I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting at Penguin when they discussed which author should be chosen for the letter Q. They weren’t plagued by what the French call l’embarras du choix, that’s for sure. On the Penguin Random House website, most of the authors whose last name begins with Q write non-fiction which also narrows the field.
 
So the editors of the series chose Ellery Queen, a name unfamiliar to me, though afterward I wondered how I had missed it. It’s the joint pen name of two cousins, Frederick Dannay (pseudonym of Daniel Nathan) and Manfred B. Lee (pseudonym of Emanuel Lepofsky), and also the name of their detective protagonist, which lends him an air of authenticity. The cousins were prolific writers of crime novels, and expanded the Ellery Queen brand to radio plays, a magazine, films and even board games & jigsaw puzzles.