SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

It’s my pleasure this week to herald the return of our photo gallery of events surrounding the Edgar Allan Poe Awards in New York City and the Malice Domestic convention in Bethesda, Maryland! The festivities all kicked off for the Dell Mystery Magazines with our pre-Edgars party, at which it’s been our  custom for many years to present the EQMM Readers Awards. The Readers Awards presentation had to be done virtually in 2020 and 2021. In 2022, we held an in-person gathering, but it was a scaled-down celebration, with few guests attending from out of town and only two of the year’s four Readers Award winners present. As you’ll see from the photos below, last week’s party filled the house (which was, as in several previous years, the library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, on 44th Street in Manhattan). Attendees included third-place Readers Award winner Anna Scotti, who flew in from California to receive her scroll for “Schrödinger, Cat” (EQMM March/April 2022); Doug Allyn, whom we hadn’t seen since our 2019 pre-Edgars party, who took second-place honors for “Blind Baseball” (EQMM May/June 2022);  and W. Edward Blain, who captured readers’ votes with his pandemic-inspired story “The Secret Sharer” (EQMM July/August 2022), which took first place from a field of more than a hundred stories published in the magazine in 2022.

Also with us at our pre-Edgars party was this year’s winner of the Robert L. Fish Award for best short story by a new American author, Mark Harrison, who took that prize with his September/October 2022 EQMM story “Dogs in the Canyon.” Mark’s debut came under the banner of EQMM’s Department of First Stories. Two other Department of First Stories “graduates” also made their mark at this year’s Edgars—albeit in categories other than the short story. Martin Edwards, who got his start in EQMM in 1991, won the Edgar for best critical/biographical work for The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, and Eli Cranor, whose Department of First Stories debut was just last year, took home the Edgar this year for best first novel for Don’t Know Tough.

Three of this year’s Edgar-nominated stories—those by Gregory Fallis, William Burton McCormick, and Charles John Harper—came from the pages of our sister publication, AHMM. All three of those names will be very familiar to EQMM readers, for all three authors have also had stories published in EQMM on multiple occasions. Bill and Charlie were with us for the party and the subsequent banquet, making it feel all the more like old times. Greg—who won the Edgar for “Red Flag” (AHMM March/April 2022)!—was, unfortunately, unable to attend.

As you scroll through the photos below, you’ll see a few more authors who’ve been nominated for awards this year, including Carol Goodman, a nominee for this year’s Mary Higgins Clark Award (and someone who will be making her EQMM debut this fall) and Rob Osler, last year’s Robert L. Fish Award winner for his debut EQMM story and a nominee this year for the Agatha Award for best first novel.

On our way from our party to the Edgar Awards banquet, the Dell Mystery Magazines staff, accompanied by John Landrigan and Doug and Eve Allyn, made a literary stop. The Algonquin Hotel, meeting place of the famous Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, is right down the street from our party venue. Wanting to kill some time before the banquet and have a quiet place to chat, we claimed a large round table (the only one of its kind) in that hotel’s illustrious lobby. Whether it was the same round table at which literary figures such as Dorothy Parker and Harold Ross (of the New Yorker) lunched together each day for a decade, exchanging witticisms and collaborating on projects, I don’t know. It’s unlikely, of course, a hundred years having passed. What I do know is that Dorothy Parker had a special connection to EQMM. She was known to be a regular reader, and when I began my tenure at EQMM I inherited some papers I can no longer find that contained quotes about the magazine from various literary luminaries. Dorothy Parker’s contribution—no doubt phrased more eloquently—was something like: “The only thing that could make EQMM better would be for it to come out more often.” A comment that I’m sure warmed the heart of then-editor Fred Dannay.

Once the Edgars were over, many of us were on our way to the Malice Domestic convention. For me and at least one EQMM author, Rob Osler, that meant the 5:30 A.M. train to Washington, D.C. We arrived to drenching rain, but in good time. I was able to make a breakfast appointment with an author who goes way back with EQMM, one of the convention’s guests of honor, Ann Cleeves; Rob tells me he made the deadline for Malice’s “speed dating” event, at which authors move from table to table, with two minutes in each spot in which to convince readers to try their work.

After a four-year absence from Malice, I had the pleasure this year of reconnecting with some old friends and making some new ones: Art Taylor and Tara Laskowski, Stacy Woodson, and our Blog Bytes columnist Kristopher Zgorski joined me for lunch, along with a bright new star on the mystery scene, Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier.  At dinner Friday night I caught up on the news of EQMM contributor Dana Cameron and previous EQMM Readers Award winner and this year’s Malice Domestic toastmaster, Barb Goffman, as well as meeting for the first time Smita Harish Jain, a current nominee for the ITW Thriller Award for her September/October 2022 EQMM story “Publish or Perish.”

For me, Malice came to an end on Saturday morning. I needed to get back to New York, but not before breakfasting with EQMM’s invaluable translator Josh Pachter and his wife Laurie, our esteemed Jury Box columnist (and translator!) Steve Steinbock, and authors Gigi Pandian, James Lincoln Warren, and Michael Bracken.

Of course, I haven’t been able to mention here all the many wonderful writers and mystery lovers I ran into while at the Edgars and in Bethesda. You’ll spot some of them in the photos. An important event I had to miss was Saturday’s short-story panel (photo below contributed by Josh Pachter), but I heard it had a big audience and generated lots of interest. That’s a good sign for our magazines and for short-story lovers!—Janet Hutchings 

Arthur Vidro publishes the thrice-yearly journal Old-Time Detection, which explores mystery fiction of the past. He has special expertise in the works of Ellery Queen, and was one of the winners of EQMM’s 80th Anniversary Trivia Contest. Old-Time Detection will be reprinting a series of early author and editor interviews from EQMM beginning this summer. Be sure not to miss them if you have an interest in the history of our genre. For this post, Arthur discusses the work of a great but underappreciated author from mystery’s golden age: C. Daly King.—Janet Hutchings

If not for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, some wonderful detective fiction would never have been written.

Every story in the first issue of EQMM  (Fall 1941) was a reprint. Great stories, but in the long run the magazine would need new stories from skilled practitioners.

Part of the solution was to bring lapsed mystery writers back into the field. One such writer was C. Daly King (1895-1963).

By the way, the “C” stood for Charles, which never appeared in his byline. To scholars, he is King or Daly King. 

Fred Dannay (the half of the Ellery Queen team leading the then-new EQMM project) was a big fan of Daly King’s sole short-story volume, The Curious Mr. Tarrant. The original edition was then, and remains today, a very scarce book. It was published in 1935 by Collins in London.

Though Daly King was an American, the book was not published in America until a Dover trade paperback edition in 1977.

Simply to have Daly King’s book in the 1940s was an achievement.

Daly King’s short story collection—especially in dust jacket—simply couldn’t be found during the author’s lifetime.  Even now, only one copy of the 1935 edition in dust jacket is known.  It was inscribed in 1940 by the author: “For the ‘Queens’—may they continue to rescue us from the ever-recurring menaces of crime. C. Daly King” and resides in the Ellery Queen collection at the Humanities Research Center in the Austin branch of the University of Texas.

Eventually Queen would compile Queen’s Quorum, which lists and describes the greatest, or most important, short mystery fiction books of all time. The list spans 1845 to 1967 (from Edgar Allan Poe to Harry Kemelman) and lists 125 books.  One of those books is The Curious Mr. Tarrant—which still had not been published in the USA.

Queen’s Quorum says the eight tales in The Curious Mr. Tarrant “are in many ways the most imaginative detective short stories of our time.”

The outstanding critic Anthony Boucher called Daly King “one of the most original, inventive, and underrated detective writers of the golden thirties. His novels of detection are elaborate and extraordinary.”

In the words of scholar Charles Shibuk, “King’s major strength is his ability to create plots. At his best, he can concoct puzzles that are as baffling and bizarre as those created by Queen and Carr, with all the deviousness of Christie.”

But by the time EQMM launched in 1941, Daly King had stopped writing fiction.  His six detective novels were published from 1932 through 1940—and, agonizingly, two of those six novels (Obelists en Route and Careless Corpse) still have not been published in the United States.

