Misadventures

by Dale C. Andrews                                                 

 

[A] pastiche is a serious and sincere imitation in the exact manner of the original author.  

    --  Ellery Queen

        The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes  (1944)   

We have been using the word "pastiche" for decades, at least since Ellery Queen's The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of such stories, was published in 1944.  

     --  Chris Redmond 

          "You Say Fanfic, I Say Pastiche -- Is  there a
           Difference?” (2015) 

       This week (I am happy to announce) marks the culmination of a project that has kept me fairly busy for a good bit of the last year -- the publication of The Misadventures of Ellery Queen, co-edited by Josh Pachter and me, Dale Andrews. The anthology collects, for the first time, 16 stories, written over the course of some 70 years. The stories are “misadventures,” that is, pastiches, parodies and other homages, all inspired by author/detective Ellery Queen. For Josh and me putting together this collection has been a work of love. And it has also been a project that has been, well . . a long time coming.   

       Many of you may remember from previous SleuthSayer articles that Ellery occupies a particularly warm spot in my writing heart. Over the years I’ve written three Ellery Queen pastiches that have graced the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and I’ve written numerous articles on Ellery and his exploits that have appeared on SleuthSayers. While some of the backstory to The Misadventures of Ellery Queen predates SleuthSayers, the recent story of how the collection came into being can be traced through various footprints throughout the history of this website.   

     Books collecting “misadventure,” that is, anthologies that carry forth the exploits of an established character but in stories penned by other authors, have a long pedigree. The best examples of misadventures are the many stories and anthologies offering up new Sherlock Holmes stories written outside of the established Arthur Conan Doyle canon. And the first collection of such stories was The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by none other than -- Ellery Queen in 1944. (The collection was quickly withdrawn from the public following a copyright challenge from the Arthur Conan Doyle estate. Luckily for all of us the collection is now once again readily available.) 

       It was only natural that a fan of Ellery Queen who has also written new Ellery Queen adventures (that would be me!) would reasonably be expected to ponder why the stories not originally drafted by Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee but nonetheless featuring their detective creation Ellery have not been previously collected. EQ pastiches and parodies are not as numerous as those featuring Sherlock Holmes, but nevertheless many have popped up with some regularity since at least 1947, when Thomas Narcejac wrote (in French) Le Mystere de ballons rouge featuring Ellery, and the inspector. Since then Jon L. Breen, Francis Nevins, Edward D. Hoch and a host of others, both famous and lesser known, have also contributed Ellery Queen stories. So wouldn’t an Ellery Queen “misadventures” anthology make some sense?   

The Japanese Misadventures

     That was precisely the question I pondered in one of my earliest SleuthSayers articles, “Fair Play Mysteries and the Land of the Rising Sun,” which posted on October 25, 2011. At the time the article was written I had just received a request to allow my first EQ pastiche, “The Book Case,” written in collaboration with my good friend Kurt Sercu, proprietor of Ellery Queen -- A Website on Deduction, to appear in exactly such an anthology. That volume, also entitled The Misadventures of Ellery Queen was published in 2012. But, as that earlier SleuthSayers post explains, the book, edited by Iiki Yusan, who also heads up the Ellery Queen Fan Club in Japan, was intended for the Japanese market and the stories it collects have been translated into Japanese. All of this is explained (and lamented) in that earlier article. Even back then, as I indicated in a response to a comment, I was ruminating over the possibility of an English language Misadventures anthology.   

       From 2012 on my author’s copy of the Japanese Misadventures just sat there on my own book case -- staring at me accusingly as nothing happened and the years slipped by. Since I don’t read Japanese about the only thing I could meaningfully ponder in Iiki Yusan’s Misadventures was the list of contributing authors, which appeared in English at the back of the book. The list included the likes of Francis Nevins, Jon Breen, Ed Hoch, and even me. 

        Also a guy named Josh Pachter.   

       Josh Pachter? Back in 2011 when I wrote that first SleuthSayers column the name meant nothing to me.   

       Josh, it turned out, has written many mystery stories during a career of almost fifty years -- including several homages featuring a character by the name of E.Q. Griffen. The reason I was unfamiliar with  these stories is the same reason that I had concluded that we needed a collection of Ellery’s misadventures -- Josh’s Ellery Queen homages were nearly impossible to find. Like almost all EQ pastiches, parodies and homages they were published originally in issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and that had occurred many years ago. As a practical matter those magazine issues were unavailable to the vast majority of the reading public. But even given this, I began to hear more and more about Josh, including the fact that he lived not all that far away from me, outside of Washington, D.C. in the Virginia suburbs.   

       So let's skip a few years and eventually alight in yet another SleuthSayers article.   

       In the summer of 2015 I received an email from my friend Francis (Mike) Nevins informing me that he would be traveling through Washington, D.C. that September. I immediately offered up our guest room, and Mike accepted. 

        Mike Nevins, as many of you will know, is an emeritus professor at St. Louis University Law School, a preeminent Ellery Queen scholar and the author of many short stories and books, including two seminal biographical works chronicling the lives and works of the two cousins who were Ellery Queen -- Fred Dannay and Manfred B. Lee: Royal Bloodline: Ellery Queen, Author and Detective (1974) and the more recent Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection (2013). Mike’s 2013 book was, in fact, reviewed by me right here on SleuthSayers in January of 2013.   

       Mike is also the author of one of the finest Ellery Queen pastiches ever written -- “Open Letter to Survivors.”   

       When Mike accepted my invitation by return email he told me that he would really like to get together with an old friend during his D.C. stay. Another author. Named Josh Pachter. As I said, by then I knew who Josh was. Mike and I contacted Josh by email and dinner was scheduled for a September evening in the backyard of my home. The dinner (you guessed it) was the subject of my SleuthSayers article of September 27, 2015.    

Josh, Mike and me in the backyard. 
(Animation courtesy of Google!)

     As we chatted that evening it turned out that I was not the only one who had contemplated a collection of Ellery Queen misadventures. Josh’s first EQMM story -- that E.Q. Griffen homage -- was published in EQMM when he was just 16 years old, at a time when Frederic Dannay was still editor-in-chief of the magazine. Josh had thereafter become close friends with Dannay and had even broached the possibility of exactly such a volume with him. But nothing came of it.   

