Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - January/February 2025

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The January/February 2025 issue marks not only our time to celebrate the winter holidays, honor Sherlock Holmes’s birthday, and ring in the new year, but it is also EQMM’s 1,000th issue! And we offer plenty over which to toast in each category, such as “No Title, No Clout” by Marcelle Dubé, which takes place around a winter festival in the Yukon; “The Greek Interpreter,” part of Terence Faherty’s Sherlockian parody series, and “The Ellery Queen Job” by Peter Lovesey, set in the real EQMM office of the 1980s. With stories by Joyce Carol Oates (“Swiss Army Knife”) and Charlaine Harris (“The One That Got Away”), this issue would make the perfect gift for any reader.
In a redemptory tone appropriate for the new year, a washed-up boxer faces a new challenge in “Going the Distance” by David Bart (from the Black Mask Department); a man considers the inequity in his childhood friendship in “Winter Visit” by Joseph Goodrich; two from a houseless encampment target by violence find power and safety; in Andrew Welsh-Huggins’s “So South It Was”; and a stifled young woman sets off for something better in “As You See the World” by Paul Ryan O’Connor.
Holiday travel? Well, keep in mind the complications involved, as in the clever “Baggage” by Rick Marcou from the Department of short stories and the emotionally evocative “Swim At Your Own Risk” by Nancy Novick, in which a young boy hopes for a safe turnout for some vacation friends. Speaking of complications, the investigations here have plenty, especially in “The Wages of Sin” by François Bloemhof from the Passport to Crime Department, “Splash” by Mat Coward about a contractor with an unusual profession, “The Scarlatti Skip” by Richard Helms, which involves a woman accused of killing her husband for an unusual reason, and “Death of a Copperhead” by R.T. Raichev, a new entry in the Antonia Darcy and Major Payne series.