EQMM got into the Daly King act in 1944, reprinting “The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem” in its May issue. This was not the story’s first reprinting.  It had appeared in the 1936 anthology Tales of Detection, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers.

In its September 1944 issue, EQMM published a new Daly King mystery.  The story’s introduction by Fred Dannay tells us, “We asked C. Daly King to write a brand-new Trevis Tarrant adventure-in-deduction especially for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.”

At the time, Daly King was conducting research at Yale University, where he was working toward his Ph.D in psychology (awarded to him in 1946) with an electromagnetic study of sleep.  Despite his workload, King answered Queen’s call.

Daly King wrote “The Episode of the Little Girl Who Wasn’t There,” which Dannay retitled “Lost Star.” In the story, Tarrant solves a “sealed room” puzzle from 3,000 miles away—the only time Tarrant acted in the role of pure armchair detective.

Dannay ended his introduction to “Lost Star” by calling it “something of a tour de force—the kind of story that demands careful reading.  So don’t bolt it; chew on it slowly.  In many ways it’s an object lesson in point-counter-point ingenuity.”

The December 1946 EQMM gave us another new Tarrant story, “The Episode of the Sinister Inventor.” Its introduction mentions a John Dickson Carr project in progress, an anthology (which never got published) called The Ten Best Detective Novels, in which, in the words of Dannay, Carr “nominated a select circle of modern American murdermongers; he included S.S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, and Anthony Abbot, and went on to say that ‘in the front rank, or very close to it, [are] Clayton Rawson and C. Daly King.’”

The November 1947 issue of EQMM reprinted a second tale from The Curious Mr. Tarrant, “The Episode of the Tangible Illusion.”

The next new Tarrant tale—though I don’t know when it was written—appeared in the February 1951 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which was co-edited by Anthony Boucher.

King’s fourth and final new Tarrant tale appeared in the April 1979 EQMM. Fred Dannay was still editing the magazine but he no longer routinely wrote lengthy introductions. But for this story, Dannay made an exception and gave us a full-page introduction, which concluded with:

“We think you will find a pleasant nostalgia in this authentic reminder of ‘the good old days’ —the days when private detectives were brilliant, if not omniscient, when cases were complex and ingenious, when the creators strove for originality of concept, when clues were subtle and legitimate but always fair to the reader, when the author and reader played a game of wits, the author trying to win by achieving a surprise solution—when ‘The Great Detectives’ of The Golden Age ‘solved the unsolvable’” . . .

That outstanding description by Dannay of Golden Age fiction has always thrilled me. Wish I could have lived through those days.

It took until 2003, but finally all twelve Trevis Tarrant stories were collected  (by Crippen & Landru) and published as The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant. Remember, the final four tales would never have been written but for the existence and encouragement of EQMM.

The book’s introduction, penned by Edward D. Hoch, began with Ed’s fantasy of publishing a series of mystery reprints devoted to locked rooms and impossible crimes.  The three short story collections Ed Hoch would select: The Department of Queer Complaints by Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr), The Incredulity of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton, and The Curious Mr. Tarrant by C. Daly King.

Which Tarrant story is the best?  Well, that’s a  matter of opinion. Hoch wrote that “The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem” is considered by many critics as the best of the tales but added: “My own favorite from the original collection of bizarre wonders, by a narrow margin, is probably ‘The Episode of Torment IV,’ a baffling tale that parallels the mystery of the Mary Celeste on a smaller scale.”

Beyond his one story collection, Daly King wrote six mystery novels, all  starring Michael Lord, affiliated with the New York City police. They are:

Obelists at Sea (1932)

Obelists en Route (1934)

Obelists Fly High (1935)

Careless Corpse (1937)

Arrogant Alibi (1939)

Bermuda Burial (1940)

In his novels, Daly King freely drew upon his wealth of knowledge in psychology, and probably had a ton of fun naming his characters. In Obelists at Sea, he gives us four psychologists, each with his own specialty in the field: Dr. Frank B. Hayvier (conditioning), Dr. Malcolm Plechs (inferiorities), Professor Knott Coe Mittle (middle grounding), and Dr. Love Rees Pons (dominance).  Read those names aloud, slowly.

Obelists Fly High (his most acclaimed and most reprinted novel) gives us Dr. Cutter, a surgeon; Cutter’s seductive niece, Fonda Mann; her unfeminine sister Isa Mann; a pilot named “Happy” Lannings; and a clergyman named Reverend Manly Bellowes. Other Daly King stories brought us film star Gloria Glammeris and a psychiatrist named Usall Backenforth (sounds like a Marx Brothers movie character who should be played by Groucho).

Obelists en Route gives us a very efficient secretary called Entwerk. His full name is Xavier Lewis Entwerk. Which can be reduced to X.L. Entwerk. (Excellent work, get it?)

Each of Daly King’s three Obelists novels contains in the back of the book a Clue Finder, which indexes all the clues that could have pointed an alert reader to the correct solution.  Now that’s fair play. His final three novels do not contain a Clue Finder.

Plus, Daly King wrote five books on psychology:

Beyond Behaviorism (1927)

Integrative Psychology (1931)

The Psychology Of Consciousness (1932)

The Oregean Vision (1951)

The States of Human Consciousness (1964)

To be precise, Daly King was one of three co-authors on Integrative Psychology.  The other two were W.M. Marston and Elizabeth H. Marston. Mr. and Mrs. Marston are credited as having invented an early prototype of the lie detector.

Daly King’s friendship with the Marstons was such that he dedicated Obelists en Route to William Moulton Marston.

Anyone recognize that name? Yes, Daly King was a friend and colleague of the man who would go on to create perhaps the most famous female fictional character ever: Wonder Woman.

Tomorrow, April 21, 2023, is the centenary of the birth of John Mortimer, the British barrister, novelist, dramatist, and short story writer who created the beloved fictional character Horace Rumpole, a London barrister who defends underdogs against criminal charges and solves crimes along the way. Sixteen of the Rumpole stories appeared in EQMM in first U.S. publication, and, of course, most mystery fans will have seen the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey. In celebration of the John Mortimer centenary, the following post by essayist and short story writer Kevin Mims explores some similarities between Rumpole and another iconic mystery character, Richard Levinson and William Link’s Columbo. In the latter we find another connection to EQMM, for Levinson and Link got their start in EQMM’s Department of First Stories while still teenagers.   —Janet Hutchings

John Mortimer, creator of the immortal fictional barrister Horace Rumpole (a.k.a. Rumpole of the Bailey), was born one hundred years ago this month. I don’t know if he ever acknowledged it, but Mortimer, when he created Rumpole, almost certainly must have been inspired, in part, by Columbo, the American TV series starring Peter Falk. The two programs—and their main characters—have a lot in common, even though Columbo was committed to putting people in jail and Rumpole to keeping them out. Both series debuted in the 1970s, but have roots that go back even farther. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mortimer wrote a variety of plays—for the stage and for British television—that featured barristers who could be considered prototypes for the Rumpole character. Likewise, Richard Levinson and Willam Link, the two high school best friends who created Columbo, wrote several stage and television plays in the 1950s and 1960s featuring detectives who were embryonic versions of Columbo.

Rumpole himself first appeared in a standalone television play on a BBC anthology series called Play For Today. Columbo first appeared in a standalone TV drama written for an American anthology series called The Chevy Mystery Show. That first Columbo mystery starred Bert Freed and was titled “Enough Rope.” It was adapted from a story that Levinson and Link had previously published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine under the title “Dear Corpus Delecti.” (Their first published short story, “Whistle While You Work,” appeared in the November 1954 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.)

The creators of both Rumpole and Columbo acknowledged G.K. Chesterton’s fictional cleric Father Brown as a partial inspiration. Both Columbo and Rumpole are cigar-smoking slobs. Both characters have working-class origins and are often underestimated by their social superiors. The wives of both men play an important part in their lives (although Columbo’s is never seen). Though Rumpole pretends to be terrified of Hilda, their marriage, like the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Columbo, seems to be rock solid and longstanding. Rumpole of the Bailey ran for seven seasons and comprised a total of 44 episodes. The original Columbo series, which ran as part of a wheel program called The NBC Mystery Movie, ran for seven seasons and 45 episodes. After a twelve-year absence from the airwaves, the series was rebooted on ABC Television in 1989, but the episodes produced for ABC are not considered canonical, or “classic,” episodes by most diehard fans.

