Ellery Queen of the 1940s, that detective-hero was possibly the best known American fictional detective. Movies, radio shows, and television shows were based on Dannay and Lee's works. Frederic Dannay, without much involvement from Lee, was founding and directing editor of "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine", generally considered one of the most influential English-language crime fiction magazines of the last sixty-five years. They were also prominent historians in the field, editing numerous collections and anthologies of short stories such as "The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes". Their 994-page anthology for the Modern Library, "101 Years' Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841–1941", was a landmark
Pen name is writing in. Western novelist Pearl Gray dropped his first name and changed the spelling of his last name to become Zane Grey, because he believed that his real name did not suit the Western genre. Romance novelist Angela Knight writes under that name instead of her actual name (Julie Woodcock) because of the double entendre of her surname in the context of that genre. Romain Gary, who was a well-known French writer, decided in 1973 to write novels in a different style under the name Émile Ajar and even asked his cousin's son to impersonate Ajar; thus he received