Ellery Queen has come back to television, and it was nearly 20 years ago this fall that I first heard of him. One September my father (Manfred Lee) started taking a pad and pen with him to the TV set. He took notes every week on a certain detective show. After each program he would rise to his feet with a sour look on his face, go into his private study, and phone his Cousin Fred (Frederic Dannay), who lived in New York. Somehow, I picked up that the new detective show, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, was taken from characters in some books that Dad and Cousin Fred had written together. This was my first inkling of what Dad did for a living.

A couple of years later I started reading the Ellery Queen books for myself. I was amazed to see how many there were and how many languages they have been translated into. I learned that there was an Ellery Queen's Mystery magazine; that there had been Ellery Queen radio show; that the first Queen TV series, 1950-51, had won a big award; that dad in Cousin Fred had received little statues of Edgar Allan Poe from the Mystery Writers of America's as awards for their books. Dan had even corresponded with Agatha Christie! They got fan mail, too, from all over the world.

All this was overwhelming for a number of reasons. First, Dad didn't act like a famous author. He watched baseball and TV in his shorts and T-shirt; he hated parties and had to be blackmailed into wearing a tie; the newspapers didn't hang on his words or chronicle his moves. Second, we lived like most people in our Connecticut town: we had a station wagon and kept chickens and cows and planted our own garden. Famous writers are millionaires; anybody can tell by counting my allowance that we weren't millionaires. Third, I had never actually seen Dad do any work. Oh, he spent a lot of time in the converted colonial schoolhouse where his study was; but I didn't consider his typewriting and calls to Cousin Fred work.

As for Cousin Fred, Dad's writing partner, he lived in Larchmont, N. Y., and I hardly ever saw him. Our conversations on the phone were limited to "Hello"; Cousin Fred would ask me how I was and then ask to speak with Dad. I'd buzz Dad to alert him in the study and that would be that.

It amazes me now that Dad and Cousin Fred could have produced so many Queen works. The writing methods were unorthodox. All the time I was growing up they did their work over the telephone. Cousin Fred plotted all the novels and short stories, creating the characters and providing Dad with detailed skeletons that Dad fleshed out. Their talents determined this arrangement. I'm sure Dad could never have come up with the sort of plots Fred did.

Dad and Fred's differences were not only professional. Often I would pick up the phone, hoping the line was free, and put down the receiver moments later with Dad an Fred's arguing voices in my ears. On one occasion, Dad threw down a plot outline exclaimed, "He gives me the most ridiculous characters to work with and expects me to make them realistic!" Cousin Fred probably felt the same frustration about Dad's treatment of his plots.

The whole Ellery Queen series almost didn't get started. In the late '20s Dad and Cousin Fred were advertising men in New York. One day McClure's Magazine announced a writing contest, the prize to go to the best original detective novel submitted. Dad and Fred decided to join the contest. The novel produced, "The Roman Hat Mystery," was a police-detective thriller centering about the murder of a shady character in a packed theater. The case of characters was enormous, the suspects legion, the plot complex; the detectives were Inspector Richard Queen, NYPD, and his pince-nezed, snobbish, intellectual son Ellery. Dad and Fred chose "Ellery Queen" as the name of both detective and author for practical reasons: it was an unusual name and, with it, both main character and writer of "The Roman Hat Mystery" would be easy to remember.

"The Roman Hat" won first prize in the McClure's contest, but then McClure's folded and the new publishers award the prize to somebody else's book. Ellery Queen might never have reached the public had not another publisher happened to see the manuscript, like it and print it. When it proved moderately successful, the cousins decided to write a sequel, "The French Powder Mystery," which opened with a corpse discovered in a department store display window. One book led to another. Finally Dad and Cousin Fred gave up their jobs and devoted themselves entirely to their books.

The hallmarks of the Queen series became clever plots and brilliant detection of Ellery. Ellery did not stay a pince-nezed snob. His chief occupation became that of mystery writer: he solves crimes in the side and uses them as bases for his novels. He is a romantic but not a romancer; earthy but not a playboy. He loves books but is interested in people, too. He is a slob at home, in the apartment he shares with his father, Inspector Queen; yet he is mentally well-disciplined. He can notice a clue as obscure as the number of matches in a matchbook, yet become so engrossed in his writing that he doesn't hear the telephone ring.

In many ways, Ellery is a lot like his creators. The NBC Ellery Queen pilot film captured the "authentic" Ellery's nearly as he has ever been captured; after watching that film last spring, Cousin Fred remarked it was like seeing himself is a young man. Had Dad lived to see the pilot (he died in 1971 of a heart attack), he might have said the same thing about himself. One can imagine the NBC Ellery being cornered at a party by an enthusiastic fan and falling asleep in his chair will she gushes at him; chopping up redwood patio furniture to use in building bird cages; finally succumbing to the charms of some pretty girl but forgetting to formally propose to her until their wedding day. My father actually did all those things.

The Ellery Queen collaboration between dad and Cousin Fred's is dead, but Ellery certainly isn't. The other day I bought a Queen book, "The Player on the Other Side," in an American Army bookstore in Furth, West Germany. I read it that night; it was pretty exciting even though I knew the murderer's identity beforehand. I should really write Cousin Fred fan letter.