Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - January/February 2021

In this issue

EQMM’s January/February 2021 issue features a dual celebration: our annual Sherlock Holmes tribute and the start of our 80th year. In honor of the latter, we present a special find, a heretofore-unpublished story by Cornell Woolrich (“The Dark Oblivion”)! Our Sherlockian fare shines, including a Holmesian Jury Box and an article by Dean Jobb on Arthur Conan Doyle’s career. In our fiction lineup we have a parody by Terence Faherty (“The Gloria Scott”), a Holmes on the Range tale (“Curious Incidents” by Steve Hockensmith), a whimsical poem by Ruth Berman (“Watson’s Plane”), and a pastiche with ominous overtones from EQMM newcomer Mike Adamson (“In the Shadow of the New”). Josh Pachter returns with another case for the Puzzle Club—and this time, there’s a Sherlockian twist (“The Five Orange Pipes”). Even our Passport to Crime tale fits the bill, as it features a sleuth known as France’s Sherlock Holmes (“The Touffard Affair” by Marcel Aymé).
Bill Pronzini’s Quincannon and Carpenter take on a case that would have made the Great Detective proud in “Pick Up Sticks,” and we ring in the New Year with warnings from Tom Tolnay (“A Dangerous Encounter”) and Ken Linn (“Stray”). The turning of the calendar brings new things for many fictional characters—like a new course of study at a tony school in “No Legacy So Rich” by Anna Scotti, untraditional instruction in “Boo Radley College Prep” by Karen Harrington, and a new nanny in Sheila Kohler’s “The Changing Room.” But new roles can bring danger (see Nick Mamatas’s mob-related “Pink Squirrel,” Rob Osler’s “Analogue,” and Barb Goffman’s “That Poor Woman,” in which someone decides to take the law into her own hands).
Money-making ventures cause malevolent interactions in Scott Loring Sanders’s “The Lemonade Stand,” “The Two Gentlemen Guests” by Susan Dunlap, and Jeff Soloway’s court-translator drama “The Interpreter and the Killer.”