The last canonical episode of Columbo was first broadcast on May 13, 1978, just about a month after the Rumpole of the Bailey TV series debuted on April 3, 1978. Peter Falk, who played Columbo, lost his right eye as a child and wore a glass eye as a replacement. Leo McKern, who played Rumpole, lost his left eye as a teenager, and wore a glass eye as a replacement. When NBC ordered a pilot episode for the series, Columbo’s creators wanted Bing Crosby to play the role, but he turned it down. Falk was a second choice. Likewise, John Mortimer was at first disappointed by the selection of McKern to play Rumpole. He would have preferred either Michael Holdern or Alastair Sim. As noted, Richard Levinson and William Link got their start as mystery writers by selling stories to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the 1950s. John Mortimer’s Rumpole short stories first appeared in print in America in the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The August, 1989, issue of EQMM features Peter Falk as Columbo on the cover and a Rumpole story by John Mortimer inside. Just as Columbo was reincarnated by ABC TV years after the demise of the original series, BBC Radio revived Rumpole in 2003 and has since produced dozens of episodes featuring a variety of actors in the lead role, including Benedict Cumberbatch.

The big difference between the two franchises is that Columbo was almost entirely a television phenomenon. In the 1970s, some Columbo episodes were novelized by an assortment of hired hands, but those books are of negligible literary value. In the 1990s, author William Harrington wrote a series of original Columbo novels for Forge Books. These aren’t bad, but Harrington’s writing has nothing like Mortimer’s wit and style. And in 2010, William Link (Levinson died in 1987) produced a slim volume of Columbo short stories. These deftly capture Columbo’s voice and personality, but the stories lack the complexity and polish of the classic TV episodes. If somehow every TV episode of Columbo were to vanish tomorrow, Columbo would essentially cease to exist. None of the books are of any lasting value.

But the same is not true of Rumpole. In fact, if forced to choose, most Rumpole fans would probably opt to preserve the written record rather than the TV episodes. This makes perfect sense for a number of reasons. All of the TV episodes have been converted into prose works, but not all of the written adventures of Rumpole have been adapted for television. Forty-four of Rumpole’s cases were produced for television. The written record is much richer. Thirty of Mortimer’s Rumpole adventures, adding up to more than 1,400 pages of material, were never adapted for TV (though some were adapted for radio). Fully forty percent of Rumpole’s adventures would be lost if all that remained were the TV episodes.

What’s more, Rumpole belongs to Mortimer in a way that Columbo never really belonged to Levinson and Link. After writing the pilot episode for Columbo (“Prescription: Murder”) and the series’ fourth episode (“Death Lends a Hand”), Levinson and Link never wrote another script for Columbo’s classic era (although they shared a story credit on five other episodes). What’s more, much of what made Columbo Columbo was contributed by other people. It was Peter Falk himself who came up with the idea that Columbo should wear a raincoat every day despite living in sunny Los Angeles (he even supplied the coat from his own wardrobe). It was Falk who chose Columbo’s iconic (and wretchedly maintained) automobile, a Peugeot 403 Cabriolet, and he also provided Columbo with his unofficial theme song, the children’s tune “This Old Man,”which he would occasionally hum while looking through his notes or waiting for someone to answer their phone. It was writer Steven Bochco who gave Columbo his canine sidekick, a basset hound referred to only as “Dog,” who made more appearances on Columbo than any human guest star.

But virtually everything that made Rumpole Rumpole came from the mind of John Mortimer. Levinson and Link had never been Los Angeles homicide detectives, but Mortimer had been a barrister who had tried numerous criminal cases in court, and he knew that milieu inside and out. Had Mortimer given up his daily involvement with the Rumpole series after one season, which Levinson and Link did with Columbo, it is difficult to imagine the program even surviving. But even if it had survived, it would certainly have been a much poorer program. Columbo, on the other hand, continued to improve even after Levinson and Link stepped back from active involvement (most fans consider seasons three and four to be the program’s high points). Mortimer never gave up his duties on Rumpole. He wrote every single episode of the TV series, alone and without a leader (inside joke). All of the stories and all of the scripts were his. All of the subsequent story collections and novels were written by Mortimer. In a way, his achievement is even more impressive than what Arthur Conan Doyle achieved with his Sherlock Holmes character. Doyle wrote fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories and four novels, for a total of sixty adventures. It took him forty years to produce them all. Mortimer wrote seventy Rumpole stories and four novels, for a total of seventy-four adventures. Forty-four of those adventures he also wrote TV scripts for. It took him thirty-two years to produce all that work. Later, when the TV show was made available on DVD, he also provided brief on-screen introductions to each of the episodes (he also occasionally appeared as a background character in the episodes). Few writers have ever been as committed to a fictional character as Mortimer was to Rumpole. He had just begun a fifth Rumpole novel, Rumpole and the Brave New World, when he died in January of 2009.

As the one hundredth anniversary of his birth approaches, we should give thanks to John Mortimer for creating one of the greatest characters in all of crime fiction. But we should probably also reserve a tiny bit of gratitude for Levinson and Link as well. Columbo showed television producers of the 1970s that a married, cigar-chomping slob could carry a mystery series just so long as he was witty, likable, and had an uncanny knack for ferreting out the truth.

Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales is a culture critic, short-story writer, and essayist who has written for The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and other publications. His fiction has appeared in several anthologies. His first story for EQMM, “The Life and Times of Big Poppa,” will appear in the Black Mask department of our May/June 2023 issue (on sale April 18). In this post he shares some insights into the work of filmmaker Abel Ferrara and reveals how two of Ferrara’s movies influenced his own work.  —Janet Hutchings

In the early 1990s, the two New York City films that had the most effect on me as a writer of noir/crime stories was Abel Ferrara’s double dose of big city sleaze King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992). While I had already discovered the pulp-lit of Chester Himes, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, and Jim Thompson, the holy quartet of streetwise scribes who led me to the path of noir, Ferrara brought that sensibility to life on screen. Two decades later when I began writing crime fiction, it was those two films that inspired me. 

A native New Yorker, born in the Bronx in 1951, Abel Ferrara was a hard knock kind of guy whose films had the raw, rough, and unpredictable energy of the city itself. Like my favorite Bronx Boys including writer Jerome Charyn, director Stanley Kubrick, comic book artist George Perez, and rapper KRS-One, he is a no bullshit kind of guy with vision that often borders on genius.

Ferrara started making movies in the early 1980s beginning with the B-movies Ms.45, China Girl, and Fear City, but it wasn’t until 1990 that I was introduced to his bleak worldview and neo-noir sensibilities through my friend (and future noir novelist) Jerry Rodriguez, who invited me to see King of New York with him in Times Square. After staring at the poster outside the Lowes Astor Plaza, where a block away hookers walked the street and three-card monte cats ripped off tourists, I wandered into the movie house not really knowing what to expect.

Sitting amongst a typical rowdy crowd who screamed at the screen and smoked weed openly, it didn’t take long after the movie began for me to block out the distractions and become absorbed by Ferrara’s dangerous visions of thug life in our hometown. Released at a time when “the drug game,” primarily crack and powdered cocaine, ruled the streets of the city, having hit hard my own Harlem neighborhood, Ferrara’s film introduced us to recently released kingpin Frank White (Christopher Walken) and his gang of mostly black henchman led by the energetic, and slightly crazy, Jimmy Jump.

Played with ghetto swagger by Larry (Lawrence) Fishburne, the crew was determined to take over the cocaine trade as well as giving back to the hood by building a state-of-the-art hospital in Brooklyn. Never one to do any acting halfway, Walken too was at his best as Frank White. Whether he was talking shit, gazing out of the window in his Plaza Hotel suite, or standing up to some subway muggers, the audience cheered for that troubled man who had so much on his mind.

