Authors in This Issue
Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet have been writing together for nearly fifty years. Together, as Hal Charles, they are the authors of more than 200 short stories and a number of novels. This new story—a thriller involving conspiracy and betrayal—is relatively new territory for the duo, many of whose recent stories for us have been whodunits starring Deputy Kelly Stonebreaker of the KSP.
Doug Crandell is a short-story writer, essayist, memoirist, true-crime writer, and novelist whose short stories have been chosen for Best American Mystery Stories and won Glimmer Train’s Family Matters Fiction Award. His novel The Flawless Skin of Ugly People was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers choice. This story has a sequel we’ll publish next year!
Libby Cudmore is the author of The Big Rewind (William Morrow, 2016). Her Martin Wade P.I. series, to which this new story belongs, has been running in EQMM since 2020. The upstate New York author is currently an editor at Rock and a Hard Place Press.
In the 1970s, Robert Edward Eckels wrote more than four dozen short stories about con men and swindles. Editor Brian Skupin has collected many of them in Never Trust a Partner (2021). Among the Eckels stories EQMM published were the entire Lovel and Lang art-forgery series. During the pandemic, after not hearing from the author for nearly forty years, we received this new story, the thirteenth in that series. Sadly, the author died in 2022, before we could publish the story.
For the past ten years, most of Terence Faherty’s stories for EQMM have been Sherlock Holmes parodies. In this story, he brings back his best-known series sleuth, Owen Keane, protagonist of his first novel, the Edgar-nominated Dead Stick, and seven subsequent novels. Keane often becomes absorbed in unusual cases, and this one is no exception.
Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales is a cultural 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. This is his first story for EQMM.
Award-winning French mystery writer Paul Halter, author of some thirty novels and many short stories, is considered the modern master of the locked-room mystery. His stories, nearly all translated by John Pugmire, have been appearing in EQMM since 2004. Through Locked Room International, his own company, John Pugmire has also translated and brought out twenty Halter novels, the latest 2020’s The White Lady.
Kate Hohl lives in New York. Her Haunting debut story takes us back to the period immediately following World War II.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and an Edgar- and Shamus Award- nominated fiction writer, John Lantigua has authored seven novels, four starring Willie Cuesta, a P.I. based in Miami’s Little Havana who frequently appears in our pages too, as in this new story. 2022 saw the publication of In the War Zone of the Heart (Arte Publico Press), a collection of Cuesta stories.
Ken Linn’s first professionally published story, “Stray,” appeared in EQMM’s January/February 2021 issue, in the Department of First Stories. It made the list of “Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense of 2021” in the volume The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. The Maryland author subsequently had a story published in AHMM.
G.M. Malliet is the prolific, award-winning author of three mystery series. The St. Just series, her first, launched in 2008, has two recent entries, 2022’s Death in Cornwall and 2023’s Death in Print. Her second, starring Max Tudor, continues with 2023’s The Washing Away of Wrongs, and the first entry in a brand-new series is 2022’s Amanda Hawke.
St. Louis writer Sandra Murphy is an editor for Writers and Publishers Network. She’s also the editor of the anthology A Murder of Crows (Darkhouse Books). Her own short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies and in our July/August 2022 issue (see “Sit. Stay. Die.”—cowritten with Michael Bracken).
A frequent contributor to EQMM, Twist Phelan had a story in this year’s January/February issue, and more are coming up soon. Since her last appearance in EQMM, her short story “The Bridge”(May/June 2022) was long-listed for the Irish Book Award. She’s also read two of her EQMM stories for our podcast: elleryqueenmysterymagaz ine.com/the-crime-scene/podcasts
Bill Pronzini had a collection of short stories published in 2020 that contains a number of his contributions to EQMM plus many stories that our readers may not have seen. Small Felonies 2 brings together fifty of his most intriguing shorts, ranging from three starring his Nameless Detective to psychological suspense, historical noir, tales with O. Henry-esque endings, and more.
Pseudonymous author Archer Sullivan has had a number of stories published in literary magazines such as Word Riot and The Rumpus under her own name, but this story for EQMM is her first fiction sale at professional rates. Originally from the Appalachian Mountains, she currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.
Marilyn Todd is the author of sixteen historical mysteries focused on the ancient world. A few years ago, she began a four-book series set in Victorian London whose sleuth is Julia McAllister, Britain’s first crime-scene photographer. The last book in that series, Dead Drop, was released by Sapere Books in 2022.
L.A. Wilson, Jr. is a resident of Atlanta, Georgia, the setting for this story, which features his series P.I. Waymon Hayes. His stories have previously appeared in EQMM, AHMM, and a variety of other publications. He’s a past nominee for the best-short-story Shamus Award.