The son of a police detective solves baffling crimes.

The third television adaptation of the adventures of super sleuth Ellery Queen, this time set during the 1940s. Queen (Jim Hutton) was a mystery writer who assisted his father, Inspector Richard Queen (David Wayne), who was with the New York Police Department, in solving murders. Sergeant Thomas Velie (Tom Reese) was Inspector Queen's assistant and Simon Brimmer (John Hillerman), a rival detective. Queen's methods were arcane and intellectual rather than action oriented, and he always astounded his father by arriving at a correct solution by purely deductive reasoning. In this version, just before he revealed his solution to the crime, Queen always turned to the camera and asked the television audience if they had figured out the identity of the killer yet, they had all the clues, because he was about to reveal the correct killer as we met the entire slew of suspects in one room for the ending.—Marg Baskin <[email protected]>