       It didn’t take long for the gears to begin to mesh. Maybe each of us thought. Just maybe working together we could actually do this.   

       And, to make a longer story short, we did! The Misadventures of Ellery Queen, which we compiled over the course of almost a year, has one story by each of us -- “The Book Case” for me; “E.Q. Griffen Earns his Name” for Josh. The other 14 stories are by other authors.  We had a lot of stories to choose from, and the final volume differs in many respects from the Japanese Misadventures anthology. Our book includes the first ever English translation of that 1947 Thomas Narcejac pastiche “The Mystery of the Red Balloons,” as well as Mike Nevin’s “Open Letter to Survivors.” Readers will also find Jon Breen’s pastiche “The Gilbert and Sullivan Clue,” and a particularly sneaky pastiche by Ed Hoch, which spent most of its literary life masquerading as an Ellery Queen-authored story . There are stories by Lawrence Block. William Brittain, James Holding and others. And the book also includes what is probably the most recent Queen homage (a sort of pastiche with it’s own twist) Edgar winner Joe Goodrich’s “The Ten-Cent Murder.” All of those, and quite a few others by authors famous and authors obscure share one thing in comon --  each was inspired by Ellery.   

       Josh and I are particularly pleased with the final product shaped by our publisher, Wildside Press, which has made the collection available in hard cover, trade paperback, and Kindle editions.  

Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee
Picture courtesy of "Ellery Queen -- A website on Deduction"

       Choosing the stories, writing  introductions, and otherwise putting this volume together has been a joy for Josh and me for many reasons. Perhaps the greatest joy is mirrored in an observation by Janet Hutchings, editor of EQMM.  In these Misadventures, she has written, “Ellery Queen lives again.” That's what we were hoping for.   Dannay and Lee, writing as Ellery Queen observed in their introduction to that 1944 Sherlock Holmes Misadventure anthology that pastiches and parodies are "the next best thing to new stories."  

       And that was always what we wanted most to accomplish -- bringing some of the many adventures of Ellery Queen written by authors other than Dannay and Lee together in one volume.  We hope that readers will enjoy diving into these alternative adventures as much as we have enjoyed collecting them.

       One final note -- in addition to availability on-line, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen will also be on sale at the Malice Domestic convention at the end of April.  And Josh and I will both be there.  Just in case anyone might want . . . uhh . . . a signed copy?

If It's Tuesday This Must Be Belgium -- or, "The Dutch Website Mystery"

    Several times in the course of past articles on SleuthSayers I have referenced my Belgian friend and occasional collaborator Kurt Sercu and his remarkable website Ellery Queen  --  A Website on Deduction.  In fact, in my first post I promised more about Kurt in the future.  No time like the present!

    I stumbled on to Kurt’s site sometime in 2000, when it had been on-line for about a year.   As an Ellery Queen stalwart over the years I had frequently used internet search engines to look for on-line articles about Queen.  Invariably those searches yielded rudimentary lists of books, or abbreviated discussions on the lives of Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay, who were Queen.  My expectations  were therefore already low when I ran the search again in mid-2000.  I was surprised when  Kurt’s then-new site appeared at the top of the search list and was awed when I then visited the site.  Even if you are not an Ellery Queen fan you have to be amazed by Kurt’s website.  It goes on forever.   But before embarking on a short tour of the site, let’s delve a bit deeper into the background of its author and proprietor

Brugge, Belgium

    It is a sort of poetic symmetry that Kurt is superficially a wholly unlikely candidate to preside over the world’s foremost collection of facts pertaining to the Queen canon – after all, in Ellery Queen mysteries it is often the least likely character who is in fact the murderer!  How unlikely?  Well, Kurt is a head nurse at a large hospital in Belgium.  He and his wife Martine and their two children Dries and Astrid reside in the picture-perfect town of Brugge, Belgium.  His native language is Dutch, and his website offers up both an English language and Dutch version.  One might perhaps have expected Hercule Poirot from Kurt, but Ellery Queen?

Dale Andrews and Kurt Sercu,
2005

In the amazing world of the internet – where everyone can be everyone else’s virtual neighbor – Kurt and I first became friends during the course of an exchange of messages on the Golden Age Detective Forum, where Kurt presides over the Ellery Queen section.  Since then Kurt and I have corresponded by email, often several times per week, and we have visited in person twice – once in 2005 when literally on the spur of the moment he flew to D.C. and together we attended the Ellery Queen Centenary Symposium hosted by EQMM in New York City.  Thereafter, two years ago Kurt and his family vacationed in the United States and stayed with us in Washington, D.C. for one week.

But back to that website.  Kurt explains there that he first became interested in Ellery Queen when he read Queen mysteries, in Dutch translation, in the 1970s.

[Then, Kurt explains,] in 1997 the net came to my house.  After some time I wanted to start a website of my own. Not one with personal [reflections] but with content, content useful to the visitor.   If all webmasters would do the same the net [it seemed to me could become an] interesting place to spend some time.  My first idea was to start a website on Tolkien.  But several sites on the subject already existed and had done a great job! So what other subject I could talk about? Well, there was [my then] small collection Queen-stories.

Those stories, together with some articles Kurt had collected concerning Ellery Queen, formed the early foundation for Ellery Queen – A Website on Deduction.  

[At first I] tried to "cut and paste" my way through what grew into a large volume of information. Too few sites, in my opinion, do justice to [Queen], who started off in the late twenties and [continued to write] into the seventies.  He made maximum use of the media at that time and is now, I feel, grossly neglected. I hoped the site [would] fire up more interest in the Ellery Queen stories.

The result of Kurt’s efforts has now grown into a near-Byzantine website.  In fact, I know of no other site that is as complex, or that offers up deeper insight into its subject matter.

     A word of caution – as noted above, Kurt has published two versions of the site, one in his native Dutch language and one in his second (or perhaps third or fourth) language – English.  My second language is Spanish, and I do well if I can order from the menu in a Mexican restaurant.  So expect a few translation difficulties, and just marvel that someone can produce such a source of information in a language that is not their native tongue.

     Just as it is the best practice not to reveal “spoilers” when discussing detective fiction, so too I want to be careful not to reveal too much about Kurt’s website since, like Ellery Queen’s stories, there is much just below the surface that is best discovered by the reader working through the site at his or her own pace.

