Current Issue Highlights

March/April 2025
EQMM’s March/April 2025 issue helps usher in the spring, but there’s still a chill to be felt as readers explore these seventeen tales of crime and mystery. We start off with a tale about gambling and friendship (or betrayal of such?) by Marilyn Todd in “The Tattenhall Tontine,” and continue on with an addition to David Dean’s Dr. Beckett Marchland series (“Aswarby Hall”). Lori Rader-Day offers a narrative inspired by the music industry (“The Woman From Rollign Stone) while Twist Phelan gives us a case from corporate spy Finn Teller (“Dupe”). Other series characters featured here are fashionable nonbinary amateur sleuth Perry Winkle (“Not the Usual Boy” by Rob Osler) and Little Havana P.I. Willie Cuesta (“The Case of the Motherless Child” by John Lantigua). Other riveting tales bloom by Edith Maxwell, Lia Matera, Andrew Klavan, Robert Greer, Mat Coward, G.M. Malliet, and Bill Pronzini. Catch our usual departments—First Stories (Emma O’Driscoll and Adam Wilson), Passport to Crime (Daniele Del Giudice), and Black Mask (Charles John Harper)—as well as new columns from Steve Steinbock (The Jury Box book reviews), Dean Jobb (Stranger Than Fiction true crime), and Kristopher Zgorski (Blog Bytes website reviews).
FICTION
The Tattenhall Tontine
by Marilyn Todd
The Beatles were belting through the speakers loud enough to bend the walls, urging everyone to get back to where they once belonged. Tony didn’t hear. He didn’t notice groovy girls wafting around with false eyelashes longer than their miniskirts, much less care that Judy Garland had just died. His focus was on the heap of pound notes on the table, and the three eights, the king, and the six in his hand. READ MORE
Not the Usual Boy
by Rob Osler
Most days, my gender fluidity creates little kerfuffle, aside from the pressure I put on myself when dressing as a woman and wanting to pull together a smart ensemble before leaving the house. One event, however, is an unfailing exception. The minor fuss begins every March at the huge professional tennis tournament that lights up the Palm Springs area, where I have served as a volunteer for the past dozen years. Although all tournament staff wear more or less the same outfit—polo shirt and trousers—the tailoring is different for women and men, and I’d rather wear pantyhose on a desert hike than suffer the humiliating cut of a men’s pair of thirty-eight-inch-waisted chinos. READ MORE
PASSPORT TO CRIME
Perfect Pitch
by Daniele Del Giudice
Translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel
“You see,” said the man sitting across from me in the train, “I deal with dust, nothing but dust,” and he said this with a feigned regret for not dealing with more substantial things, while actually suggesting that dust was a rich, diverse universe, about which I certainly knew nothing. “I imagine that for you dust is just an annoyance, the neglect and aging of the world, whereas on the contrary it is alive with freshness.” READ MORE
BLACK MASK
Smoke and Mirrors
by Charles John Harper
The cornflower-blue 1948 Packard Super 8 convertible—windows up, top down, fresh off the showroom floor—screeched to a halt in the bus-stop lane in front of the Cahuenga Building. Stopped like a wave in a fish tank, surging forward then back, bobbing on its springs.
With its whitewall tires, rear-fender skirts, and V-winged cormorant, Goddess of Speed hood ornament, it was a beautiful car. A car with style. READ MORE
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
An Informant
by Adam Wilson
When you see Jim Tierney walking towards you from across a pub, you run. Or, at the very least, you sidle out unseen before he gets you talking. That’s the general consensus. Unfortunately, looking up from my glass, I realised only too late that he wasn’t a nightmarish apparition conjured by some cruel Freudian corner of my subconscious. By that time, he was taking the seat across from me. READ MORE
NONFICTION AND REVIEWS
Jury Box
by Steve Steinbock
This installment of The Jury Box is being composed under unusual conditions. On November 19, the Pacific Northwest experienced a weather condition called a bomb cyclone, the epicenter of which was very close to my home. Trees took down power lines and cell towers all over Puget Sound, leaving me without power or heat for eight days—and still no internet. Inconvenient as it’s been, there’s something nice about writing a column with fountain pen and paper by candlelight. The fictional Ellery Queen and his father, Inspector Queen, experienced a similar sense of isolation when, during The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933); they were trapped in a mansion on a mountaintop during a forest fire. I’m on a mountain as well, but this one isn’t on fire. READ MORE
Blog Bytes
by Kristopher Zgorski
Let’s start this month with a fun website that all readers and writers can get behind. It’s called I Heart Bookstores (www.iheartbookstores.com). Just as the name implies, this website celebrates bookstores—namely, non-chain stores around the U.S. Upon opening the link, visitors will find a map with thousands of area bookstore locations pinned (somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 stores). The About page explains what types of bookstores are and aren’t included (for example, college bookstores are not covered). READ MORE
Stranger Than Fiction: Preview
by Dean Jobb
The realms of crime fiction and true crime have many intersections. Fiction writers often draw on real investigative techniques, police procedures, and even notorious crime cases in fashioning their stories, and, conversely, fictional sleuths and their methods have occasionally influenced the practices of actual police forces. READ MORE