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n November 27.1932 listeners could tune in on the WABC-
Columbia program  "America's Grub Street Speaks" at 6:00 PM and hear three mystery story writers attempt to solve a real mystery. Captain John Ayer head of the New York Police Departement's Missing Persons Bureau stated the known facts in a case his departement has not been able to solve. Barnaby Ross, Ellery Queen and 'The Diplomat' tried to find the answer. These three all appeared incognito and on the promotional material you see them wearing masks. Lee ofcourse was Barnaby Ross, Dannay was Ellery Queen and 'The Diplomat' was John Franklin Carter. He was a writer under under several pen names, ('Unofficial Observer','Jay Franklin',...). who in 1930 wrote  a series of detective novels about a diplomat-detective, Dennis Tyler under the name "Diplomat". Tom Stix was the regular conductor of this weekly program. As the NYT article puts it "The test will probably not proof anything, but it ought to be amusing". It appears to have been a one-off for the three masked men. Tom Stix Sr. was the agent for Walter Cronkite, Eleanor Roosevelt,  and a lot of others... It got both Dannay and Lee in the media and this had more to do with there intentions of playing out their Barnaby Ross/Ellery Queen parts (getting publicity for the books) rather than wanting to get into radio. For their real fictional work to be heared on radio we still have to wait some 7 years...
 

n 1938 the cousins were experimenting with different media. Both their efforts in theater and Hollywood had gone astray and fortunately for them an other medium was to come to full bloom... it came looking for them. Ellery Queen was a guest along with Donald Budge, Benny Leonard, James Braddock, ... in For Men Only (NBC 38-05-2) where amids a number of talk an drama subjects guest appeared. This was more than likely publicity for the books. Their biggest move with regards to their use of the medium radio was soon to follow. George Zachary, a young executive at CBS was playing with the idea of an hour long detective where the listeners could match their wits with the leading character in solving the riddle before he could. He was searching for the writers who could come up with a weekly script for such a series... At that time radio had his heroes e.g. The Shadow but no 'real' detectives. Zachary was not really an expert on detective fiction and started working his way through several libraries. Only after 'some 200 stories' he stumbled upon his first Queen-story. There he found his idea of 'challenging' the listener in print. He made the cousins a modest offer of $25 a week in exchange for which they had to provide an hour long radiomystery on a weekly basis! It's probably wise to deduce that the possibility of millions of listeners did the trick. They were given the chance to learn the skills of this new profession by writing scripts for two existing series, sadly without credit nor pay. One of these was Alias, Jimmy Valentine (1937-1939), remotely based on an O.Henry short story about a reformed safecracker and featuring Bert Lytell in the leading role.  Here the cousins supposedly wrote scripts on a weekly basis. Only one episode is written by them for sure: the episode aired on November 21,1938. Propably their last work for the series.  The other series was the illustrious' 'Shadow'. When asked by Francis M.Nevins Dannay didn't remember which scripts he and Manny helped creating, nor did he remember who played the Shadow at the time they were broadcast (Orson Welles or Bill Johnstone). It has become clear that their contributed to the first five seasons of the Bill Johnstone-era. Edith Meiser, script editor for the series, hired the cousins because "...she had read their stories, and was all too happy having them working for us. We handed them model scripts and they went to work..." (William Nadel) After a nice piece of deduction Nadel narrows the episodes down to the following 8 to 11 scripts:
         "Shyster Payoff" 11-06-38
         "Black Rock" 11-13-38
"Fountain of Death" 11-27-38 not available for examination* 
         "Murder in E Flat" 12-04-38
         "Murder by Rescue" 12-11-38 not available for examination*   
         "Give Us This Day" 12-25-38 not available for examination* )
         "Valley of the Living Dead" 01-22-39
         "The Ghost of Captain Bayloe" 02-05-39
         "Friend of Darkness" 02-19-39
         "Sabotage by Air" 03-05-39
         "Can the Dead Talk?" 03-19-39 

* Syracuse University Library has script copies

Fred and Manny also appeared in This is New York,  (39-02-26, 8 to  9 pm ) a series designed to give listeners a grasp of the real New York through interviews with famous, ordinary and obscure people who live and work there. The episode had the following items: "Ellery Queen" Solves a murder; Ella Fitzgerald, Chick Webb, Deems Taylor.
They did however appear as Mr.Ellery and Mr.Queen in a half game half panel show called Author! Author! which debuted on April 7, 1939. This show, they created and sold to the Mutual Network, would start with a dramatized version of some unexplicable event and the moderator (first Ogden Nash, later replaced by S.J.Perelman) would then challenge each of the four panellists to come up with a solution which would make sense... Next to the cousins several mediafigures served as guests Dorothy Parker, Fannie Hurst, Heywood Broun, Moss Hart and George S.Kaufman, Marc and Carl Van Doren, Erskine Caldwell, and Quentin Reynolds to name but a few. After having put their solutions to eachother it was attacked by the other members of the panel and listeners could participate to by sending in their solution to the problem. The sponsor B.F. Goodrich Rubber Co. offered $25 for every solution that was aired.
An example employed on the first program was this: " A young man arrives for the reading of his uncle's will. The only heir is in desperately in need for money to cover his gambling debts. The will gives him a choice: Accept $10,000 in cash or the contents of an envelope. He opens the envelope, which is empty, with no stamps or writing on it. 'I will take the envelope,' he says. The solution which Dannay proposed was that the young man had poisened his uncle by means of a poison applied to the envelope and that this uncle, before dying, gave him the choice of destroying the evidence of his crime or to claim the money, for which he committed the crime, only to risk exposure. Panelists were supposed to devise this kin of solution on the spot, while being attacked by other panelists. This kind of mechanical approach was especially appealing to Dannay and despite being a daring format for that period it wasn't what audiences waited for and it can still be considered a surprise it lasted for one year.
    
achary over at CBS was gathering his team. Dannay and
Lee had stepped up to the challenge to provide a weekly Ellery Queen script for which they earned $350/script. In order to attract a more female audience, Dannay, Lee and Zachary added a new character to the stories: Ellery's secretary Nikki Porter. She was played by Marion Shockley whom Zachary married. The analogue to the 'Challenge of the Reader' was to stop the action and put the crucial question to a panel of well known guest stars or later listeners.  Zachary produced and directed thirty-four hour-long radio drama's which were broadcast between June 1939 and February 1940. The program ran initially on a sustaining basis (without a sponsor) as a summer replacement for The Screen Guild Theater.  Studio executives were initially not impressed by the program. They changed their view when due to a water hose burst in the transmitter cooling system at a Chicago station WBBM  'The Mother Goose Murders' was forced off the air 9 minutes before the end of the program. The number of listeners who called in was so great it not only remained on the air but also garnered its first sponsor Gulf Oil. Not much survived the years apart from the 'translations' of the stories to other formats. After this period the format changed to half an hour drama's.To prevent the plot leaking out Zachary would keep the final part a secret even to the actors who played in it. At the last dressed rehearsal all was revealed and it didn't take long for the actors to organize a pool, the winner being the one who unmasked the culprit. Ted de Corsia  (Velie) and runner-up Robert Strauss were the most frequent winners. For its first few months, the show's armchair guests (at $25-$50 a case) were not that frequent winners. Lillian Hellman was the only one to show on-the-scent results, solving the mystery of Napoleon's Razor in a nick. As did Harry Kurnitz, who solved the mystery of the March of Death right off the bat.