In many respects the site is half Wikipedia, half computer game.  For those of you somewhat removed from the “gaming community,” there is a device used quite often in games that is referred to as the “Easter Egg."  Easter Eggs are hidden messages or "in" jokes or references hidden in the course of a game.  Kurt’s site is full of Easter Eggs -- click-able words that the reader will miss unless care is taken, and that, once found, will lead the reader to hidden pages from which you can tunnel deeper and deeper into the subject matter.  As an example, if you dig really deep you can find my very first Ellery Queen pastiche, never published elsewhere.  But it will take a lot of looking.  I barely remember how to get there myself!  You can also find hidden goodies such as an essay on the Queen Centenary Symposium, one click away but otherwise not referenced on the site’s menu.

      It would be easy to spend a rainy day entirely entertained by Ellery Queen -- A Website on Deduction.  The homepage for the site gives you most of what you need to know in order to begin your journey.  While some guidance is offered below, explore the page with your cursor.  Like a good fair play mystery the site holds lots of twists and turns, just awaiting discovery.

That promise aside, here is a sort of beginner’s guide to the site.

    “List of Suspects” takes you to detailed essays on recurring characters in the Queen library – Ellery, the Inspector, Sergeant Velie and, among others that infrequent Secretary and almost love interest, Nikki Porter. You will also find essays on Djuna, a character in early Queen mysteries (who also figures prominently in The Book Case pastiche), and lesser luminaries -- like coroner Dr. Samuel Prouty.

   “QBI” unlocks an amazing sixteen pages in which every Ellery Queen book ever written – and not just those in which Ellery appears – is discussed in detail.  Kurt even provides the history of each of the works that Dannay and Lee “farmed out” to other writers in a perhaps ill conceived attempt to keep the Queen name before the reading public.  (Some, including Frederic Dannay’s son Richard, have argued that this in fact hastened the demise of Queen since these later volumes are generally inferior to the works actually authored by Dannay and Lee.)  While perusing these essays be sure to click on the covers of the various volumes – this will take you to even more in-depth discussions of each work.

     “Kill as Directed” offers up essays on every Ellery Queen movie, comic book and television series.  Clicking through the list of episodes of the first EQ television series, which aired on the ancient and largely forgotten Dumont television network, will lead you to a select few episodes that Kurt has uncovered that can be watched, in their entirety, through the website.   The section also contains a full and affectionate guide to the 1975 NBC Ellery Queen series, a personal favorite, now (finally) available in a re-mastered DVD collection, and surely one of the finest fair play detective series to ever grace the small screen. 

     “Whodunit” contains essays chronicling the lives of Dannay and Lee.  But you will also find biographical notes on every other author who  ever authored a Queen work as a ghost writer.  These comprise those farmed-out volumes, the Ellery Queen Jr. juvenile mystery series, and some later Ellery works that, while outlined by Dannay, were written by others during the period in which Manfred B. Lee famously suffered from writer’s block.  In "Whodunit" you will also find descriptions of every Ellery Queen pastiche ever written.

     This all just scratches the surface.  And the site continues to grow.  In addition to the interview with Iiki Yusan, which prompted my SleuthSayer’s article on October 25, Kurt has also recently devoted a growing number of pages to the “West Eighty Seventh Street Irregulars,” comprised of individuals who have been active in keeping alive the Queen name.  There you will find essays by Joe Christopher, Janet Hutchings, Jon Breen and (blushing) me!

     Enough guidance!  Go forth.  And be warned – there is a lot more clicking to be done before you even get beyond the site’s introduction page.  If you are a Queen fan, or potential Queen fan, well, read and enjoy.  But even if you are not, take a look around the website and marvel at how much sheer information is imparted through this grandly designed portal.

David Dean, right, with his Readers' Choice award.  (Runner-up on left)

A note to Tuesday readers -- as you may have noticed, there has been a little bit of disarray getting our Tuesday rotation of authors up and running.  For that reason you have had me lurking around here for several weeks in a row.  Next week, however, we welcome aboard a new SleuthSayer -- David Dean.  

David is a well known author of mystery stories, who will doubtless offer up his own introduction next week.  I have some (grudging) praise that I will proffer first, however.  David's short story Ibrahim's Eyes came in first place in the 2007 EQMM Readers Choice survey, thereby edging out -- by one vote -- The Book Case, which placed second.   Welcome, David!
  

SleuthSayers First Anniversary!

by Leigh Lundin and my fellow SleuthSayers

Tomorrow SleuthSayers will be one year old!

Our first year has been wonderful to us, our cadre of crime-writers and crime-fighters. A few of us have been together 5¹/₂ years, although it's not longevity that makes a SleuthSayer, but camaraderie and a penchant for damn good writing.

We're pleased to count among our colleagues a police chief, a DEA Special Agent, a military explosives expert, a Washington lawyer and insider, and a crime scholar. We also feature cosy novelists, historical authors, and popular pasticheurs. While we embrace all genres of crime-writing, we probably have more short-fiction specialists thanks to our Criminal Brief days. With further ado, hear from my colleagues about the past year and the next.

