How is Ellery described in the novel, The French Powder Mystery?

In the preface to The French Powder Mystery, the reader learns that Ellery, along with his wife, son, and father, Inspector Richard Queen, retired member of the New York Police Department, is now living in a tiny mountain home in Italy, having given up his old profession. (Ellery's wife and son mysteriously disappear in subsequent works.) The novel itself goes back to the time when Ellery and his father lived together in a West 87th Street apartment in New York City, "a veritable fairyland of easy bachelordom." Ellery, a Harvard graduate, places great store in the values of the past and has an independent income which allows him the opportunity to pursue a dilettante's study of culture. Because he is given to wearing smoking jackets and a pince-nez, carrying a walking stick, and speaking abstrusely, many commentators regard Queen as a snobbish prig, especially in the early works. Yet rigorously analytical and emotionally detached, Ellery is capable of penetrating mysteries that all others find beyond comprehension.