25 minutes before the time I like to publish an article on my blog every weekday and I’m struggling for an idea. I’ve had a couple of little ideas in my head for the past hour or so as I do other things and couldn’t make them work so I came back to the computer and just checking Twitter when I found this published on The Bookshop Blog. It’s about the Malice Domestic Writers Award, a lovely award given by the fans themselves at a conference in Virginia, the award itself appears to be a teapot…mmm…I could use a teapot I’ve mislaid mine, do you think it’s a bit extreme to write a book to win a teapot? A downside, I don’t think I could write a mystery novel for any amount of money or awards so I might just have to buy another teapot. Reading through the article I noticed an entry published in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in June 2011 which got me thinking.

I started thinking about the number of series written by one author which have later turned out to be a pseudonym for multiple people. In the case of the Ellery Queen mysteries they were originally written by two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manning Lee, who kept a tight rein on their writing and eventually allowed other writers to use the name as the author but not as the character. What? Ellery Queen was both the author and the character, he was much loved and many of these works were put on the radio and the television, Helene Hanff (of 84, Charing Cross Road fame) wrote some of the scripts. They started a mystery magazine in 1941 which is still being published to this day.

Other series which have one name on them but were actually written by several different authors are The Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, but not Enid Blyton, she wrote all her own books.