"The Three Scratches" is a radio play written by the collaborative duo Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who together used the pseudonym Ellery Queen. It was originally broadcast on December 17, 1939, as part of the CBS radio series "The Adventures of Ellery Queen." The story features the titular amateur detective, a mystery writer who assists his father, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Department, in solving baffling crimes through pure deductive reasoning.
The play is a classic locked-room-style mystery, a format for which the Ellery Queen stories were particularly celebrated. In the narrative, Ellery Queen is called upon to investigate a perplexing death where the only clues are three mysterious scratches found near the body. The plot unfolds with the series' signature style, presenting all the clues to the audience and challenging them to solve the puzzle before the detective reveals the solution. The radio series was notable for featuring a guest "armchair detective" each week who would attempt to solve the crime alongside the fictional sleuth.
As a piece of the larger Ellery Queen canon, "The Three Scratches" represents the character's successful transition from the page to the airwaves. The radio program, which began in 1939, was instrumental in cementing Ellery Queen's place in American popular culture, reaching a nationwide audience and further popularizing the fair-play mystery format. The play was later adapted into a film, demonstrating the cross-media appeal of the detective character during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