Dale Andrews: Choosing a favorite mystery from the past year would be difficult– too many contenders. But my favorite mystery-related event is easily identifiable– the pre-Edgar Award cocktail party hosted by EQMM/AHMM that I attended in New York last April. I don’t make it to every one of these gatherings– the train ride from DC to NYC and back is a bit dear. But where else, in two short hours, does a mystery writer get the opportunity to visit such fascinating and revered comrades in arms? This year I chatted first with the sponsors of the event, Janet Hutchings and Linda Landrigan. Then I headed across the room to visit Frederic Dannay’s son Richard and his wife Gloria. We discussed Blood Relations, the recent collection of the letters of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee edited by Joseph Goodrich, and then shifted smoothly to Jeffrey Mark’s planned new biography of Dannay and Lee. After that it was great to re-connect with my SleuthSayers’ partner David Dean, who was an honored guest, an Edgar nominee for his short story Tomorrow’s Dead. While David and I held down the fort for SleuthSayers, our predecessor blog, Criminal Brief, was even better represented with James Lincoln Warren, Steven Steinbock and Melodie Johnson Howe all in attendance. The opportunity to visit with these folks and others during the party was easily worth the cost of those train tickets. But in many ways the best was yet to come. When the party ended I found myself in a fascinating three-way conversation on mysteries and Ellery Queen in particular on the walk back to Penn Station with Joe Goodrich, editor of the afore-mentioned Blood Relations, and my old friend Francis (Mike) Nevins, preeminent Ellery Queen scholar and the author of another upcoming retrospective of Dannay and Lee. As the Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” says concerning the two party system, as between the two it is the after party that you really want to attend!
		David Dean: It has been an interesting year for me. Not only did I retire from police work last November, but after a mandatory visit to its corporate HQ (location undisclosed as per contractual agreement), I also signed on with SleuthSayers. It's a great gig, and with the checks that keep rolling in, I've made several additions to my collection of vintage British roadsters. No less exciting, my story, "Tomorrow's Dead," July 2011 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, was nominated for an Edgar. An obscure Brit took home the actual prize, perhaps in retaliation for my buying up all their good roadsters. My horror novel, "The Thirteenth Child" will be released Oct. 5th by Genius Book Publishing--as the name of the company suggests, they only publish works of genius, so please ignore any snarky reviews that may be forthcoming. Mostly, I continue to scribble away, trying to fashion something that people might read.
Deborah Elliott-Upton: Although I have been a writing instructor, I enjoy being on the opposite side of the desk, too. My life's goal is to never stop learning. A new piece of knowledge is like quality chocolate: delicious, appetizing and leaves one with a taste for more. Despite my other obligations, I decided to return to college. This summer, I took two courses: philosophy and psychology. Both proved interesting, both as a student and as a writer. Both of my instructors were writing books; one a nonfiction text, the other fiction. In classroom discussions, the fiction writer and I realized we had much in common and following the end of classes, we became fast friends. I have enjoyed introducing her to my other writer friends and we have attended a writer's workshop together. What is more fun than sharing your time with people of like interests? The nonfiction writer/instructor asked if I'd be interested in editing his book, so that may still come to pass, after I finishing editing my pastor's book. The great mystery in life is how to get everything finished, but as in writing any project, it will be done step-by-step by putting one foot in front of another.
		Eve Fisher: 2012 saw two notable things for me: (1) I started contributing to Sleuthsayers as a blogger and (2) I discovered a whole new fan base in China, where my works are being translated by a mystery man in Shanghai who loves Laskin, SD! I’m not getting paid for it – but he shared the web site with me. The most interesting crime-related event of 2012 was at our local prison, where I volunteer and found that I had one former student as an inmate and another as a prison guard. Both of them were happy to see me.
John Floyd: Of all the mystery/crime-related books and stories I've read this past year, my favorite is probably a novel by Steve Hamilton, called Die a Stranger– the ninth book in the Alex McKnight series, set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I've enjoyed all the McKnight mysteries, as well as Steve's two stand-alones (Night Work and The Lock Artist)– but in my opinion Die a Stranger is distinctive in that it has one of the best, most logical endings I've read in a long time. It's the kind of seamless wrap-up that makes readers gasp with delight and makes fellow writers wish they could do half as well. Personal-favorite event: I was fortunate enough to place short stories in three back-to-back issues of The Strand Magazine: the Oct. 2011-Jan. 2012 issue, the Feb.-May 2012 issue, and the (current) June-Sept. 2012 issue. I'm not sure if my stories were good or if The Strand had three slower-than-usual submission periods, but I prefer to believe the stories earned their keep.
		David Edgerley Gates: My earliest influence as a storyteller was Kipling, and then the duck stories from Carl Barks– if you don't know, I'll happily explain. My best read of last year was Alan Furst, Spies Of The Balkans, and this year, his new book, Mission to Paris (I almost said, Night Train to Paris. evocative of Eric Ambler, one of Furst's big influences). My favorite crime event was local, a stripper hired to discredit a mayoral candidate here in New Mexico: I wrote a story about it, "Heavy Breathing." I found some new writers, or new to me, and not necessarily generic, Orhan Pamiuk (his book about Istanbul), Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union), and some old faves, Harlan Coben and Laura Lippman don't phone it in.
Jan Grape: One year ago, Sleuthsayers began. Strangely enough, my cats and I'd just moved from a 375ft2 RV into a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house. I'd barely settled with my furry felines, Nick and Nora, when we were joined by an Alien from the Planet Nashville in the Tennessee constellation– the youngest son of my daughter, Karla. Now I know exactly why she offered to buy this house for me. (Ha.) She thought I wouldn’t figure out her master plan. (Haha) Alien Cason and I managed to survive 8 months together and just before the men in the white coats with the straight jackets came for me, Cason and his female companion unit, Justine, who'd lived with us two months, headed back to his home planet. They’re doing well, both working and have their own apartment. I do miss the alien and not only on nights when it’s time to take out the garbage. Although my writing suffered from alien activities and ear/sinus infections punctuated by a Grape family reunion in NJ, I co-edited an American Crime Writers League anthology, Murder Here, Murder There, including my short story “The Confession”, inspired by a song by a friend, Thomas Michael Riley. I’m working to get my books on Nook and Kindle, and I hope to return to Broken Blue Badge, 3rd in the Zoe Barrow, Austin Policewoman series. Happy Birthday!
		Dixon Hill: This year has been rough for my “writing department,” due to extended family concerns. However, I’ve thankfully had time to read—quite a bit of it spent, unfortunately, in doctors’ offices and hospitals. The four top new writers I’ve run across include our own Fran Rizer and her wonderful Callie Parrish Mystery Series. What’s not to love when the protagonist wears an inflatable bra and her best friend is a phone sex operator? Well, actually, there’s a lot more to her stories, but I don’t want to give anything away—they’re great from stem to (ahem) stern! Then, there was Pistol Poets by Victor Gischler. Though it had a few technical flaws concerning weaponry and tactics, imho — I couldn’t help enjoying it. I’m now seeking time to enjoy a couple of his other titles: Gun Monkeys (Hey! Who wouldn’t wanna read a book named Gun Monkeys??) and Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse. I also recently read Jake Hinkson’s Hell on Church Street, a veritable fire-ball of murder that burned to the last page faster than Time Fuse and reminded me of some of the best of Jim Thompson’s work. Last, but far from least, I discovered Marcus Sakey’s excellent The Blade Itself and Good People, as well as a fantastic short story of his. Finally—here’s a toast: To next year being easier on everyone’s “writing department”!
Janice Law: It’s always nice to find a good new mystery, and this year so far, I’ve found two, neither from long time favorites. The Fear Index by Robert Harris is not only well plotted and timely, but works interesting changes on a favorite plot line. A sort of financial thriller, science fiction mashup it not only works very well but anticipated the recent runaway computer trading on Wall Street. Second is Mission to Paris by Alan Furst, whose well reviewed previous novels never clicked with me. This one is highly appealing with its movie star lead who, surprise, eventually falls for an age appropriate woman. Brisk and more realistic than usual this one could give nostalgia a good name.
		R.T. Lawton: This last year has been a time of re-reading old favorites, making new writing friends and getting a story into the MWA anthology. Some of my old favorite reads are the Chester Himes paperback novels featuring his Harlem Detectives, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. I found those in a used book store in Washington, D.C. during 1971 when I had free time from BNDD Basic Agent Class #15 and wanted something to read other than training manuals. Three of his novels were later made into movies. As for the new writing friends, that’s those blogging at SleuthSayers, plus readers who chime in from time to time. Some of you I hope to meet at the annual EQMM/AHMM cocktail reception in NYC this coming April, and the rest of you at one of the future Bouchercons or Left Coast Crime Conferences. And lastly, after three attempts at the MWA anthology, I finally made it into the one for 2013.
Rob Lopresti: I debated displaying some false modesty but hell, you guys know me by now. My favorite mystery-related experience of the year was being on the cover of Alfred Hitchcock's. It's an honor and I felt honored (still do). I suspect one reason my story made the cover is that it was easy to find a file picture (as opposed to a commissioned artwork) that would work with my story. Not that I'm complaining; the picture worked fine. This reminds me: the thing that thrilled me most about my first published story was the fact that it was illustrated. After all, for all I know the editor could have purchased it without even looking at it, but damn it, the artist had actually read it.
		Leigh Lundin: As I write this, I'm housesitting in a beautiful cliffside home on the Indian Ocean where whales and dolphins frolic in the waters below and the sound of the surf helps me write… 9th grade math textbooks in this case. It's been a great year launching SleuthSayers with the help of my colleagues and board members, which is where much of my creative energy's gone. During the Royal Show here (like a state fair), I chatted with a world-renown police rescuer Jack Haskins. Who knows– you might read about him on SleuthSayers! For some reason, authors names don't stick until I connect with them, and during the past year I now have a dozen more friends and colleagues. EQMM and AHMM are delivered every month to my door here in South Africa, so now when I see the author list you can hear me say, "So that's who that author is!" Here's to the next year…
Fran Rizer: The past year was traumatic for me and I escaped into reading. There were many exciting and intriguing mysteries by the big dogs, but the book that I enjoyed the most and read over and over is a collection of short stories that equal any I’ve ever taught on the college level— Blood in the Water by Janice Law. These pieces and the ones by other SleuthSayers that I read in AHMM, EQMM, and Woman’s World inspired more interest in writing short stories. Three of my recently written shorts were chosen to be included in the SC Screams Anthology. My thriller was published under a pen name that I’ll soon share, and the fifth Callie Parrish mystery, Mother Hubbard Has A Corpse in The Cupboard, will be released the first of 2013. Like several other SleuthSayers, I write music, too, and am proud as a peacock that Gene Holdway’s new CD, Train Whistle, includes six of my original songs.
		Louis Willis: For me, a reader and reviewer, the past 12 months reading articles of SleuthSayer members has been instructive. I've learned how writers of fiction think when creating a story. I’ve felt the agony they go through while writing; the anxiety they suffer after submitting it to an editor and waiting for a reply; the disappointment they feel when the rejection slip arrives. I've also felt the ecstasy they feel when the story is accepted and the excitement when it is published. When I receive my copies of the AHMM and EQMM, I search the contents for stories by SleuthSayer members. It has been fun. I look for to the next 12 months of delightful and insightful articles.
Liz Zelvin: SleuthSayers has given me some enjoyable new blogging experiences--sharing the virtual stage with crime fighters as well as crime writers and with blog brothers as well as blog sisters. It's been a good year for me in terms of creative projects too, with a couple of long-awaited publications: Death Will Extend Your Vacation, the third novel in my series featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, and "Shifting Is for the Goyim," my paranormal whodunit e-novella on Untreed Reads, as well as the release of my CD of original songs, Outrageous Older Woman, a dream thirty years or two years in the making, depending on whether you start counting at the point of writing the songs or recording the album.

