Calamity Town is a mystery novel by American writers Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay, published in 1942 under the pseudonym of Ellery Queen.

Ellery Queen moves into the small town of Wrightsville, somewhere in New England, in order to get some peace and quiet so that he can write a book.

After many popular mystery novels and a number of movies, the character of Ellery Queen was at this point firmly established.

The Wrightsville novels all take place against the backdrop of that small imaginary New England town, feature some characters that repeat between books, and generally are more character-driven and realistic than the earliest Ellery Queen puzzle mysteries.

... Wrightsville's milieu, people, plot, details, overall framework and everything else about it are fully organic to Queen's own vision, not yanked bodily from any prior source but shaped in part by earlier work...[1]Very intelligently, Dannay and Lee used this change in locale to loosen the structure of their stories.

Ellery leaves Manhattan for "Wrightsville", where he falls in love and gets entangled in various concerns culminating in murder; he is for a time himself a suspect.