Short Crime Fiction – March Hare Edition

For a recent Chicago jaunt, my suitcase held short story magazines not getting read in the flurry of daily life. Since the temperature in my daughter’s house was 63 degrees (the furnace repair man threw in the towel and refused to charge anything), my preferred keep-warm strategy was to wrap myself in a comforter with a cup of ginger tea and catch up with what’s hot between the covers of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Mystery Tribune.

Ellery Queen (Nov/Dec 2018)

This issue is a perfect example of the diversity of story types the mystery/crime genre embraces, everything from the echoes of Raymond Chandler and his P.I.’s in Bill Pronzini’s “Smoke Screen,” to John H. Dirckx’s nifty police procedural, “Where the Red Lines Meet,” which every real estate agent should read. Ditto “Open House,” by Reed Johnson.

O.A.Tynan’s “Jenny’s Necklace” and Jehane Sharah’s debut story “The Screening” show people haunted by deaths that took place long ago. The future of crime prevention is secure too, as a couple of feisty kids help resolve some bad situations in Anna Scotti’s entertaining “Krikon the Ghoul Hunter” and Michael Sears’s “The Honest End of Sybil Cooper.”

“Bug Appetit’ by Barb Goffman, nominated for an Agatha Award, offers the author’s trademark comeuppance for characters too clever for their own good! (If you’ve read Barb’s story, you appreciate the Asian insect buffet in the photo. And, if you haven’t, you’ve got a pretty good guess about the connection right now.)

Mystery Tribune (Fall 2018) – Kindle edition available online

I love the mix of stories, essays and photo galleries that make this magazine unique. Naturally, you know you’ll get a good story from Reed Farrel Coleman, who leads off this issue with “The Devil Always Knows.” Joe De Quattro’s “Still Life with Stalin” was one of my favorites here, as were the photos by Philip Kanwischer.

Ellery Queen – March/April 2019 Kindle edition available online

I looked high and low for the Jan/Feb issue, because I wanted to read Art Taylor’s award-nominated story, “English 398: Fiction Workshop,” but that issue is buried somewhere. A pleasure to look forward to. This current issue nevertheless contains some gems.

“Life and Death in T-Shirts” by British author Liza Cody was fun, as was Susan Dunlap’s tables-turning “Aunt Jenna Was a Spy.” Paul D. Marks’s “Fade Out on Bunker Hill” and Robert S. Levinson’s “All About Evie” prove once again that Hollywood is the gift to mystery-writers that keeps on giving. Even though I saw what was coming, I especially enjoyed the Peruvian connection in John Lantigua’s “The Revenge of the Puma.” More great tales than I have room for here!