# Stanley Ellin

Stanley Bernard Ellin (October 6, 1916 – July 31, 1986) was an American mystery writer. Ellin was born in Brooklyn, New York. After a brief tenure in the Army, at the insistence of his wife, Ellin began writing full time. While his novels are acclaimed, he is best known for his short stories. In May 1948, his first sale, and one of Ellin's most famous short stories, "The Specialty of the House" ("Speciality of the House" in England), appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
In the years to come, Ellin's fame as an author grew. He was awarded three Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Edgar Award). His first Edgar was for the short story "The House Party" in 1954, the next for the short story "The Blessington Method" in 1956, and his third for the novel The Eighth Circle in 1959. Several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents were based on Ellin short stories, and his novels Dreadful Summit, House of Cards, and The Bind were adapted into feature films. Charles Silet writes that Ellin "did much toward erasing the distinctions between traditional genre and mainstream fiction by writing novels more concerned with character and locale than with plot."
Ellin was a longtime member and past president of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA). In 1981, he was awarded the MWA's highest honor, the Grand Master Award. Writing in The Times, Marcel Berlins said, "Stanley Ellin is the unsurpassed master of the short story in crime fiction."

## Life

Stanley, born in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, was the only child of Louis and Rose Mandel Ellin. They were a loving family and he enjoyed a happy childhood. Ellin writes fondly, if a bit sardonically, in the "Introduction" to The Specialty of the House and Other Stories:
   At age three, I was shipped off in my mother's care to a boarding house in Lakewood, New Jersey, to recuperate from some lingering ailment. In my earliest days I was always recuperating from some lingering ailment or other, and this one must have been particularly interesting to have led to that hejira from Brooklyn to the remote wilderness of New Jersey where, as everyone in my family knew, the fresh air alone was life restoring.
He garnered a love for reading at a young age. As a boy, Stanley urged his father to read him Beatrix Potter's story The Tale of Peter Rabbit over and over: "I have some vivid memories of that bucolic episode [in Lakewood, N.J.], but most vivid is the memory of my father, on a weekend visit, sitting by my bed filling me with bliss as he read Peter Rabbit to me, patiently read it over and over on demand until I was letter perfect in it. He must have read other stories to me as well, but of them I have no recollection because they lacked the true magic." He eagerly read books in the family library by the likes of Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe, who were literary influences on his writing.
He graduated from New Utrecht High School, where he had been a precocious student.
Ellin was educated at Brooklyn College and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1936 when he was 19 years old. He married Jeanne Michael, a freelance editor and former classmate, in 1937; they had one daughter, Sue Ellin (Mrs. William Jacobsen), and a granddaughter, Tae Ellin. Apart from some travel abroad and some time spent in Miami Beach, Florida, he lived his entire life in Brooklyn.
To support his family, Ellin worked as a magazine salesman and distributor, boilermaker's apprentice, steel worker, shipyard worker, dairy farmer, and junior college teacher before serving in the US Army in 1944-1945 during World War II. Afterward, Ellin began writing full time while his family lived on his service unemployment allowance and on his wife's editing salary.
Lawrence Block reported, "Ellin was a perfectionist, working slowly and deliberately, producing a page of typescript on a good day. He admitted to having rewritten the opening paragraph of a short story as many as forty times before going on to the next paragraph and polishing each subsequent page in similar fashion before proceeding further... He managed only one a year, sent each in turn to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and never had one rejected." "Only one a year" is not precisely accurate, but the Internet Speculative Fiction Database shows it is close.
Ellin co-wrote the screenplay for the 1951 film The Big Night along with Joseph Losey, Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner, although Ellin and Losey were the only ones credited for it up until the year 2000. He also wrote book reviews for such venues as The New York Times Book Review, chiefly of suspense novels, as well as essays such as "Mystery Novel or Crime Novel" (Writer, vol. 86, January 1973, pp. 22–24) and "The Destiny of the House" (Armchair Detective, vol. 12, Winter 1979, p. 195).
He appeared, along with Frederic Dannay, Brian Garfield, and Denis Healey, on the television show Crime Writers in the episode "Murder for Pleasure" (Season 1, Episode 6, 10 December 1978).
Ellin died of a heart attack (complications from a stroke) at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, New York, on July 31, 1986. He and his wife had become Quakers in the late 1960s. His ashes, and those of his wife, lie in the Friends Cemetery in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.