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MAY/JUNE 2022

Welcome to EQMM! Featuring the world’s most celebrated crime writers alongside brilliant new voices. Cutting-edge content includes suspense thrillers, whodunits, and noir, reviews, and an editor’s blog. Join us … if you dare!

EXCERPTS:
Blind Baseball
Doug Allyn

Lucky Stars
Karen Harrington

DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES:
I Believe In You
Jeremiah K. Balko

PASSPORT TO CRIME:
Pedro Antão’s Glasses
Machado de Assis

See who won EQMM’s 80th Anniversary Contest!

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SNEAK PEEK

What can we really know about reality when we’re separated from it by electronic and other barriers? That’s the question for characters in EQMM’s July/August 2022 issue.

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Awards

Over 75 Years of Awards

370 nominations from the breadth of the mystery genre

113 award-winning stories

Edgar, Agatha, Barry, Derringer, Arthur Ellis, Robert L. Fish, Macavity, Shamus, Thriller, Anthony, and more.

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FROM THE EDITOR
Welcome to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. My editorship of EQMM began in the summer of 1991 following a call from then editor Eleanor Sullivan, who was helping in the search for her successor. I was mystery-fiction editor at Walker & Company at the time, and had charge of a series of anthologies of EQMM stories. The connection would provide an entrée to a whole new world of publishing.

ABOUT EQMM
Launched in 1941, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine set the standard for the modern crime and mystery short story. EQMM offers outstanding literary quality, an expansive reach across the whole range of mystery and crime fiction, and a global orientation in its story selection.

AUTHORS' CORNER
Meet Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine’s authors! In addition to discovering an impressive Who's Who of internationally renowned writers, you'll learn about authors in the current issue, read what they have to say at the EQMM blog, and more. Visit often—there's always something new!

CURRENT ISSUE
EQMM’s May/June 2022 issue celebrates Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and the spring season with signature mystery and mayhem. In “The Manglik Curse” by Smita Harish Jain, a daughter tries to bend her parents’ marriage traditions and her astrological fate to her will; in “Phoney Friend”...

THE CRIME SCENE
Get the latest news, enjoy stories only available here, check out Editor Janet Hutchings’ blog, enjoy engaging podcasts, view the photo gallery of EQMM personalities. Check it out.

An Inside Look

Art by www.shutterstock.com

Blind Baseball

by Doug Allyn

The roadside bomb was a beauty. Neatly wired, compact. First-rate workmanship. Good. Every tech’s nightmare is getting blown away by some kid’s cobble job.

This unit was cached in a schoolboy’s backpack, hidden under a cardboard box by the roadside. Four bricks of Semtex wrapped with duct tape, with its trigger—no, two triggers in plain view. The wiring was laid out in straight lines, the soldered joints sheathed in shrink tubes. Precise, professional work.

All good. And yet— READ MORE

excerpt2_Lucky-Stars Art by Shutterstock.com

Lucky Stars

by Karen Harrington

Milton says to me, “It’s been a long day. Get on over here and wash my feet.”

“Milton, I’m not.”

“This ain’t no negotiation. Remember last time?”

I get the bucket and fill it with soap and water. Because I remember last time.

When the filthy job is done, he says to get him some cold iced tea to drink. He sits outside like a king with bare feet. Says he likes to feel the grass underfoot. What I do is carry the bucket to the kitchen. I make him an iced tea with the dirty feet water, half and half. It’s hard not to laugh when I watch him down his own grit. READ MORE