Soon after getting out of prison, Frank unleashed a blood-bath gang war on everyone from the Italian mob to the Chinese gangs to the NYPD dudes (Wesley Snipes, David Caruso) determined to take him down. Yet, as good as Walken was, he was no comparison to Fishburne’s role as the bugged-out, blow-sniffing, gun-shooting Jump, who had more swagger than a million Jay-Z’s. Looking like his daddy might’ve been a Black Panther back in the day, Jump was crazier than most gangsters, but he still reminded me of a few cool but deadly dudes I knew in Harlem. Fishburne doesn’t walk in the film, he moves swiftly as a dancer, quietly as a jungle cat, and the role was one of his best.

Screenwriter Nicholas St. John, who’d collaborated with Ferrara on the director’s previous projects, gave Jimmy Jump some of the coolest lines in the movie. “Trust isn’t one of my stronger qualities,” he says, moments before killing a drug dealer. Additionally, the film also featured wonderful co-starring performances from Paul Calderon, Steve Buscemi, Roger Guenveur Smith and Giancarlo Esposito. Since many of those actors had worked together in other New York-centric films (mostly Spike Lee joints), the ensemble acting was seamless as the robbers, cops, and various baddies battled for supremacy in a decaying metropolis.

While King of New York overflows with violence, there are many dimensions to the film, as though Godard, fairy tales, and gangsta rap inspired Ferrara equally. The Schoolly D. songs used in King of New York, especially “Saturday Night,” only added to the hip allure of the film, an aural black cherry on top of a cake made out of dynamite. The song being played also gave Walken the opportunity to dance. Schoolly, who came from Philadelphia and was releasing songs long before Ice-T or Snoop Dogg, has been cited as the original gangsta rapper. He and Ferrara were perfect for one another, and would later work together on other films, including The Blackout (1997) and ‘R Xmas (2001).

While obviously influenced by Martin Scorsese, whose Goodfellas came out the same year, Ferrara’s perspective of our beloved sin city in King of New York was more diverse. Indeed, he sees the city as a melting pot where different races and nationalities worked together, a town where Blacks, Irish, Asian, and Latinas worked on both sides of the law and looked out for one another. 

Shot by cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, the film had strange texture that worked perfectly. Between him and Ferrara, the nighttime streets, rides on the subway, and various shoot-outs, including the brutal climax where damn near everybody died, felt like something Frank White actually dreamt while he was dying in jail.

Like most of Ferrara’s films, King of New York was shot on a tight budget, but the director still managed to master mix a calm art-house sensibility with a manic pulp vision that was dark, dangerous, and intoxicating. However, if King scraped the surface of the scum that drove cabbie Travis Bickle crazy, then Bad Lieutenant dived in deep and just continued swimming to the bottom for infinity.

Released two years after King, Harvey Keitel played the title character, a cop so damaged that even his fellow officers were disgusted by his behavior. The cops gave him sideways glances when he accidentally dropped a kilo of coke he stole from a crime scene or talked badly about the Catholic Church putting up a $50,000 reward for the capture of the “boys” who raped a nun.

Still, that was small stuff compared to the rest of the inspired decadence of the ninety-six-minute movie. The lieutenant, who wasn’t even given a name, was perhaps one of the most damaged characters in ‘90s cinema, filled with enough dread and pathos to fuel six David Fincher films. As he smokes crack in tenement hallways, masturbates in front of two teenaged girls, and shoots up with a hooker, we almost feel sorry for this pale-faced mess of a man.

Embracing those dark and scary places, Ferrara shot Bad Lieutenant, which he co-wrote with Zoë Lund, as though it were a modern-day horror movie. If King of New York was a dream, then Bad Lieutenant was a nightmare. The movie’s unintentional (I think) comic relief comes when he was at home surround by crying babies, an oblivious wife, and an old, white-haired mother-in-law who said nothing but stared at Keitel fearfully. She was the only person in the house who actually looked at him.

While one of the main plot points concerned the raped nun, Ferrara’s masterpiece was a brilliant study of a man who no longer believed in anything: a Catholic who doesn’t believe in God, a cop who doesn’t believe in the law, and a man who doesn’t believe in death because he’s already living in hell.

Keitel never stopped challenging himself when it came to taking difficult roles, and in Bad Lieutenant, he played the ruined character with the rawness of a pus-oozing sore. Unlike other scary cat directors, my man Ferrara (the tainted saint of cinema, the outlaw auteur, the Hubert Selby Jr. of movies) captured it all.

                          ***

One of the things I’ve always loved about New York City is how we can run into our cultural heroes on the street, in restaurants or in the living room of some Greenwich Village-dwelling weed dealer. That said, in 1996, I had the pleasure of meeting Abel Ferrara at a wrap party for Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus.

The celebration was at a midtown Manhattan nightclub called the Supper Club and when I saw him, he was standing upstairs looking like Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy with his arms wrapped around his then-actress/girlfriend Annabella Sciorra. In pure fan-boy style, I walked over to him and began gushing about how much I loved King of New York and Bad Lieutenant. Looking like he was high on something, he shook my hand and mumbled, “Thank you, man,” in a voice that reminded me of Tom Waits. There was a small pause and then Ferrara asked, “You want to come with us over to the bar.”  

I’ll always be thankful to Jerry Rodriguez, who later wrote the crime novels The Devil’s Mambo (2007) and Revenge Tango (2008), for introducing me to the work of Abel Ferrara.

—For more on Jerry A. Rodriguez and his novels:

Partners in Crime: The Life, Loves & Nuyorican Noir of Jerry Rodriguez

Pseudonymous author Archer Sullivan has had stories published in several literary and genre magazines, mostly under her own name, but her first fiction sale at professional rates was to EQMM. The story will appear in the Department of First Stories of our May/June 2023 issue (on sale April 18). She tells us that she’s a ninth generation Appalachian who currently resides in Los Angeles, where she is a real-life Beverly Hillbilly. Her topic here touches on something I’ve always believed in: the healing power of fiction. —Janet Hutchings

It’s interesting the way fiction heals. The way we can fall into a story when we most need it, lose ourselves in it, emerge changed. I can point to specific books throughout my life that shepherded me through tough times. Robin McKinley’s work in middle school. Sherlock Holmes in my early teens. In high school: The Princess Bride. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Slaughterhouse Five. Later: Bleak House, Watership Down, True Grit, the many works of Lois McMaster Bujold. I regard these books as old friends and have distinct memories of where I was when reading them, how I felt.

A few years ago I was diagnosed with a chronic illness. I’d had it all my life but my symptoms had always been mild enough to generally ignore. Then, one day, something new happened. Sitting at my computer, typing, pain rushed through my hands. It was like lightning and fire all at once. And it didn’t stop. I felt it when I ate, when I watched TV, when I ran errands, and when I tried to sleep. But the worst was typing.

I had just begun a fledgling writing career, but I couldn’t type for more than ten minutes without agonizing pain. To make matters worse, I was suddenly alienated from my friends and family. I’m a socially awkward, neurodivergent, introverted person and I do almost all of my communication with the outside world via the keyboard. For me, thinking out loud exists on a sliding scale somewhere between exhausting and impossible so my entire life had (at least since I was twelve and had access to the internet and a computer) been conducted through typing. Now, suddenly, I felt completely closed off. Any fine movement of my fingers seared with burning, throbbing pain. Determined to find a fix, I was in and out of doctors’ offices, testing centers, and physical therapy clinics every single week.

I want to say up front—because there is a time and place for suspense and a blog post isn’t necessarily it . . . even if it’s the EQMM Blog—that this pain was eventually resolved. But, it took a while.

And, in the meantime, I found solace in books. Mystery had always been my favorite genre, but I’d never given it my full focus.

Now, suddenly, I had all the time and motivation to catch up. I re-read Sherlock Holmes, then discovered Alan Bradley’s fabulous Flavia series. I still remember—in the worst of that pain—lying on the sofa and laughing out loud at Flavia’s antics and rare, bold voice. I read several of Robert Parker’s Spenser novels and fell in beside Hawk and Susan in my amused admiration of Spenser’s unalterable moral compass. I decided—around the time I lost the ability to open even a peanut butter jar—that I could be soothed by Poirot’s fussy and meticulous crime solving and read ten or twelve Christies in a row followed by a few dashes of Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and PD James. Then I came back across the pond and stuck with the PI genre from Hammett to Chandler to McDonald to Hansen to Parker (once again) and then to Grafton.

