The Great Geek Manual

Last week, I was looking for something to watch online when I stumbled onto an old mystery series called Ellery Queen (IMDB) from 1975. I’m a huge fan of mystery series – even the hokey old ones.

Having already seen just about every incarnation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series, I found the series to be fairly predictable, and I was about to find something else to watch when it struck me.

Ellery Queen is astonishingly similar to the current ABC series Castle. I don’t mean similar in the way every Christie derivative is similar to every other derivative. I mean that Castle could damn well be an out-and-out remake of Ellery Queen.

First off, there’s the name. “Richard Castle” and “Ellery Queen” are both allusions to the game of chess, as is “Jameson Rook,” the pseudonym Castle uses in the series. This, in itself, seems to be an homage and acknowledgment on the part of Castle to the earlier series.

Then, there’s the similarity in the lead characters. Both of the Queen and Castle character are mystery novelists who help the New York City police solve homicides in their respective series. Queen is comically absent-minded, while Castle is comically roguish. Queen lives with his father. Castle lives with his mother.

Queen, who assists his father in solving cases, wants nothing to do with real crimes, and in a running joke, he is constantly trying to avoid being dragged into his father’s cases. Castle, on the other hand, dogs Detective Kate Beckett at every turn, worming his way onto her case by virtue of his friendship with the Mayor despite her constant resistance to his presence throughout season one. You would have to watch an episode of the older series to understand what I mean, but the two characters’ foibles are so completely polar opposite that they’re nearly identical.

Though Queen’s aged father and Castle’s grudging partner are complete opposites in the looks department, both characters share the same stock response to their leading man – constant exasperation. Queen is always late, always distracted, and always loosing things. Castle, on the other hand, is always underfoot, always immature, and always flirting.

The similarities don’t end with the characters, though. In both cases, there are real books that have been published and marketed as if they were written by the characters themselves. Richard Castle is credited with writing the recently released Heat Wave, while Ellery Queen is the pseudonym famously used by Daniel Nathan and Manford Lepofsky for over forty years. And that’s not even the most telling part. Both television series include an episode that prominently features the real books written by their fictional lead character.

So how about it? Has anyone heard any reference to the works of Ellery Queen made by the creators of Castle in an interview? Is anyone aware of a business connection between the two productions? Is this a deliberate imitation or have the tropes and plot devices of murder mysteries become SO tired and cliche that a resemblance is inevitable?

I think I might e-mail an inquiry to find out.