Old-Time Detection: Best Mystery Writers

featuring Arthur Vidro

I’ve been pestering Arthur Vidro to submit an article ever since he was kind enough to send me a copy of Old-Time Detection, which I read with my feet propped up in the waiting area of an old-time tire repair shop. Before me, Dale Andrews not only invited Arthur, but has written about him more than once.

Arthur lives in Claremont which, as Dale has noted, is the pattern for Ellery Queen’s Wrightsville. His address is on… Ellery Street.

Arthur hand-publishes Old-Time Detection three times a year, a labor of love. As you might surmise, OTD eschews many of our modern means of publishing, but then its focus is not of this century. It harks back to when detectives used deduction and ratiocination rather than rely on electronic surveillance and CSI labs. That word ‘ratiocination’… I learned its definition as a kid reading golden age mysteries. When has anyone read that word in a novel in the past half century?

The following originally appeared in the Autumn 2008 issue of Old-Time Detection. [Mr. Vidro’s notes appear in brackets.]

For more information about subscribing, contact Arthur at oldtimedetection(at)netzero(dot)net

— Leigh Lundin

Anthony Boucher's 1951 List of 44
[42 novelists plus 2 short-story writers]
by Anthony Boucher
annotated by Arthur Vidro

    In June 1951, Ellery Queen asked his fellow crime writers:

“Would you care to nominate the ten best living detective-story writers? “For your convenience, why not use the back of this letter, and the stamped, addressed envelope enclosed.”

