You want to start writing crime/mystery short stories? Great. Jump right in. After all, you've gotta start somewhere. Every long journey begins with a single step. So don't be afraid to put yourself out there when you put pen to paper. But be sure to think outside the box and avoid cliches like the plague. If you do all that, before you know it, you'll live happily ever after.
If you're a new or newer writer, you may be wondering if my word choices in the prior paragraph were ironic. They were. But the sentiment behind them was not. It is important to take risks and try to achieve your dreams, and you do have to start somewhere.
I started my fiction-writing journey more than twenty years ago by taking a workshop in writing a mystery novel. I wasn't aiming to write short stories back then, but the skills I learned were applicable. I was fortunate to have found a workshop that exactly fit my needs a five-minute drive from where I lived. I recognize that might not be the experience of everyone who is reading this now.
But here is something you all do have in common. You can sign up for a free online webinar being held this Saturday, October 18, where you can hear from some seasoned writers and editors, as well as some successful newer writers, about writing and submitting crime/mystery short stories. It doesn't matter where you live or your experience level or what your ability to pay is. If you have an internet connection and are interested in the topic, you are welcome.
You're also welcome even if you aren't new to writing short stories. This advice could be useful no matter how many stories you've had published.
The webinar, titled Mystery in the Midlands: Writing Short Mystery Fiction 2025, is sponsored by the Palmetto Chapter of Sisters in Crime and the Southeastern Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Here is the schedule (note that everything is Eastern Time):
11:15 a.m. Welcome
11:30 a.m. Plotting Short Stories
12:30 p.m. New Voices in Short Mystery Fiction
1:30 p.m. Intriguing an Editor: So Your Writing’s Remembered Even If Your Story’s Rejected
2:30 p.m. Conclusion
Segment Descriptions and Participants
Plotting Short Stories
John M. Floyd’s short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Strand Magazine, Best American Mystery Stories, Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and many other publications. John is an Edgar nominee, a Shamus Award winner, and a six-time Derringer Award winner.
New Voices in Short Mystery Fiction — Michael Bracken, moderator
N.M. Cedeño writes across genres. Her short stories have appeared in Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, After Dinner Conversation, Black Cat Weekly, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and Crimeucopia. “Predators and Prey,” was selected for the “Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense of 2024” list in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025.
LaToya Jovena's crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Best American Mystery and Suspense. She writes about the DC suburbs a lot, because that’s where she lives.
Tom Milani’s first
story was published in 2022. Since then, his work has been short-listed
for a Derringer Award, and he has published an additional nine stories,
a novella, and his debut novel.
Intriguing an Editor: So Your Writing’s Remembered Even If Your Story’s Rejected — Paula Gail Benson, moderator
Barb Goffman has
won the Agatha Award four times, the Macavity twice, and the Anthony, Derringer, and Ellery Queen Readers
Award once each, as well as the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s lifetime
achievement award. She’s been a finalist for major mystery awards
forty-nine times. She has edited or co-edited fifteen anthologies with another in progress, and she received a Derringer Award for Murder, Neat.
Sandra Murphy is
a Derringer-winning writer whose stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and several other publications. Additionally, she is the editor of four
anthologies, including, most recently, Sex and Violins: An Erotic Crime Anthology and Yeet Me in St. Louis: Crime Under the Arch.
Josh Pachter is an author, editor, and translator. A two-time Derringer winner and the 2020 recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society's Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement, he is the editor of more than two dozen anthologies, including four Anthony Award finalists.
Are you eager to watch? If so, it's easy to register. Just click here.
Thank you to the organizers for inviting me to participate. I hope you join us.
A new Michael Bracken anthology has just launched, Prohibition Peepers. In coming weeks, I intend to blab incessantly about it.
My story, ‘Dime Detective’, features a slightly atypical private detective in the final days of 1932. After civilization had been drawn into WW-I (1914-1918), North Americans were hit with the Spanish Flu pandemic (1918-1920). Morals activists turned the temperance movement into a national-forced abstinence mandate, resulting in the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment, banning drinkable alcohol.
God wasn’t finished with America. The Great Depression set in (1929-1939), overlapping Prohibition (1920-1933), the Dustbowl (1931-1940), and the build-up to WW-II (1939-1945). Those twenty-five years (1914-1939) leading up to the Second World War were rough, but in some ways, the 1930s remains one of my favorite eras.
Sparked in the 1920s, musical creativity exploded in the following decade with the swing era, the landscape of the big bands. That music sticks with us today, works such as Louis Prima’s ‘Sing! Sing! Sing!’ (1936), famously covered by Benny Goodman (1937) with Gene Krupa and Harry James. Japanese love that piece. Few people today know Glenn Miller’s famous ‘In the Mood’ (1939) originally began life as ‘Tar Paper Stomp’ (1930) by Wingy Manone, which spawned numerous spin-offs. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, the Dorsey brothers, and Cab Calloway, not to mention wah-wah specialist Clyde McCoy. What an era!
Mechanical beauty: The late 1920s and 1930s saw some of the most beautiful motorcars ever built. Packard, Bugatti, Mercedes SSK, Bentley, and the ACD group– Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg, combined sweeping form with function.
And of course it was an era hard-boiled noire and mystery lovers revere.
Booth Tarkington
Most Famous Novelist Unknown Today
Generations X, Y, Z can’t be criticized when the most famous author of the 1920-30s, Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), descended into oblivion after his death. He is one of only four novelists to win multiple Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction (along with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead). His best known work, The Magnificent Ambersons, (1918) won the 1919 Pulitzer, and was made into movies at least three times, one directed by Orson Welles.
Considered the most important author of his time with a number of works turned into films, Tarkington, along with James Whitcomb Riley, Meredith Nicholson, and George Ade, formed what has been described as an Indiana Golden Age of literature, only to fade into obscurity with the advent of WW-II.
The author created an inverse image of the infamous George Amberson Minafer in a 11-year-old boy named Penrod. His friends group is multiracial, certain to get Penrod books banned and burned in Florida schools. The choice of names was fraught: Sam, Herman, and Verman, a nickname to arouse the ire. Tarkington couldn't foresee his vision of an expanded racial universe could be tarnished by a careless, offhand choice of nicknames.
Penrod is a cross between Tom Sawyer and Dennis the Menace, who, along with his pals, might have influenced the Little Rascals / Our Gang franchise. As a book-devouring child chomping through our thin school library, I discovered the series: Penrod, Penrod and Sam, and Penrod Jashber. The first two books were mostly short stories, the third more of a novel. The latter featured him playing private detective.
Is there any wonder I thought of Penrod when Michael asked us to write a private eye story in the prohibition time frame?
In my story, Penrod Jasper (the surname comes from my grandfather) is twelve as is Sam… actually Samantha. She has a touch of my niece and I fell in love with her. She’s outspoken, trusting, fearless, and won’t back down for any reason. I’m also fond of one of my gangsters, a hulking, not-so-bright muscle named Ferd. And there’s Queenie… Discover them for yourself.
Enscribed in Black and White
I had the opportunity to read a few stories prior to publication and one unintended factor struck me– this book will be banned in Florida. Each story I read, mine included, dealt with not merely race relations, but race and relations.
I interpret it as our small way of telling rising racial supremacists that we reject their world. Most of us want to live and love in peace and prosperity, kindness and consideration.
In future articles, I’ll be talking about the following:
