Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - November 2016

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This issue, the penultimate in the 2016 celebration of our 75th anniversary, honors those who have contributed to the mystery-fiction world in areas other than fiction writing: the historians, critics, reviewers, and biographers of our field. We have work from both a former and current president of the U.K’.s Detection Club: acclaimed author and editor Simon Brett (with the wry small-village mystery “The Body in the Bookshop”) and award-winning critic Martin Edwards (with the nonfiction piece “Ellery Queen—and Enthusiasm”). Reviewer, critic, and teacher Art Taylor takes a contemplative tone in his short story “The Great Detective Reflects,” while Ulf Durling, former secretary of the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy, revisits a puzzling old case in a short story for our Passport to Crime department (see “Windfall”).

From Our Archives comes a tale from top critic, Edgar Award winner, and former EQMM reviewer Anthony Boucher (“A Kind of Madness”); learn more about Boucher and other early critics for this magazine in “EQMM’s First Reviewers,” an article by Jon L. Breen, himself an award-winning reviewer who also takes the gavel in this issue’s The Jury Box.

More outstanding fiction comes from cultural anthropologist Meg Opperman (see “Murder Under the Baobab,” another in her Mkama and Lubadsa series) and from Jim Allyn, who fills the Black Mask Department with his poignant tale of childhood friends, now veterans (“The Master of Negwegon).” Multiple award winner Dana Cameron provides a new case in her Anna Hoyt historical series (“An Obliging Cousin”) and Scott Loring Sanders spins a tale about new beginnings in “Frank’s Beach.” Finally, newcomer Cathy Lazere enters the Department of First Stories with the humorous yet dark “Gurus Need Not Apply.”

As Janet Hutchings urges in her From the Editor’s Desk feature, let’s salute the critics—and enjoy some first-rate fiction while we’re at it!