Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - September/October 2022

In dit nummer

EQMM’s September/October issue ushers in autumn with specters of all kinds. In “No Peace for the Wicked” by Martin Edwards, a dead woman hovers around the living to discover her killer. We welcome a lively skeleton to our pages with the EQMM debut of Leigh Perry’s series character Sid in “The Skeleton Rides a Horse,” set amongst fans of a TV Western. Ghosts appear within another fan community (those obsessed with the Black Dahlia), in Paul D. Marks’s “The Wraith of Bunker Hill.” John Dziuban’s “Down the Mine” (Department of First Stories) involves a haunting—or is it an hallucination? Series sleuth Santa Ezerina unravels the mystery of strange lights in the sky in “The Celta Wave Conundrum” by William Burton McCormick, and a mythical creature of the night appears in Jane Jakeman’s “The Edinburg Vampire.”
If you prefer more solid ground, you’ll enjoy “The Hideout” by Bernard Onken (Black Mask department), “Dogs in the Canyon” by Mark Harrison (Department of First Stories), and “Sound Moral Character” by Hal Charles. Being watched isn’t always bad, though, as we find in “The Light on the Lagoon” by Elizabeth Elwood.
In Art Taylor’s “We Are All Strangers Here” and Anne Swardson’s postwar tale “Uncaged,” the POV characters may have figured out the perfect murder, while in “Police Technique” by Pierre Very (Passport to Crime) the culprit only thinks he’s got everyone stumped by the seemingly impossible crime.
Despite doing good, protagonists find danger, as in Twist Phelan’s “The Kindness of Strangers,” the story of two night-clubbing teens; David Dean’s “Deconstruction,” involving construction-site graft; Joseph S. Walker’s “Cleaning Day,” about an interfering aunt; and “Publish or Perish” by Smita Harish Jain, focused on a grab for academic research.
Speaking of academics, who determines the correct pronunciation of a word? Read about a real phonetics dispute that led to murder in Dean Jobb’s column Stranger Than Fiction.