Ellery Queen Mysteries

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I used to read the mystery novels that featured Ellery Queen and his father, Inspector Queen, but something about them has always bothered me and I have always wondered about it. In the early Ellery Queen mystery novels, there was always a forward that was purportedly written by a news reporter who knew the Queens. In the forward, he would say that the mystery you were reading was based on a case that the Queens had worked on and that he was writing about because Inspector Queen had retired from the police force and he and Ellery had moved to Italy where Ellery had married and had a son. The reason this always bothered me is because he would date the entry and, as I said, these were the early novels that I think were back in about the 1930s. But the Ellery Queen novels continued to be written for many years and "changed with the times" so that the ones written in the 1960s, for example, purportedly took place in the 1960s -- with no further reference to any wife or son or earthquake that swallowed them up and led to Ellery's return to the U.S. Did anyone else ever notice this? Or was there some explanation given in a novel that I missed reading? Or was this another example of literary license and I am merely revealing my obsessive compulsive tendencies?