— Fred Dannay [of the Ellery Queen collaboration]

    Probably the most thorough reply to Fred Dannay's request for a top ten list came from mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher. His response merits being quoted in full. The names he cites, by his merely citing them, give 21^st century readers a dazzling roster of worthy authors to read. I don't know how much time Boucher spent in crafting his reply, but clearly he was enjoying himself; this was no mere annoying task for him, but a challenge he tackled with enthusiasm.
    Boucher's reply, from Berkeley, California, was among the earliest received; it was dated June 14, 1951 and typed on the letterhead of the Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, which was edited by Boucher and published by Spivak:

Dear Fred,

    You're a menace!
    You know I take my responsibilities seriously and can't just go jotting ten names down on the back of a letter – and you also know I never can resist such queries… and there goes a large chunk of F&SF's working day. Spivak should sue you.
    Anyway:
    My list of ten is not just living writers – it's contemporary practicing professionals, not including those who happen to be alive but are not actively important; order is alphabetical:

Nicholas Blake
John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson
Agatha Christie
Erle Stanley Gardner / A.A. Fair
Michael Innes
Ngaio Marsh
Ellery Queen / Barnaby Ross
Georges Simenon
Josephine Tey
Cornell Woolrich / William Irish / George Hopley

    A major criterion in selection was not only quality, but individuality and distinction.
    [Always the completist, Boucher insisted on including each author's known pseudonyms – in Woolrich's case, more than one pseudonym. He also felt obliged to bestow honor upon top writers who no longer were adding much to their prior accomplishments.]
    Here's a supplementary list of twelve living writers of the first rank who have stopped writing (at least in our field) or made only a few insignificant contributions in recent years:

Eric Ambler
E.C. Bentley
Anthony Berkeley / Francis Iles
Raymond Chandler
Freeman Wills Crofts
Graham Greene
Dashiell Hammett
Ronald A. Knox
Philip MacDonald
A.E.W. Mason
Craig Rice
Dorothy L. Sayers

    These lists are, incidentally, based primarily on the novel – thus excluding such figures as T.S. Stribling, who's written only shorts, or Roy Vickers, whose novels are usually ghastly. [Vickers won much acclaim for his Department of Dead Ends police investigative short stories. Stribling, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his novel-length fiction, is well worth seeking out for his short stories featuring criminologist Dr. Henry Poggioli – some of which are in print, courtesy of Crippen & Landru Publishers.]
    You might also be interested in the list of also-rans. These are the people who only barely got squeezed off the first list:

Margery Allingham
Charlotte Armstrong
Manning Coles
Edmund Crispin
Elizabeth Daly
Cyril Hare
Matthew Head
H.F. Heard
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
the Lockridges
Helen McCloy
John Ross Macdonald
Margaret Millar
Q. Patrick/Patrick Quentin
Elliot Paul
Evelyn Piper
Mabel Seeley
Rex Stout
Lawrence Treat
Arthur W. Upfield

    [John Ross Macdonald would later become more famous as Ross Macdonald. The Lockridges refers to the husband/wife mystery writing team of Richard and Frances Lockridge.]
    Do keep me posted and Tell Me All about this poll.
    TIMES has decided to give me the whole mystery-review column for a four-month trial period starting July 1. I'll also be covering the science fiction field for the TRIB (as H.H. Holmes) … which is handy because I have to read all that for F&SF's reviewing column anyway.
    [TIMES and TRIB refer to the newspapers The New York Times and probably the New York Herald Tribune. H.H. Holmes was a pseudonym Boucher also used on two of his mystery novels, Nine Times Nine and Rocket to the Morgue.]
    It took me a while (complicated by commuting to Los Angeles for the Hammett trial) to get over the illness with which I so spectacularly left New York; and I'm only gradually getting untangled and back to normal operations. I'll try to write you a proper letter soon – meanwhile please proffer my warmest devotion to Hilda.

Best,
Tony

    Fred Dannay was married to Hilda Wisenthal from 1947 until her death in 1972. Boucher did not consider this list of authors to be a full-fledged letter, so he promises to provide one soon; he corresponded frequently with Fred Dannay. Dashiell Hammett in 1951 was convicted of contempt of court for which he served five months in jail. Boucher's “Criminals at Large” column in The New York Times would run from 1951 until his death in 1968.

---

Leigh again with a historical note:

The trial referred to grew out of the McCarthy hearings in which Congress demanded Dashiell Hammett brand friends as communists. The thought police ploy was nasty: If a respondent knew no communists or had the fortitude to not dime out acquaintances with different beliefs, the result was the same: imprisonment for contempt of court.

Punishment of six months in a federal prison wasn’t sufficient: Hammett was blacklisted, his radio program cancelled, his books taken out of print, and his financial resources drained by government fines and legal fees.

Subscribe to Old-Time Detection ($18US per year, slightly higher elsewhere) by writing Arthur at  oldtimedetection(at)netzero(dot)net

Staying Afloat

I recently got my hands on a hoard of very old Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazines, and have been skimming them for dusty gems.  Came upon a little oddity in the April 1969 issue.  The first odd thing is that the story was a reprint - it had first appeared in EQMM in 1947.  And the editor -- that would be Frederick Dannay -- reports that upon the original appearance "(a)lmost without exception, readers and critics disapproved of the story, and editor-EQ [Dannay], to put it mildly, was pilloried."  Now, he reports, people have been asking to see "that prophetic story."  He suggests that he and the author were ahead of their time.

Well, we will get into that.  The story was "The President of the United States, Detective," by H.F. Heard.  Now, I would bet a shiny new quarter, featuring the Everglades National Park on the reverse side, that that title came from the editor, not the author.  First of all, Dannay was addicted to title-tinkering.  Second, it stinks of special pleading:  "This isn't science fiction!  It's a detective story.  See?  It's in the title."


It is science fiction.  The story takes place in the year 1977--

Okay, let's pause for a moment and deal with this crazy-making real-life time travel.  The story was written (or at least published) in 1947.  It was reprinted in 1969.  But I just read it (while flying around in my jetpack, of course) in the year 2014, which means this reader is further removed from the date of the story than Heard was when he wrote it.  Mind-boggling.

The hero of the story is President Place, "a mammoth of a man.  His hands were bigger even than George Washington's, he was taller than Lincoln, he weighed more than Taft. 'The biggest president ever.'"  Clearly not modeled on Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter, both of whom graced the Oval Office in 1977.

And now I should put in a SPOILER ALERT because I am going to reveal the plot of this almost seventy-year-old story. 

