One of the classic books of the mystery genre is available now at a bargain price in a Kindle edition at amazon.com: The Adventures of Ellery Queen, by Ellery Queen. These classic stories from the 1930s are a cornerstone of mystery fiction. In these stories, the eponymous author team of Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, writing under their pseudonym of Ellery Queen (also the name of their detective), firmly established the outlines of a particular type of American detective story: the Great Detective tale which mixed realism with surrealism for a distinctly 20th-century American type of tale.

The Queen stories and novels employed the most complex, elaborate mystery puzzles while fashioning an ongoing critique of one of mid-twentieth-century America’s central contradictions: individuals’ and society’s yearning for security and wealth while urgently desiring to see oneself, and be seen by others, as virtuous. The story “The Mad Tea-Party” in this edition illustrates this admirably by depicting its fashionable characters as embroiled in a scenario of Alice in Wonderland surrealism, plus murder. Just a tad more normal but still brilliant are “The One-Penny Black” and “The Seven Black Cats.” All the stories in this volume, taken from the early years of Queen’s career, are first-rate.

This Kindle edition from the Mysterious Press is an extraordinary opportunity to obtain one of the classics of its genre at a bargain price of just $2.99.

Most highly recommended.