It's Christmastime, and young Ellery Queen has been invited to spend the holidays at a house party. During the eleven nights before Christmas, a series of anonymous gifts begin to arrive, each with increasing menace. Ellery tries to discover their source and meaning but to no avail. Finally, on the twelfth night, things turn deadly. Unable to solve the murder, Ellery returns to it decades later when he happens upon his diary. Will he finally be able to deduce the identity of the killer?
Ellery Queen is a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn—Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (1905–1982), and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee (1905–1971)—to write detective fiction. In a successful series of novels that covered forty-two years, Ellery Queen served as both the authors’ name and that of the detective-hero. The cousins also cofounded and directed Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential English crime-fiction magazines of the twentieth century. They were given the Grand Master Award for achievements in the field of the mystery story by the Mystery Writers of America in 1961.
Mark Peckham is an actor and director based in Rhode Island. In addition to working with Trinity Rep, Virginia Stage Co., and many Boston-area theaters, he was the voice of Joseph Smith in the award-winning PBS documentary American Prophet with Gregory Peck.