Opera House Square

Opera House Square

Open-Public Park

Claremont Literary Walking Tour - Stop #2

You are in "The Square". It's a square, but it's round. Five streets radiate out from the circle. The National Bank and Town Hall on your left and beyond that the park and Carnegie Library. Behind you the old hotel. Down the main street is the five and dime and the theater. One of the streets leads to the Low Village. You're in Claremont, right? No, you're in Wrightsville. Actually you're in BOTH!. Claremont is Ellery Queen's Wrightsville, the fictitious town in Calamity Town and other Ellery Queen mystery novels and short stories.

Confused? Ellery Queen is a pseudonym created in 1929 by American crime fiction writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee and the name of their main fictional character, a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve baffling murders.

Manfred Lee, used Claremont as the model for Wrightsville in the Ellery Queen novel Calamity Town. Why Claremont? Because Lee had married a former Claremont girl and would visit Claremont at times. Also, their daughter married a boy from Claremont.

In 1959, Manfred Lee attended a meeting of the Claremont Kiwanis Club as a guest speaker and guest of his son-in-law, Bob Steinfield. It was at this meeting that Lee, for the first time, publicly acknowledged that he based Wrightsville on Claremont.