The September/October 2016 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine is the one picked to be the 75th anniversary issue in the year-long celebration of the publication’s staying power and popularity. The precise date of the first issue in 1941 is unknown, but it was fall, in a rather bleak time in history, with World War II raging and uncertainty everywhere. Three-quarters of a century later, EQMM still challenges and entertains!
Betty Fedora, by contrast, is a new mystery/crime publication, dubbed “kickass women in crime fiction.” Issue 3 arrived recently and contains a story of mine, “Breadcrumbs,” with the kickass woman in question a Michigan state trooper hoping to protect a young woman hiding from her abusive husband. She fears he’s tracked her down.
Here are some of my favorite stories from these two magazines—writers I hope to read more from:
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Linda Barnes’s EQMM story, “The Way They Do It in Boston” has great energy and atmosphere. She’s the author of 17 novels and has collected numerous award nominations.
- “The Specialty of the House” by Stanley Ellin—his first published story—is reprinted from the 1948 issue of EQMM. Ellin was a novelist whose books were adapted for the screen, big and small. He was foremost a master of the short story, and this is “one of the most famous crime stories ever published.”
- In this issue, perennial EQMM reader favorite (mine, too!) Dave Zeltserman’s a.i. assistant Archie helps not his detective Julius Katz this time, but Katz’s sister Julia elude a determined assassin.
- Preston Lang’s Betty Fedora story, “The Sign,” is a tale of double-double-crosses, launched by a decades-old sign in a seedy Manhattan bar that reads “Hardtack Coghlan doesn’t pay for a drink.” Has the real Hardtack finally walked in?
- Office speculation runs high about the true identity of dishy Rudy in the Louisa Barnes story, “Her Colours.” Rudy, she says, had “a gift for insubstantiality.” While the women fixated on him, was there really a spy in their midst?
- Colleen Quinn’s story poses Betty Fedora readers an intriguing problem. In “The Game of Six Brothers,” when the groomsmen at a wedding discover one of the bridesmaids is a private investigator, they challenge her to figure out which of them is a murderer. And she can ask each of them only one very important question.
Read and enjoy!