In 1929, cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee created the author Ellery Queen. This also became the name of their sleuth, a young, Harvard-educated New Yorker who solves crimes out of intellectual curiosity. Forming a distinct set, the duo's first nine novels refined the mystery genre, and we are pleased to present four of them.

As publisher Donald Kirk prepares for a banquet, an unfamiliar man comes to call at the office. Within an hour, the mysterious visitor is dead on the floor, head bashed in with a fireplace poker. Stranger still, in this 8th case (after The Siamese Twin Mystery), everything is topsy-turvy—the furniture is now backwards, and even the dead man's clothes have been put on front-to-back. As detective Ellery Queen pries into the secrets of Kirk's Mandarin Press, he must tread lightly, for walking backwards is a surefire way to step off a cliff.