One of the most exciting developments of 2024 at Dell Magazines is the launch of a new podcast series entitled The Mystery Hour, presented by popular podcaster Rabia Chaudry and featuring stories from EQMM and AHMM. The readings are flawless and engrossing, and each episode ends with Rabia Chaudry sharing, briefly, her knowledge of some true-crime cases that the fictional story brings to mind. The series launched yesterday with “A Small Mercy” by Alice Hatcher, first published in EQMM’s November/December 2023 issue. Listen to this first episode and I guarantee you’ll be hooked. The following post by EQMM and AHMM Senior Managing Editor Jackie Sherbow reveals how the series came about. Jackie was instrumental in finding, managing, and shaping the project!  —Janet Hutchings

My friends think I’m slightly unhinged: I’m one of those people who are always listening to a true-crime podcast, even when falling asleep. This, after editing mystery stories all day. So when author and friend of EQMM Sarah Weinman reached out to put me in touch with acclaimed podcaster Rabia Chaudry, I was a bit starstruck, and certainly delighted to hear that she has been a lifelong fan of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. And she had a proposal for us.

Rabia is an attorney, advocate, and author of the New York Times best-selling book Adnan’s Story as well as the executive producer of a four-part HBO documentary series The Case Against Adnan Syed. Rabia is also coproducer and cohost of the podcasts The 45th, The Hidden Djinn, Nighty Night, and Undisclosed. For those unfamiliar with the Adnan Syed case, you may remember it from the groundbreaking 2014 podcast Serial. Rabia and the Undisclosed team were a major force in reversing the subsequent public and legal biases against Adnan Syed, leading to his eventual evidence-based exoneration. Several of her other podcasts feature her as a narrative fiction storyteller.

And she was e-mailing me. And to my surprise she was a bit starstruck too, due to her admiration of the magazines. She wanted to do a storytelling podcast with stories from the Dell mystery magazines. We were thrilled.

Many of you know that we have had a podcast series for many years; many of you have even contributed your stories to it. Our podcasts had a DIY charm: None of us are audio engineers, and we worked with free software and amateur recording devices (often, these days, our smartphones). Here was a chance to have a professionally produced podcast on a podcasting network with all the networks and support that entails.

It has been an enlightening learning process for us at Dell, but thanks to the help of our web, digital, marketing, and contracts departments (Abigail Browning, Carol Demont, Joy Brienza, and Darcy Bearman)‑plus Rabia and the folks at Rhapsody Voices‑we the editors of EQMM and AHMM were able to navigate through this process. Thanks to Rabia’s experience in the podcasting realm, The Mystery Hour has been taken aboard by the leading content network Rhapsody Voices.

We’re proud to share that the atmospheric and suspenseful pilot episode came out yesterday and that new episodes will come out on subsequent Wednesdays. Each story is one of the high-quality tales readers love from the pages of EQMM and AHMM.

You’ll be able to subscribe to The Mystery Hour wherever you get your podcasts, and you’ll also find updates on the “Podcasts” section of our website (please see links to Apple and Spotify as well as our podcast page below). We hope you’ll find these suspenseful and intriguing stories, read with panache by Rabia, riveting midweek listening. (Just be careful if you’re listening before bed!)

Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mystery-hour/id1756397106

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2I59pUzrU1ZrXUCGXMkrkD?si=4db130e923dd42ac

Podcasts https://www.elleryqueenmysterymagazine.com/the-crime-scene/podcasts/