I dipped into noir but always found it unsatisfying. Perhaps this should have been obvious. Noir is intentionally bleak, after all. So, while I appreciate the beautiful writing in many noir novels, I cannot actually enjoy them. Though I may admire the way the author works, the stark language, the devastating social landscape, noir isn’t an escape for me. And an escape is what I needed.

This is the thing about mystery—especially traditional mystery but usually in PI as well—you begin with a problem (a dead body, a missing person, a stolen item) and you end with a solution. Sounds simple. But in a world where we are all jaded, harried, and/or a little bit broken, this concept has power.

There are bad guys and there are good guys and, by the end, the bad guys are punished thanks to the efforts of the good guys. PI often goes into grayer territory than traditional mystery, but while a PI may skirt the law to creatively solve problems, they almost always stick to their own moral code which almost always ends in a positive solution for Team Good (or at least Team Not As Bad.) And that simple thrust of plot from problem to solution, from bad to good, from wound to healing, is good medicine.

Traditional mystery takes it a step further, presenting the reader with a problem at the beginning (usually a dead body) and challenging them to be part of the solution (finding the killer.) So when we read WhoDunIts we aren’t just watching the events unfold, we’re part of the process. Every step of the way. It’s empowering. And it’s a reminder that life isn’t (or doesn’t have to be) noir. Yes, we are a complicated species with myriad serious problems, but that doesn’t mean we’re doomed. Sometimes heroes emerge. Sometimes life changes for the better. Sometimes we manage to side-step what seems to be our fate.

Pain is a much studied phenomenon these days. In reality, it’s nothing more than the brain’s reaction to specific stimuli via nerves that may or may not be relied upon to accurately convey information. And yet it feels so solid. Sometimes, it can feel as if it will never end. As if it flows from an endless source. As if you, yourself, are made of it. And, in those times, it is often necessary to know that at least something is solved. Something is fixed. Someone is saved. There is good in the world and, at the end of the day, it wins.

As I went from doctor to doctor and test to test, Flavia’s conversations with Dogger pulled me through. As I lay awake at night with my hands throbbing to the point of frustrated, exhausted tears, Cordelia Gray’s determination held me together. As we finally came to understand the root cause of my pain (not my hinky finger joints but compressed nerves in my cervical spine) I celebrated with Poirot. And as I began the long journey back from muscular atrophy and nerve damage, I hung my hopes on the hook beside Spenser’s Red Sox cap.

It was more than a year before I came back to the keyboard. I remember the moment. The cold sweat slicking my skin, the pounding of my heart, the tears in my eyes. I was terrified that I would try to write and it would start all over. But I put my fingers to the keys and I typed. And I waited. I typed. And I waited. And no pain came.

I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to all the authors who had sat at their keyboards and typewriters and notebooks and sheafs of papers before me, who had put their hearts and heads and precious time into giving me and so many others hours of not only entertainment and diversion, but something deeper and more meaningful.

When I finished that first new story, I realized I was a different writer—a different person—than I’d been before. I still had the same chronic illness and would always have odd problems and distressing symptoms as a result. And, the pain could always come back if I didn’t stay on top of my physical therapy, strength training, postural adjustments, etc. But I could write.

And what I wanted to write was mystery.

Last week’s post on this site generated a conversation about the need for writers to subscribe to publications to which they submit work. This week I’d like to discuss the various ways in which not only writers but all readers can purchase subscriptions or individual copies of our magazines. There have been some changes lately pertaining to the marketing of our digital subscriptions, but before we get to that I thought you might find it interesting to take a little journey back in time and see how EQMM has adapted to previous changes in the magazine marketplace.

When EQMM was launched in 1941, the newsstand was king. There was no viable way to get going other than to put as many copies as possible out on the newsstands, hope you’d be seen, and then try to convert as many of the newsstand buyers as possible to subscribers by way of ads or inserts. It was a very uncertain business, as EQMM’s founding editor, Frederic Dannay, wrote at the time. He called the launching of EQMM “experimental” because he wasn’t just facing the usual problems of visibility and competition; he was putting an entirely new type of magazine out there. That is not to say that there were not other magazines that fell roughly into the same category: There were still many pulp genre-fiction magazines on the market, including the famous Black Mask, so there would have been a readymade section for EQMM on the newsstands. What was different was that EQMM was digest-sized, printed on better paper than the pulps, and instead of being devoted to one type of mystery or crime story, it had very broad parameters for content.

Dannay’s experiment was, of course, a success: The first issue sold over 90,000 copies—which would, today, be an absolutely astounding feat for a genre-fiction magazine. Nevertheless, competition on the newsstand was fierce. You had to stand out in some way to get the attention of new readers and as the first point of contact with buyers was the cover image, a lot of attention had to be paid to art. In EQMM’s first years, the famous book designer George Salter served not only as art director but cover artist for many of the covers. Eventually, in order to remain competitive on the newsstands, EQMM had to resort to more lurid and sexually explicit covers than was typical of the Salter issues. By that time, though, the magazine had already converted a number of its newsstand readers to subscribers, and Dannay didn’t feel comfortable sending copies with nudity and sexual violence depicted on the cover into households where kids might pick them up. Thus began in interval in which only newsstand buyers could obtain issues with cover art. Subscribers got plain-type covers.

By the mid 1950s a new multimagazine subscription business had come into existence: Publishers Clearing House. They offered customers the chance to choose from a selection of magazines from different publishers with the sale going through PCH—which, of course, took a cut of the profits. Their business model was a new concept in magazine marketing. In the mid 1960s, PCH added to their mailings the chance to enter sweepstakes at the same time a customer placed a subscription order. This was a very successful move for both PCH and the magazines it represented, including EQMM. By the mid 1970s, other similar multimagazine subscription businesses were coming into existence, and this way of acquiring paid circulation became the primary means for EQMM and many other publications—superseding newsstand sales.

And then it all changed—pretty suddenly! Because there was a hitch to those sweepstakes offers. Although many people believed it was only possible to enter the sweepstakes if you subscribed to one of the magazines offered, it was stated on the promotion (if you looked) that you could enter without buying a thing, and government regulations stipulated as much. In the 1990s, a lawsuit was brought against PCH alleging that entries that came in without purchases were being discarded. A series of further lawsuits brought against PCH and other companies in the multimagazine subscription business led to greater government oversight and eventually to most of the companies discarding the sweepstakes model. Their profits fell, which in turn resulted in their needing to take a larger cut of the profits made on each subscription.  Eventually, the proportion of the profits going to PCH and other such companies made it unprofitable for magazines like EQMM, which make their money on sales of the magazine rather than advertising dollars, to continue to acquire new subscribers through them.  That primary source of new business, for us, dried up.

The next decade was a difficult one for nearly all subscription-based magazines. I may have the figure slightly wrong after all this time, but I recall reading that the majority of American magazines lost at least ten percent of their subscription base during that period, and the more a publication had depended on sources such as PCH, the bigger the drop was.

That we were able to survive during those years is a testament to the commitment of our longtime subscribers. We started with a large subscriber base and managed to retain an adequate percentage of it. If you are one of those subscribers who were with us through the 1990s and early 2000s, thank you!

And then, miracle of miracles, in 2008 the e-reader came along! Our magazines were perfect for those early devices, since we print in black and white and have few visuals. Our marketing department was right on top of this revolution in publishing, and as a result our magazines became among the first to be offered on e-readers. Eventually, advances in technology took away our advantage, as it became possible to display full color, glossy magazines on most devices, and they flooded the digital marketplace. Fortunately, by that time we had already built up a significant digital-subscription business.

But now we come to a new turn in the road. After fifteen years, Amazon is discontinuing its digital subscription program. In September of 2023, the Amazon digital newsstand will close. In its place, Amazon is now offering Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and all of the other Dell fiction magazines, on its Kindle Unlimited service. Kindle Unlimited is a convenient, economical option, particularly for those who read multiple magazines and books on Kindle. The difference is that each time a new issue comes out, you’ll need to go to where the magazine is displayed and click on the “Read for Free” button. It won’t be delivered automatically.