During one day President Place gathers info from several sources that convinced him that the Commissar of the USSR is up to no good.  The Commissar was Yang Chin, a Mongolian ("China, as usual, had swallowed those who rashly tried to get her into their clutches").  And as it turns out Yang had dropped atom bombs on his own permafrost, melting the ice, which would inevitably lead to parts of Europe and the Americas being flooded.

Ah, but he didn't count on shrewd President Place who, the same day, (apparently Environmental Impact Statements don't exist in this version of the 1970s) ordered the Air Force to bomb Greenland and Antarctica, causing their ice packs to melt, causing the land to be lightened, and therefore rise up.  

I told a friend about this and he said "Physics no do that."  He is a native English speaker,   but he was stunned.

An aside: the late author, H.F. Heard, also known as Gerald Heard, was an interesting guy.   His web site, which doesn't seem to mention our target story, does tell us about a Sherlockian novel, A Taste For Honey, and a lot of religious texts.  Apparently he was a big influence on the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous as well.

Getting back to the short story, one interesting point, obviously, is its prediction of human-made climate change.  I went on the web searching for comments on the story and  found Cli Fly Central, a website dedicated to climate change science fiction, which it suggests should be called Cli Fi.  Mr. Heard's piece is one of the earliests entries.  There is even an award for Cli Fi novels: The Nevil. 

This is of special interest to me because it appears that my own contribution to Cli Fi will be published in the next year.  It is, I assure you, crime fiction, not SF.  Even though it doesn't have "detective" in the title.  In the mean time, stay dry.

The Mysterious Women of Dell Magazines: Janet Hutchings

Janet Hutchings
photo by Laurie Pachter

Yesterday we began a series of interviews with the editors of the Dell mystery magazines. We began with Jackie Sherbow, we finish tomorrow with Linda Landrigan. But today we welcome Janet Hutchings.

— Robert Lopresti

Janet Hutchings has been the editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine since 1991. She is a co-winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Ellery Queen Award and the Malice Domestic Convention’s Poirot Award, and in 2003 she was honored by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention for contributions to the field. Under her editorship, EQMM was named Best Magazine/Review Publication by Bouchercon 27 and in 2017 was celebrated by Bouchercon 48 for Distinguished Contribution to the Genre.

---

Relate a piece of history about your magazine.

EQMM made history with its very first issue. When founding editor Fred Dannay released the magazine to the world in the fall of 1941 he was offering readers an entirely new type of publication. He’d decided to bring together between the covers of a single magazine stories of such widely different sorts that the combination would create a new type of audience for the mystery short story. Everything from what he called realistic stories of the hardboiled school to classical whodunits in the style of England’s Golden Age of mystery to stories no one would even remotely have considered mysteries before, by mainstream and even literary writers, were to be included. It was all, he said, “frankly experimental.”

Previously there had been the pulps, focused on hardboiled action-based stories, and the slicks, which published about one mystery per issue of a more traditional kind, but there was no single publication for readers who liked both forms—or for those who liked an even wider mix of stories. EQMM’s first issue sold more than 90,000 copies and the magazine soon began to exert an influence not only upon mystery fiction—helping to define the boundaries of the genre as we know it today—but upon the wider culture. At least one recent contemporary scholar has argued that EQMM was one of the many forces that influenced the postmodernist movement in the arts and literature. Modernism had made a clear distinction between art (or what we might call “high art”) and popular culture. Postmodernism rejected that distinction. But rejecting that divide was exactly what Dannay was doing in the early days of EQMM, mixing the high brow and the popular—the “literary” and the genre story.

What is one thing you wish everyone would know about your publication?

One thing I wish everyone would know not just about EQMM but about short-story magazines in general is that they are not just agglomerations of stories. In recent years various e-publishers and websites have been making individual stories available for sale or for free reading. But what the reader gets by subscribing to a short-story magazine is not simply a collection of individual stories, it is—or should be—a more complex reading experience.

The magazine should be designed to take the reader on a journey, via the juxtaposition of the stories, sometimes also by thematic convergences, and sometimes by means of commentary that may accompany a given story (the most famous example of the latter being Fred Dannay’s lengthy introductory essays for so many of the stories in early EQMMs). A short-story magazine should also seek to broaden readers’ tastes by offering, occasionally, something the readership would not necessarily be expected to like. I hope short-story magazines are never replaced entirely by short stories sold individually, because if that happens, a place in which discovery can occur will be lost. It’s an editor’s job to stretch readers’ horizons.

What does a typical workday for you look like?

There’s no typical day. I’m a little obsessive about keeping up with reading. When I hold a story for more than two or three weeks it’s usually either because something special is going on or because I like the story and hope eventually to find a space for it. Whenever possible, I devote one day a week entirely to reading. In recent months, social media has also been taking up a lot of my time: we now blog, podcast, and post on Twitter and Instagram—in between our primary duties, which are curating, editing, and finalizing each issue for the printer.

Have you always been a fan of mysteries?

I always read and enjoyed mysteries, from childhood on, but I was not a really dedicated fan until I got a job at the Mystery Guild in the 1980s. We got to read virtually every mystery novel that was published in a given year there, and it was so much fun! Still publishing some of the authors I first read there—such as Simon Brett.

Aside from short mystery fiction, what other parts of the genre do you enjoy?

I’ve had very little opportunity in recent years (with eyes always tired from reading submissions) to keep up with what’s going on at novel length in the field; nevertheless, I don’t feel out of touch with the genre as a whole. I once wrote that from our small outpost as editors of short-story magazines, we get to see the whole of the broad, fascinating universe of mystery and crime fiction.

I don’t consider the mystery short story to be a single form. It is, it seems to me, a multiplicity of forms in terms of length, and also a multiplicity in terms of structure. There’s everything from the miniature novels that Ed Hoch wrote for EQMM for so many years to the circularly structured twist-in-the-tail story (and much in between). I call the twist story “circular” because when you get to that final twist you see that it is what the whole story had to be leading up to. Flash fiction is another separate form, and in its compression it often has to convey whatever is necessary to the story through imagery; it says a lot in a very few words and in this it can sometimes have a lot in common with poetry. There’s so much more that falls under the mystery short story umbrella than I can mention here.

What great short story or collection have you read recently?

I am currently reading Joyce Carol Oates’s new collection Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense. I’ve been a fan of Joyce’s work for decades—long before I came to EQMM!

What is your personal editorial philosophy?

