| Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries | | | As difficult as it must be to write a radio murder mystery, the ultimate triumph of the art (presumably accomplished by Lee and Dannay) was the creation of a series of programs, each of which runs about 70 seconds from the description of the details of a murder to Ellery Queen's deduced solution to the crime. The addition of a break for a locally added commercial may have raised the total listening time to over 2 minutes, but these short, short stories are over in just a minute without the commercials. The programs may have run even longer when stations would get listeners to phone in during the break, giving their solutions to qualify for prizes from the sponsor. Given the brief running time of the show, details of the murderer's apprehension are not included, but that shouldn't have taken Ellery Queen more than another 15 seconds or so. |