If you prefer a digital subscription, the good news is that in the near future those will be available through our website. Available formats will include ePub and PDF, both of which are readable on Kindle, Nook, tablets, and other Apple and Android devices. The reader experience will be similar to the previous Kindle experience. We’re excited by the possibilities opened up by bringing digital subscriptions into our own sphere of business, but we ask you to be patient as we make this major transition. We’ll let you know, both on this site and on our social media, when this option goes live.

And, of course, you can always subscribe to the print magazine! Print subscribers continue to account for the largest part of our readership. Print subscriptions to EQMM can be purchased from us directly here. For our other magazines, please visit the individual websites.

If you’re someone who prefers to purchase the odd single copy of the magazines, you’ll likely not find them at your local big-box stores. They are, however, available in the magazine section of most Barnes & Noble stores—which makes sense, since our magazines are more akin to books than to the types of magazines found at giant retailers such as Walmart. You can also buy single digital issues on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other e-tailers. I hope this has given everyone a picture of where and how issues of the Dell fiction magazines can be obtained. What started me on this topic was last week’s discussion of the need to convert writers to readers, so I’ll close by adding that if you are a writer, you can sometimes obtain a discount on your subscriptions to magazines to which you contribute. The Dell mystery magazines occasionally offer such a discount, so keep your eyes peeled for one.—Janet Hutchings

Ever since EQMM changed from monthly single issues to double bimonthly issues, a lot of my reading for the magazine has been concentrated in the “off” months, when there is no issue to release. This presents a challenge. No matter how much anyone enjoys reading—and I enjoy it a lot—when you read only fiction (indeed, only certain types of fiction) for many hours a day, day after day, it can be difficult to come to each new story unfatigued by what can come to feel like a sameness in themes, content, and styles. Fortunately, the crime-fiction field comprehends a vast literary space; the strength of the Dell mystery magazines, it seems to me, is precisely that there is so much variety in what we offer. But variety in the subgenres into which our submissions fall doesn’t necessarily result in a complete change of pace for us as we evaluate those submissions.

Even the most voracious readers have their favorite authors. I’m no exception. There are authors who brighten my day when their names appear in our submissions queue. Nevertheless, all authors have themes and types of characters and plot motifs that they revisit from story to story (or, for that matter, from book to book), albeit in ways that may not at first be apparent. When I am first becoming acquainted with an author’s work, it may take a while before I spot the elements that will be repeated in future submissions. It can be something as large as a type of plot—an author is irresistibly drawn to conspiracy stories, for example. Or it can be something as small as a descriptive element—such as always mentioning the specific height of each character (as one of our award-winning authors often does). In between those big and small preoccupations, there are innumerable ways in which the things that absorb a given writer shape the story. I recently listened to an audiobook by an author I’ve read before (and like) whose approach is mostly realistic, with the exception of a slight slant towards what seem to me to be unrealistically dark outcomes. 

There is nothing wrong with such preoccupations or predispositions. They’re necessary, I think: Good fiction derives from concerns that are deeply absorbing to the creator. But for a professional reader it can be a challenge to put expectations based on an author’s previous work aside and see each new submission in a fresh light. When I’m feeling a little daunted looking at a particularly long list of submissions, I’ll often start by reading those that come from authors whose names I don’t recognize. My hope, I suppose, is to encounter a new voice, and to see a plot unfold without any preconceptions on my part as to how it’s going to play out. If I find something new that’s right for us, it gives me energy to delve into more of the queue.

Of course, as just about any editor at any magazine will tell you, the majority of the good submissions we receive are from established authors, with whose work we are already familiar. A lot of anthologies in our field accept only blind submissions and require that authors not employ series characters who might be recognizable to the judges. I always felt that this would be an inadequate precaution against bias if I or any of my colleagues at the Dell mystery magazines were asked to serve as an anthology judge. I was pretty confident that I would recognize the work of many of EQMM’s regular contributors even with the names stripped from the manuscripts and no series characters appearing. Yesterday, however, a misclick on my computer resulted in the opening of a submission that I believed was by one of our regular authors (whom we’ll call Author A) when it was actually by someone else we often publish (Author B). I recall thinking, as I was reading the story, that it was something of a departure for Author A. However, I happened to know that Author A had an interest in the world in which this story was set and in the subgenre to which the story belonged, so I didn’t question that it was, in fact, by Author A. It was only when I returned to the submissions list that I saw my mistake. It occurred to me, then, that it might be more interesting to read submissions if one did not know who the author was. One would be reading from a fresher perspective. In this particular case, had I realized who the author really was, I might have seen where the story was headed—because I’d have remembered how other stories by Author B had unfolded. And as I mentioned above, all authors (at least all that I’m familiar with) repeat or reuse, consciously or unconsciously, some elements of their earlier fiction.

My point in sharing these reflections is, in part, to suggest a strategy to writers in making fiction submissions. EQMM allows multiple submissions, and we truly appreciate every author who thinks of EQMM as a potential market. We try to give careful consideration to everything submitted to us. But we receive a lot of stories, and if you want your work to be read with a fresh eye, it really is best to try to space your submissions out a bit. A number of unpublished authors make a new submission to EQMM every couple of weeks, and in such cases it is nearly impossible, after many have had to be turned down, to open the next submission with the anticipation of finding a story we can use. Even established authors risk having their submissions not stand out as much as they otherwise would when a large number of stories are submitted in a short period of time. It’s sort of like binge-watching a TV series. Do you remember each episode as clearly when you watch that way as you would if the episodes were spread out as originally aired? I don’t, and the same thing holds for me with multiple story submissions from a single author.

Of course, the problem from a writer’s perspective is that there are so few good markets for short stories. How can you avoid submitting too frequently to a given publication when there are so few alternatives? I don’t have a good answer to that. All of us in the mystery community need to figure out how to generate more readers of short crime fiction. If we could crack that tough nut, a proliferation of publications would likely follow. —Janet Hutchings

L.S. Kunz  has received awards for her short stories and middle-grade fiction, including the Bronze Typewriter from the League of Utah Writers, but her debut story in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s March/April 2023 issue, “Midnight Run,” is her first professionally published work of adult fiction. It’s a heart-pounding thriller that you won’t want to miss. In this post, the author points to some things mystery fiction can teach us that pertain to real life.  —Janet Hutchings

A few years back, a good friend of mine gave me a copy of The Devil in the White City. I hadn’t read Erik Larson before, and I had almost no interest in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Still, I trusted my friend, so I opened the book. That was Saturday morning. The laundry didn’t get done that weekend, but Erik Larson’s masterpiece did. I couldn’t put it down.

I had a similar experience reading John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a love song to 1980s Savannah, with its mossy oaks, shady squares, and unforgettable residents. Both books are true crime where murder is an excuse to immerse you in a time and place as unique as the characters who live there.

In The Monster of Florence: A True Story, Douglas Preston, with the help of his friend and fellow investigator Mario Spezi, weaves a similar tale. A series of unsolved murders provide the backdrop to explore Florence’s cramped cobblestone streets and the sweeping Tuscan countryside.

With Preston for a guide, you bask in the glow of Florence’s Renaissance past and pick through the debris of history right up to the early 2000s when Preston fulfilled the dream of moving his family to Florence.

In the shadow of Michelangelo’s David and Giambologna’s Abduction of a Sabine Woman, Preston peels back Florence’s touristy sheen to reveal an underbelly every bit as violent as the statues lining its historic streets. He lays bare the corruption and incompetence, pride and panic, beauty and banality that make modern Florence a treasure and a trash heap.

Florence’s brilliant past doesn’t immunize it from modern decay. By the time the police drive Douglas Preston from Italy and arrest Mario Spezi, you are shocked but hardly surprised. Bad identifications, false confessions, tainted crime scenes, planted evidence, fear, ego, ineptitude. It’s all in Douglas Preston’s book.

But it isn’t confined to Preston’s book. Around the world, in locales sublime and humdrum, innocent people are in prison. Right now. Convicted based on mistaken identifications or coerced confessions, faulty forensics or bad investigations. As Saul Kassin explains in Duped: Why Innocent People Confess—and Why We Believe Their Confessions, these incarcerated innocents aren’t bad people who were leading bad lives and barreling toward trouble. They are regular people. Just like us. It’s the stuff of nightmares and fiction, but it’s real.

