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he two cousins now known as 'Ellery Queen' were born in Brooklyn's Brownsville district. Manfred Lee in January 1905, and Frederic Dannay in October. Their birth names were Manford Lepofsky and Daniel Nathan.
Their mothers Rebecca and Dora where the daughters of Russian Jewish immigrants Leopold and Rachel Wallerstein. Rebecca married Benjamin Lepofsky and Dora married Meyer H. Nathan, a liquor salesman.Lepofsky may not have been the real familyname as it may have been change by Benjamin's father on his way from Russia to America. Apparently a fellow immigrant advised him to Americanize his name from 'Ashov' or Arshow' to 'Lepofsky', the name of someone he knew who had already immigrated into America.
Mrs.Rebecca Lepofsky named Manford after a leading character in a magazine love story she was reading shortly before here delivery. The doctor registered the boys birthcertificate as Emanuel. A similar thing happened when her sister Dora Nathan gave birth to her son nine months later, the doctor now seemed to dislike the name Daniel which his parents gave him and filled in the birth certificate as David. This was not even  known to close relatives as Richard Dannay confided: "After his death, I came across a copy of his petition to change his name to Frederic Dannay from -- David Nathan!"
They changed their names as young men, Lepofsky truncating and anglicizing his last name and modifying his first to a name meaning "man of peace", Dannay constructing a surname out of the first syllables of his birth names and taking "Frederic" out of admiration for the music of Chopin. Friends and family kept calling them Manny and Danny."

Lee grew up as the eldest of three children (sisters Helen and Rena) in Brooklyn and attended Boys' High (now Boys' and Girls' High). As a child, Lee had a difficult time with what he termed "the brutality of the streets," so he turned "for refuge" to books. Dannay's family moved to then-rural Elmira, New York, when he was a small boy. This hometown of Mark Twain gave him a real 'Tom Sawyer-like' boyhood together with a best friend named... Ellery. During vacations Manny went on holidays to his cousin en once in 1914 he even stayed the entire vacation. In 1917 the family decided to returned to Brooklyn to live in the Wallersteins house. During the first winter Danny was bedstrikken by a abscess to the left ear and one of his aunts handed him Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It changed his life...
Together with Manny he now attended Boys' High. Much more as brothers they shared the same interests such as baseball and detective stories. It's in their mid-teens, coming to and from New York, whilst sharing a cab,streetcar,...they started plotting impossible crimes, playing with ideas. They even plotted a crime in the (for them) almost 'holy sanctuary' of a public library. They concentrated on the 'how' rather than the 'who'... Eventually they changed the location to the museum to work out this closed-room-mystery.

Manny graduated from Boy's High and went on to the N.Y. University, whilst working as a Western Union messenger. Manfred B.Lee completed his studies at the New York university. His ambition back then was to be a serious writer, a '20th century Shakespeare'. His mother wanted him to go on to law school but soon after in 1926 Lee, who for a while had directed a five piece jazz-band (he was an excellent violinplayer), found his way into advertising as redactor of slogans and scripts for filmcompagnies (Pathι). In 1927 , Manfred (under the name Manfred Lee) wrote, together with Frances Guihan, the story for the silent movie 'Closed Gates', directed by Phil Rosen. In 1928 he married his first wife Betty Miller.

Danny had his own ambitions wanting to be a poet. Even now faith dealt him a feebler hand... .Prohibition meant his father was out of business and he had to quit Boy's High before his graduation. In 1921 at sixteen and in his third year High School he went working to help out the family. His after- school job as a soda fountain clerk set aside his first full-time position was as a bookkeeper but not his last. For the next seven years he jumped from job to job and the family's financial position changed. Danny could even receive his high school diploma and even took some courses in the Arts Students' League (to paint). In 1926 he married Mary Beck, his first wife and by 1928 he worked as a copy writer, art director for a N.Y. advertising agency.

Their offices were at walking distance and since their interests were basically the same,"Manny" and "Dannay" met on a regular basis and frequently went out for lunch together. They were fascinated by the crime and decided to write about it. One of those fascination led to Joseph Bowne Elwell, the greatest bridge player alive, the so-called "Wizard of Whist", a tutor of the game to the King of England and the millionaire Vanderbilts. Author of best-selling bridge textbooks, an unofficial "spycatcher" and intelligence agent, a heavy gambler on the stock exchange, the owner of a large stable of race horses, a developer of Florida real estate, a dealer of bootleg liquor, and an industrious philanderer, Joseph Elwell is believed to be the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby in his book, The Great Gatsby. But Joseph Elwell is today remembered for being murdered in June 1920 in a classic "locked room" mystery---to this day still unsolved. Someone managed to sneak into his art-filled house in Manhattan, shoot Elwell in the head, and vanish into thin air.....leaving Elwell in a room locked from the inside! The Slaying of Joseph Bowne Elwell is author Jonathan Goodman's fascinating account of the corrupt life and mysterious death of one bizarre man. The Elwell case has been used as the basis of many crime novels (including one of the most famous, S.S. Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case), films, and a play. Supposedly this case resulted in the formation of the writing partnership.They would set their teen-age fantasies aside and write a 'serious' book in the Van Dine-manner. They only needed the spark to set it off...