story in their life. At the time he made the statement, genre writing was not considered literature and was often disparaged. The claim that Steinbeck or Hemingway had written genre fiction was controversial, yet over the years, the magazine published works by William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Twain, and E. M. Forster. By 1945, EQMM had published four Pulitzer winners. In The Literature of Crime, Queen’s 1950 anthology of literary authors who wrote crime fiction, Dannay said in the introduction:

Few people realize, few critics, too, that nearly every world-famous author, throughout the entire history of literature, has tried his hand at writing the detective or crime story. Some, it is true, have merely “stooped to conquer.” In these instances, the results have invariably borne the mark of the greatest of literary sins-insincerity. Most of them, however, have attempted in all good faith to conquer the technical difficulties of the form. In these instances, the results have seldom been so-so: great writers usually produce either solid successes or hollow failures, and many of them have made important contributions, creatively and critically, to the crime genre.

That is not to say that the magazine kowtowed to literary authors. In 1946, William Faulkner’s work, submitted to the magazine’s best story contest, won only second place, prompting Faulkner to fume. Likewise, a Jorge Luis Borges story was excluded from a new-story contest in 1948 because it was actually a translation by Anthony Boucher and not a new work, per se. fulfillment of Spivak’s third criterion for EQMM came about more slowly.

Readers of the magazine are familiar with The Department of First Stories, which has been a feature since 1949. Over 700 authors have published their first stories in the magazine.

That’s not to say that EQMM only began publishing its first mystery stories in 1949. “The Specialty of the House,” Stanley Ellin’s masterpiece, first appeared in EQMM in 1948. However, readers had to rely on the introductions to each story to reveal the new author’s status.

Even though both parties agreed on the type of magazine to be produced, the contract discussions between Spivak and the Queen team were prolonged as Dannay and Lee negotiated changes to the original contracts. They wanted the cost of editorial assistance to be covered by the publisher. Additionally, they wanted their profit percentage increased to cover overhead. Per the contract, their share was to be calculated on a sliding scale, starting at 5% for the first $200,000 in gross annual sales. The overhead would be a point of contention for years with the cousins, who wanted a higher percentage of profits to cover things they, but not the publisher, considered overhead, including finding many of the stories for the magazine. In the early years, the magazine mainly consisted of reprinted stories, which took time to locate. In 1948, the sliding rate was changed to a flat ten percent of gross annual profit. After the contracts were signed. Spivak wanted to throw a launch party for EQMM but was concerned about others’ attitudes toward celebrating a mystery magazine. So he officially made the party a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s mystery short stories. Under that banner, the party was a great success. A luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria was held, and the proceedings were broadcast by radio station WJZ. The speakers included notable genre expert Howard Haycraft and, of course, Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay.

According to Spivak, the first issue of EQMM sold more copies than the American Mercury, and the magazine showed a profit from its inception. The contracts included a clause allowing a few trial issues, so the magazine began as a quarterly. If the first twelve issues did not earn $2,400 for the cousins, they would have the option to terminate the contract. The same would be true if they did not earn $3,000 in any twelve months after that first year.

The contract clause was moot. The magazine was immediately profitable. The Queens’ earnings from the magazine were soon ten times the minimum. For the first year, starting with the now-sought-after Fall 1941, the magazine printed 150,000 copies. Each of the first year’s sales numbered 94,000 copies sold per issue. In May 1942, the magazine went monthly, and from the September 1942 issue on sales exceeded 100,000 copies of each issue.

While Mercury Publications obviously did not own the rights to Ellery Queen, the publisher asked for the right to publish anthology works that appeared in the magazine. The anthologies, unlike Dannay’s collections, would have the Queen name in the title of the books. These would earn the cousins’ twenty-five percent of the profits.

From the beginning, Dannay wished to use his collection of short stories to develop, edit, and publish a series of multiple-author short-story anthologies bearing the Queen name. He started in 1938 with Challenge to Reader, an odd-duck anthology in which the reader had to guess the true identity of the fictional sleuth whose name had been altered by the editor. The book took years to sell out its remaining printed copies. Its publisher, Frederick A. Stokes, turned down Fred’s next planned anthology, a vein of mystery short stories from Edgar Allan Poe to 1941.

In the interim, Ellery Queen’s former agent had changed position and become the vice president of Little, Brown and Company. He approached Manny about publishing their latest novel, Calamity Town. Fred refused to sell just the novel to Little, Brown. He insisted on a package deal in which the publisher took both the new anthology and the Queen novel. The publisher declined the offer, returned to the negotiating table, and then refused it once more. As the 1941 catalogue was being prepared, the publisher called again and agreed to accept both books.

101 Years’ Entertainment appeared in 1941, as the best of the Queen anthologies. As well as being a collection of the best stories from the past century, the anthology included a narrative of the genre to date. An instant success, the book was reprinted several times in hardcover and later in paperback. This feat only served to provide more good press and attention to. the newly published magazine. The anthology was issued as a Modern Library Giant in 1946, promoting the Queen name even more. Ultimately, the Ellery Queen anthologies would change to include just stories from the magazine and from Fred’s collections. This reduced the heavy administrative duties the cousins had to perform to locate rights holders and obtain permission to reprint a story, a process that typically required a dedicated assistant.

Even with its enormous success, Spivak decided to sell EQMM and other publication holdings starting in 1950, to focus on his other pursuits. In 1945, Spivak developed Meet the Press as a radio program supporting American Mercury. In 1947, the television program first aired. The radio and TV programs coexisted until 1950, when the radio show ended. In’ views at the time suggested that Spivak was working sixteen-hour days seven days a week to meet all of his commitments. As had been the case with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Meet the Press was far more lucrative than American Mercury and earned far more for Spivak than his prize publication

As his career moved towards politics, Spivak sold The American Mercury in 1950 to Clen Ryan, a wealthy investment banker. In 1953, after buying out his cofounder, Spivak sold Meet the Press to NBC, though he would continue to host for another 20 years. In 1954, he sold his interest in Me: Publications, ending his ties to EQMM. Spivak’s papers are in the Library of Congress. Frederic Dannay’s papers are at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and Manfred B. Lee’s papers are at the Heinecke Library at Yale. It was in these papers that this story of the magazine’s beginnings was found.