One of my favorite things about mystery fiction is being transported to far-flung destinations. In my earliest reading memories, Mary Downing Hahn guided me into a crumbling graveyard in the wooded countryside of Holwell, Maryland. There, I perched, breathless, on the edge of a tombstone as I waited for Helen to come. Barbara Brooks Wallace tucked me behind the curtains in dreary Sugar Hill Hall, where I could sneak peeks at the forbidding Mrs. Meeching and the forbidden bowl of peppermints. Agatha Christie captained me up the Nile. Daphne du Maurier abandoned me on the windswept Cornish coast. And Mary Stewart sent me scrambling down scree and over cascading waterfalls in the French Pyrenees.  

Today, I revisit these old haunts like old friends, and seek out new mysteries set in exciting new places. But my literary journeys haven’t just transported me to new viewpoints. Without my realizing, they’ve transported me to new points of view as well. Subtly, step by step, my favorite mystery writers have taught me to look beyond the obvious. To spy the shortcuts my mind creates and reject them. To search for truth.

Books like Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, and Rationality, by Steven Pinker, teach us that our brains naturally—and without our conscious input—simplify the world. To handle life’s complexities, our brains create shortcuts. If we want something to be true, it feels true. Even if it’s not. The more we hear something, the truer it feels. And once we’ve decided something is true, our brains filter the evidence to fit that belief.

But truth is nuanced, and justice often lies somewhere in the gray. Mystery fiction won’t let us be complacent. It teaches us to look beyond the narrative that feels true to find the real truth. The obvious suspect might be the culprit, sure. But the investigation never stops there.

As Maria Konnikova explains in The Confidence Game, “When we’re immersed in a story, we let down our guard” and “we may absorb things under the radar, so to speak.” “We may even find ourselves, later, thinking that some idea or concept is coming from within our own brilliant, fertile minds, when really it was planted there by the story we just heard or read.”

Admittedly, Konnikova was talking about con artists—how they use narrative to trick us into doing their bidding. But influence doesn’t have to be a grift. Stories turn us into better people—better citizens—even as they transport us.

Recently, Tana French’s The Searcher sent me tramping through western Ireland, across checkerboard fields, over “sprawling hedges” and “dry-stone walls,” in air as “rich as fruitcake.” I confess, when I first saw the bucolic village of Ardnakelty, I expected more of a ramble—a buddy story sprawling across the dappled countryside. Gruff but good ex-cop and grubby but guileless little girl bond while they solve the mystery of the girl’s missing brother.

But Tana French was never going to let my feet or my mind off so easy. As the sheen of the village tarnishes, so do its inhabitants. The ex-cop isn’t as gruff but good as he thinks he is. He wasn’t above the brutality he saw during his career. He was part of it. Complicit.

And the villagers aren’t as innocent as they appear. Except for the child caught in the middle, no one is spotless. Fear, cowardice, greed, bias, anger. None of it is visible from the country roads, but it’s there, lurking behind tweed caps and curtained windows, driving secrets deeper into the dark, protecting its own.

By the time “[t]he land has left its luring autumn self behind” and its “greens and golds have thinned to watercolor,” the ex-cop has changed too. The mountains have “burrowed deep inside him.” The only way he will solve the mystery is to acknowledge the bad in himself and accept that the answer to every problem isn’t a badge. Right and wrong are rarely as simple as we want them to be. Sometimes, the solution isn’t to seek revenge but to sit down and listen.

Mystery fiction has taught me to assess the real world with a reader’s eye. Sherlock Holmes taught me never to be deceived by the “obvious fact.” Doyle, Arthur Conan, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Miss Marple taught me to reserve judgment till I have enough “definite knowledge” to make “definite assertions.” Christie, Agatha, Nemesis. And to act on behalf of others. Even if it’s dangerous. After all, “we are not put into this world, Mr. Burton, to avoid danger when an innocent fellow-creature’s life is at stake.” Christie, Agatha, The Moving Finger. And Mrs. Pollifax taught me that “small rebellions” can change the world. Gilman, Dorothy, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax.

Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi could have cowered in the face of pressure and threats. They could have stopped investigating. But they didn’t, and the world is better for it. Only by calling out unfairness can we hope to change society for the better.  

The best mystery fiction and true crime makes us better citizens of our communities and of the world. It sheds light on injustice and forces us to face our own ignorance. And it does it all while immersing us in the spellbinding sights and sounds and smells of distant destinations we may never get to visit in real life but can’t get enough of.

Detroit freelance journalist Mike McHone started writing short stories in the mid 2000s, but it was only in 2018, after picking up his first copy of EQMM, that he decided to switch the focus of his writing to crime fiction. His work has since appeared in EQMM, AHMM, the Anthony Award-nominated anthology Under the Thumb: Stories of Police Oppression edited by S.A. Cosby, and in a number of other publications. He was the 2020 recipient of the Mystery Writers of America Midwest Chapter’s Hugh Holton Award for his soon-to-be-published debut novel You Make Yourselves Another. His new story in the March/April 2023 issue of EQMM, “Carver (and) [Company],” has a most unusual cast of characters. In this post he gives us a glimpse of what inspired him to create them. —Janet Hutchings

If a writer is lucky enough to hang around long enough to see at least a few of their stories wind up in print, it’s inevitable someone will ask where they get their ideas. After my story “Carver (and) [Company]” appeared in the March/April 2023 issue of Ellery Queen, I had three people ask me how I came up with the main character and the plot. Since I barely know what I’m doing (with writing, editing, dressing myself, life in general), I’ll try my best to answer.

First and foremost, if you haven’t read the story, well, shame on you. What the hell are you waiting on? I demand you buy five copies of the magazine to atone for your sins. Secondly, I’ll put the plot on a bumper sticker for you, as my hero Kinky Friedman would say. Josephine Carver is a private investigator and like most P.I.s she’s in need of a case to get some money in her pocket. The case she decides to take on involves infidelity. A wife suspects her husband of cheating, so she goes to Jo Carver for help. Jo takes the case and along the way discovers the “cheating” husband is not who he appears to be.

So far, there’s nothing new. Infidelity’s been done a million times in P.I. yarns, and if I had a nickel for every time a cheating case took a weird turn in a detective story, I’d have enough cash to buy a carton of eggs. However, from the outset (and by that I mean the very first line), we see something a little different concerning Jo Carver. She has assistants who help her piece together clues and ultimately solve the case, except her assistants live inside her head.

Yes, dear reader, Jo Carver hears voices.

No, she’s not insane, hasn’t suffered any traumatic event, doesn’t have a split personality, borderline disorder, or any form of psychosis. Her brain, as she says, is just wired a little differently, and because of this, she communicates with two very distinct voices that have been there since she was a child. The first voice is stern, by-the-book, critical, and sounds exactly like her grandmother Gertrude, hence her calling the voice Gertie. The other voice has a laid back, take-it-as-it-comes vibe whose tone reminds Jo of a fat, lazy cat, which is why she calls it Eddie, the name of her grandmother’s tabby.

Even though the voices are foils and the banter between them can be humorous, there was one important aspect that I made sure to implement when fleshing out the details of this story. This piece may be categorized as a comedy, but Jo would never be the butt of a joke. We can laugh at the circumstances she gets herself into, some of the things she says, or the replies from Eddie or Gertie, but we’ll never laugh at her for who she is. That would be cruel, and frankly there’s enough of that nonsense in the world as it is.

When I originally started this story, the main character was completely different. It was a person suffering from PTSD and the voices were quite nasty, but I quickly jettisoned that because I didn’t want to get too dour. However, I found the idea of intrusive narration by way of character interjections interesting to work with, and truth be told, I find the study of auditory hallucinations and disembodied voices fascinating. Historical figures like Sigmund Freud, Martin Luther King, Carl Jung, and Joan of Arc all claimed to hear inner voices. Sometimes, like Joan of Arc, the voices acted as a spiritual guide. Sometimes they were, as in Jo Carver’s case, voices of a relative that could be critical but helpful. According to some of the source material I poured through,  many people are in the same situation that Jo’s in. No trauma, no psychosis, just little voices popping up every so often to share thoughts. 

