he Blue Movie Murders (1972)

All Hollywood producer Ben Sloane had wanted was to find Sol Dahlman, the mysterious film genius who had made The Wild Nymph and now Sloane was dead. The governor told Mike McCall to, ‘Go up to Rockview and get me the killer!’ But it wasn’t quite that easy. The Mann Photo Service, long rumored to be a center of the blue movie industry, was torn by a strike, and nobody was talking to strangers not Xavier Mann, not Major Jordan, not beautiful April Evans, who refused even to tell who she was or why she, too, was investigating the murder. Then, just to make the job a little harder, Cynthia Rhodes and her Fem Lib Raiders hit town and a man named Carry Tanner decided McCall had lived too long. 

Ghostwritten by Edward D. Hoch.  All of the ghostwritten books were edited and supervised by Lee, except The Blue Movie Murders which was edited and supervised by Dannay after Lee's death.

Ed attested to this fact "I remember that I spent an entire summer's afternoon there, going over the manuscript page by page. For me , it was a lesson in editing from a master. He preferred fewer commas than I usually used, and fewer words. He found a frase like, 'He shrugged his shoulders," to be redundant. "You can't shrug anything but your shoulders", he told me, and of course he was right. To this day I remember that, every time I see the phrase in someone else's book. There were red editing marks on virtually every page of the manuscript..." (Old-Time Detection Issue 16, Autumn 2007)

I'd like to remark that the Taiwanese edition in the section below has the name of Edward Hoch next to Ellery Queen. A first to my knowledge.