This isn’t easy to characterize succinctly. First, although I sometimes offer thoughts about how I think a story might be improved, I see my job as editor as fundamentally different from that of a critic or a teacher. My first responsibility as editor is to our readers. I read as a sort of proxy for them. And reading for them means I have to try to read in the way that they will read the finished magazine—for enjoyment, in other words, and not critically. When I sit down to read submissions, what I’m hoping for, no matter what the subgenre of the story, is to be taken out of my own life and all that surrounds me and be pulled entirely into the world of the story. I like all types of mysteries—indeed, all types of stories. Genre is not very important to me. A story will generally succeed or fail for me depending on how deeply the author is able to immerse me in it. And it isn’t always the best-crafted story that succeeds in doing this. It’s often the inexperienced Department of First Stories author who holds me captive from first page to last. I think this has something to do with passion (perhaps before writing becomes a job) or with the fact that first efforts often draw deeply from experience that has profoundly affected the author.

When I do attempt to give advice, I try to approach each short story as an organic whole. I know a lot of writers and also teachers of creative writing put a lot of emphasis on the importance of the separate parts of a story. The opening line is something that seems to be given a lot of weight. I often hear writers advised that they need an “attention grabbing” opening line. I think too much emphasis is put on this. A great opening line may be vital to a writer in getting the creative juices flowing. Some writers have told me they have to have an attention-getting opening line as the seed for the story. That’s fine. But from a reader/editor’s perspective what makes the opening line good or bad is how it serves everything that follows it in the story. Endings, it seems to me, are harder. I think an ending should have a sense of inevitability that derives from all that goes before it. But again, it’s the story as a whole—the particular story—that is my focus, not any rules I could formulate.

What do you love about short stories?

The tightness of the structure, and the fact that they can be read in one sitting. As Edgar Allan Poe pointed out, what you can read in a single sitting has the potential to have a profound impact. Life does not intervene.

What’s a place you’ve traveled to that has stuck with you, and why?

I lived in England for most of my twenties, and since those are formative years, I’m sure the affinity I have for most things British will never leave me. It’s wonderful having so many British writers contributing to EQMM, though that was none of my doing; it must be credited to my predecessor, Eleanor Sullivan. In geographical terms, EQMM’s reach has always been wide. From the earliest days, the magazine has looked for the best in mystery and crime stories from all over the world. There were 13 international contests run in the early years of the magazine and they received submissions from nearly two dozen countries.

One of my favorite departments is Passport to Crime, which we launched in 2003 with a crime story per month in translation. I’m not much of a traveler these days, but two trips I’ll never forget were the Soviet Union in the 1970s—it was like waking up in a war movie from the 1940s, with rationing and not much color and no advertising— and Costa Rica a couple of decades later, where I spent a night in a rain forest in a storm, with the animals seeming to generate as much noise as a NYC street. These days, I let our Passport authors take me where I want to go.

Where did you grow up?

The Chicago area, “flyover country.” Which is funny because I was once accused by an author whose work wasn’t accepted to the magazine of being an insular New Yorker with no understanding of the Midwest. I love my adopted city and state, but the Midwest will always be a part of me.

Thanks, SleuthSayers, for hosting the Dell Mystery Magazines editors! Tomorrow, Linda Landrigan.

The Last Lesson: Queen vs Hitchcock

Two weeks ago I reported that I had been invited to speak to the Northwest branch of the Mystery Writers of American on the subject: "Ten Things I learned Writing Short Stories."  I listed nine of them and promised to deliver the last one this week.  Here goes!

10.  What's the difference between Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine?  That's the second-most common question I hear about my writing.  (The first is the dreaded WDYGYI?)

For many years my reply was simple: AH buys my stories and EQ doesn't.  But since EQ has surrendered to my dubious charms several times I have to come up with some better distinction.  So here are a few.

Origin stories.  I mean the origins of the magazines themselves.  I think they are useful in thinking about how the editors think: What is in the magazine's DNA, so to speak?  Because as the old saying goes "What's bred in the bone, comes out in the flesh."

EQ was started in 1941 under the editorship of Frederic Dannay, one half of the author Ellery Queen.  Besides being an author and editor, Dannay was an anthologist and a historian of the mystery field.  He was determined to cover all aspects of the field (as opposed to Black Mask Magazine, for example, which had focused on hardboiled) and to stretch the definition of the mystery as well.  Therefore it was not unusual for him to print stories from around the world, stories from "literary" authors who were not considered mystery writers, and reprint stories that had been forgotten or that no one had previously thought of as belonging to the crime field at all.  EQ, for example, was the first American magazine to publish the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.  EQ retains a keen sense of the history of the mystery field, which leads to publishing parodies and pastiches.

AH, on the other hand, was founded in 1956.  The film director had no direct role in the magazine, simply licensing the use of his hame and likeness.  For many years the introduction to each issue was written in his voice.  The magazine was not inspired by his movies as much as by his very popular TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which actually filmed some stories that had originally appeared in the magazine.  Like the TV show, the magazine leaned toward suspense, twist endings, and a macabre sense of humor.  It still does.

Distinctions today.  EQ has regular departments.  Going all the way back to Dannay's day it has featured the Department of First Stories, which has premiered the work of up-and-coming artists who went on to fame such as Harry Kemelman, Henry Slesar, Stanley Ellin, and Thomas Flanagan.  Every issue features Passport to Crime, a story translated from another language.  EQ also owns the rights to the Black Mask name and often features a story in that magazine's hardboiled style.

My description of the beginnings of AH may have left you with the impression that their selection of story types is narrow. In fact, the opposite is true.  You can find examples of westerns and science fiction in its pages, as long as crime is front and center. Fantasy elements  may slip in.  (The rare ghost story can show up in either magazine; for some reason ghosts are the one bit of woowoo that is allowed in the mystery world.)

And some more quick generalizations.

EQ seems to lean more toward the grim, the longer, and the fair-play detection stories.

AH appears to favor the lighter, the shorter, and the twist ending.

It is important to be clear that everything I am saying here is about tendencies, not absolutes.  You can find exceptions in every issue, but if you are trying to decide which magazine to submit a story to first, this might help you.

One thing both seem to insist on, is high quality, which may explain why my overall sale record at AHMM is only about 33% and much worse at EQMM.

Your mileage, needless to say, may vary.