Although psychological communities around the world are still gaining perspective on auditory hallucinations, there have been a number of studies and articles done in recent years, some of which can be found here, and I hope you find them as interesting as I did:

https://www.popsci.com/hearing-voices-neuroscience-hidden-speech/

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/hearing-voices/experiences-of-hearing-voices/#.Xc6QxVf7SM8

Why Might People Hear Voices?

https://understandingvoices.com/

So, delving into an unordinary psychological character trait was one reason I developed this character, but the other was to try something I’d never attempted. Basically, I wanted to write a wholesome, good-hearted character who could go an entire story without saying fuck every two seconds. I did it and I now await my Edgar, Anthony, Pulitzer, or Nobel nomination, please and goddamn thank you.

I’ve written my fair share of neo-noir stories and tales that involve killers, betrayers, backstabbers, liars, and warped protagonists with enough baggage to make JFK International jealous. This time around, I wanted to take it in a different direction because, let’s face it, the world of mystery and crime fiction is filled to the brim with hardboiled characters and dicks (pun intended?) who can outshoot or out-think anyone. It’s chock-full of beautiful geniuses with square jaws and barrel chests with wits sharp enough that the Gillette corporation could package them up and send them out to market. They can kick ass, take names, are the smartest smartasses in the room, and look good while doing so.    

Jo Carver? She’s not a genius. She’s intelligent, but her cases are solved through hard work, experience, and maybe a little luck but not ungodly brilliance. She’s polite, not sarcastic. She’s ex-military and knows how to handle firearms, but she doesn’t get into shootouts willy-nilly. Taking all of this into consideration reveals the truly odd and sublimely weird aspect of this character that sets her apart from most fictional P.I.’s, detectives, or crime fighters.

She’s a nice person without any emotional baggage who just wants to help people.

Wacky, eh?

In today’s society, where it’s commonplace to argue on social media about quite literally anything from whether or not Coke is better than Pepsi (it isn’t), up to and including if COVID-19 is real (it is) and whether or not the Earth is flat (it’s not, and, please, stop entertaining this bullshit), where shootings in the U.S. are as much a natural, everyday occurrence as wind and sunlight, where self-righteousness drowns reason, where empathy is the most precious of all gifts due in part to its rarity, it’s nice to think that a good person is out there helping people, even if that person is fictional. Yeah, shootouts are cool, car chases are neat, punching a bad guy is badass, but being nice and lending a helping hand in this day and age?

Well, that is strange, isn’t it?

But, sadly, it shouldn’t be.

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time and three novels, the most recent of which is Bluff (Mysterious Press). His short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies and have twice won the Pushcart Prize. He co-directs the creative-writing program at Mississippi State University. Michael’s first story for EQMM, “What You Know, What I Know,” appears in our current issue (March/April 2023). In this post he talks about two real-life mysteries—and what fiction can do that real life often cannot. —Janet Hutchings

The first mystery:

When my sister Julie and I were kids, my parents would host dinner parties for their friends. Sometimes Julie and I ate ahead of time; other times we were allowed to eat with the grown-ups. At some point in the evening, once the eating slowed down and wine glasses had been refilled a couple of times, the grown-ups sitting around the table would begin to tell jokes. My parents loved joke-telling. They especially loved jokes with long set-ups. “I can never remember jokes,” people have told me my whole life. My parents remembered them. Or at least my mother did. My father was—is—someone who wants to believe he’s a good joke-teller. In practice, he’s the guy who gets almost to a punchline before frowning and saying something like, “Wait—did I mention he had a wooden leg? Well, he has a wooden leg. That’s important.”

Usually, the jokes at these parties were clean, or clean-ish. But one joke was not clean. It was so not clean that my parents always made Julie and me leave the room ahead of time. All we ever learned was the punchline: “If I were a rich man.”

But we never learned the joke leading up to it. For years, we wondered: what could possibly be the very dirty set-up to a lyric from Fiddler on the Roof?

The second mystery:

My mother was a high school English Teacher in Brooklyn. Early in her career—this would’ve been in the late 1960s—her school sponsored a poetry-writing contest for which she was the judge. The winning poem came from a student she never liked, a student whom she believed could never write a poem like the one he submitted. I say submitted, rather than “wrote,” because that’s precisely the point. She believed he plagiarized the poem. But this was decades before the internet, and despite my mother’s vast knowledge of poetry, this poem wasn’t familiar to her. It simply struck her as something a high-school student—and particularly this high-school student—wouldn’t have written. Without evidence of plagiarism, though, she had no choice but to go ahead and select the poem as the winner. It was, after all, the best poem.

Growing up, I heard the story about this so-called poet several times. Even decades after the fact, the whole episode still nagged at her, so much so that she still remembered a couple of the lines from the poem. Had he written it? Had she failed, as a teacher, by assuming, without any evidence, the worst about this young man?

No. There’s no way he could’ve written it.

Unless, of course, he did.

One day, about ten years ago, my own family happened to be visiting my parents back in New Jersey, and the subject of the old high-school poetry contest came up. My mother recited a line from the poem, and my wife asked, “Why don’t you just Google the line?”

And for the first time, she did. Seconds later, she was staring at the answer to a fifty-year-old mystery. I don’t recall the poem—it’s been ten years, and my mother is no longer alive to ask. But suffice it to say, the kid had, in fact, half a century earlier, plagiarized the poem to win his high-school writing contest. The mystery had finally been solved; my mother was right to have been suspicious all along.

But she didn’t feel vindicated. She just felt sad, and she later confided that she would’ve been happier not to know—to keep alive the smallest hope that this unexceptional student, for one particular moment on one particular day, had risen above the limits of her expectations.

The problem with my mother’s situation was that either her former student had plagiarized, or he hadn’t. One or the other. And because of my mother’s limited understanding of this student, the answer reduced him to one sort of kid or another.

But what if she—and we—knew more? What if, yeah, the student had plagiarized the poem, but here’s how it went down: The kid (we’ll call him Ben) was well aware of his lousy reputation. He could do no right at school or at home. He kept getting in trouble. So one Mother’s Day, he finds some nice poem in a book and copies it onto a piece of paper and gives it to his mother, who loves it so much. “Did you write this, Ben?” she asks. And because of the look in his mother’s eyes, and because what could be the harm, he shrugs and mutters, “Sure, I did.” Unbeknownst to Ben, his mother enters the poem in the school-wide contest. (She knows Ben would never stoop to entering a writing contest himself.) Ben has no idea the poem’s been entered, but then he wins. And so now he’s terrified of being exposed. But the teacher, a nice young lady, Mrs. Kardos, she seems content with giving him the prize even though he’s getting a D in her class, and surely she must know he couldn’t have written the poem. Days and weeks and years pass. And although he always feels a twinge of guilt about it, there’s no denying the much-needed lift it gave to his mother all those years ago. And not just then. For decades. Even now, when she’s in her 80s and he’s approaching 60, she’ll sometimes refer to him as “my poet.”

That’s not what happened. But it’s what fiction can make happen.

In the realm of fiction, mysteries exist to get solved. But the solution itself isn’t enough, and sometimes isn’t even the point. What fiction can do—and what “real life” often fails to—is to bring a story to its conclusion, to solve the mystery, in a way that enlarges our sense of wonder and possibility.

Which brings us back to that long-ago joke my sister and I were never allowed to hear. Many years later, I said to my parents, “Remember that dirty joke you always kicked me and Julie out of the room for with the punchline ‘If I were a rich man’? What was the joke?”

My parents looked at each other. They vaguely remembered the punchline. Neither one remembered the joke.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said.

I’ll admit, after that I looked online for the joke a few times, to no avail. But this incident wasn’t so long after the plagiarism mystery got solved, and pretty quickly I stopped searching, deciding it was better not to know. Maybe one day I’ll change my mind. For now, though, I prefer to imagine my parents and their friends young and red-faced and doubled over in laughter after hearing the best, dirtiest joke there ever was, a joke that will always live tantalizingly just out of reach.