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.
Writing in The Times, Marcel Berlins said, "Stanley Ellin is the unsurpassed master of the short story in crime fiction."
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.
"[1][4] 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.
Afterward, Ellin began writing full time while his family lived on his service unemployment allowance and on his wife's editing salary.
[2] Lawrence Block reported, "Ellin was a perfectionist, working slowly and deliberately, producing a page of typescript on a good day.
Ellin died of a heart attack (complications from a stroke)[8] at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, New York, on July 31, 1986.
But in truth even without 'The Specialty of the House' Ellin would be one of the modern masters of the genre, with a reputation built firmly upon novels and some of the most imaginative stories in the mystery-suspense field.
Ellin identifies not only with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and Arthur Conan Doyle but also with Fyodor Dostoevski and William Faulkner, who also dealt with the theme of crime and punishment.
"[3] Art Taylor, a writer of stories for such venues as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and a reviewer for the Washington Post Book World and other periodicals, wrote that "what has given Ellin such lasting renown in the pantheon of short story writers is surely the precision of his plotting: the clockwork accuracy by which each element of a given tale contributes subtly, effortlessly, inexorably toward some crushing plot turn or crisp final image.
and "But suppose…" possibilities, or trying to tie up the loose ends left purposefully dangling, or supplying the emotional responses underplayed by the author, or at the further extreme, having some hefty moral quandaries laid at our doorsteps, as Ellin's "The Moment of Decision" so expertly does.Clarence Petersen of the Chicago Tribune wrote about the reception to Ellin's The Dark Fantastic, which was turned down by eleven publishers before finding a home: The publishers were troubled by the novel's villain, a retired history professor crazed by racism, who plans to atone for a lifetime of "hypocritical" liberalism by blowing up the Brooklyn apartment building he owns, taking his own life and the lives of his black tenants.
[12]Kirkus Reviews wrote of The Blessington Method and Other Strange Tales, "These patently, potently malevolent short stories, in which the strange is kept well within reach of possibility, show Mr. Ellin not only in top form but in the medium in which he is most expert... And the title story and the concluding The Question, which an electrocutioner can no longer avoid, may well take their place alongside of Ellin's long remembered The Specialty of the House.
This "macabre little tale about an unusual restaurant in Manhattan and its lonely patrons"[14] earned the Best First Story Award in the Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine contest of 1948.
"[15] A reviewer for The Guardian said the story displays "both a debt to Edgar Allan Poe and an acute understanding of human nature that is the key to the success of his work.