Kiwi contributor to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Further to my Tuesday post looking at Hamilton-based writer Stephen Ross, who has a short mystery story in the March 2010 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ross now also has a mystery short story in the May issue of equally prestigious Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine was launched in 1941, by two New York cousins, Daniel Nathan (aka Frederic Dannay) and Manford Lepofsky (aka Manfred Bennington Lee), who wrote dozens of detective fiction stories under the pseudonym Ellery Queen (and starring a detective of the same name) between 1929 and 1971.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is one of the most influential crime fiction publications in history, and the longest-running, and most-awarded, mystery fiction magazine in existence. More than forty Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners have featured in EQMM — Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Alice Walker among them.

Almost seventy years on, getting a short story published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is still seen as a very 'big deal' for modern mystery writers, from acclaimed novelists to budding writers (their Department of First Stories has launched more than 700 writers). The magazine continues to deliver top-notch stories written by the world's leading crime and mystery writers, including, as noted on the subscription part of their website, Lawrence Block, Jeffery Deaver, Margaret Maron, Val McDermid, Anne Perry, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell, and Peter Robinson.


As noted on the EQMM website, Ross is currently the only New Zealand writer regularly contributing to EQMM. Although he lives in Hamilton, he sets his mysteries overseas, rather than in New Zealand. "In addition to being a mystery writer, Ross is an occasional newspaper and magazine columnist, and a long time ago, he says, he wrote jokes for television. Like most short story writers, he has a day job; he works in the IT industry as a copy/technical writer and as a programmer."

Ross also has further mystery short stories coming out in upcoming issues of EQMM, Alfred Hitchock Mystery Magazine, and Prole, a new British literary magazine. So his location way down the bottom of the world certainly isn't stopping him 'breaking in' and having some great ongoing success in the Northern Hemisphere short story market.

In the May 2010 issue of EQMM, which (at least for the next few weeks) you can read about here, Ross "returns to the Golden Age of Hollywood, when a rising starlet enlists a budding writer, behind her mogul husband's back, to script the perfect crime."

You can read a (very large) extract from the story, "The White Door", here. Even though it's only the first week of March, apparently the May issue of EQMM may already be on sale - so those dying to read the end, can pick up a copy to find out what happens. I am going to have to source one from somewhere (unfortunately AHMM and EQMM aren't readily available in NZ).

Do you read Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine? Or other mystery short story magazines, such as AHMM or The Strand? Do you enjoy crime and mystery short stories as well as full-length novels? What do you think of the start of "The White Door" - would you want to read more? Thoughts and comments welcome.