Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - May 2016

In this issue

We continue our 75th-anniversary year celebration with May 2016, a special All Nations issue. If that sounds familiar to you, it should—EQMM editor Frederic Dannay put together EQMM’s first All Nations issue in August 1948. You can learn more about that issue and the history of EQMM in May’s From the Editor’s Desk feature “From the Four Corners of the World.”

Inside the May 2016 issue you’ll find stories from twelve countries and all continents except Antarctica, by award-winning and internationally celebrated authors and carrying the names of many accomplished translators. We start off with a very special tale from our own archives, the first English translation of any work by Jorge Luis Borges: “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a characteristically labyrinthine mystery translated by Anthony Boucher, originally part of EQMM’s first All Nations issue. Also from Argentina and similarly steeped with scholarly tension is Christian X. Ferdinandus’s “For Strictly Literary Reasons.”

Angolan author João Melo brings us a dark tale of domestic suspense (“Soot”), while tales from Sweden and Belgium revolve around apartment buildings (“An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems” by Helene Tursten and “Garage 27” by De Paepe and Depuydt). And bestselling Swiss author Petra Ivanov’s “For Semira” deals with the aftermath of war and the life of a refugee.

Two puzzles are set at Christmastime, but with very different tones: “The Miracle on Christmas Eve” by Taiwanese writer Szu-Yen Lin is a bright and nostalgic locked-room mystery, of sorts, while “The Cold Night’s Clearing” by Japanese author Osaka Keikichi, is a whodunit with a hauntingly dark solution. An impossible-crime tale from France’s Paul Halter rounds out this classical trio (“The Scarecrow’s Revenge”).