Larry Sweazy, whose work was last featured in our pages more than a decade ago, returns to EQMM in our current issue (May/June 2024) with the memorable and moving story “The Low Waters,” in the Black Mask Department. The author is one of several EQMM contributors who are best known in the field of Western fiction. Larry won the Western Writers of America’s Spur award for Best Short Fiction in 2005 and for Best Paperback Original Novel in 2013. But he is also a mystery writer who has earned recognition with inclusion in year’s best anthologies and with a nomination for a Derringer Award in 2007 ..read more

H. Hodgkins is a professor of English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of Style and the Single Girl: How Modern Women Re-Dressed the Novel, 1922-1977. Her professional fiction debut, the story “When Baptists Go Bad,” appears in the Department of First Stories of our May/June 2024 issue, on sale April 9th. In this post, she suggests some interesting challenges for mystery writers, derived from her knowledge of literature.  —Janet Hutchings I doubt most mystery writers have difficulty thinking up ideas. A picture, a n ..read more

A winner of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement from the Short Mystery Fiction Society and many other honors, Michael Bracken is one of the most prolific and popular short-story writers (he’s also a novelist!) in our genre. You can find a new story by him, “Bermuda Triangle,” in our upcoming May/June 2024 issue (on sale April 9th). He’s here to tell us about an important new venture that every fan of short crime fiction, as well as every writer, will likely be interested in.—Janet Hutchings Novelists soak up attention at mystery conferences and conventions, d ..read more

Happy reading this season and all others ..read more

Sophia Lynch made her fiction debut with the story “Rendering,” in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s January/February 2024 issue. The story turns around a life model who agrees to a private session at an artist’s home—a situation with inherent potential for sinister developments and suspense. The author herself has worked as a life model and studio assistant. She’s currently immersed in her first novel, while also producing a handful of new short stories which she describes as “about strange people doing appalling things.” In this post she discusses her interest, as a crime-fiction wri ..read more

Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee Janice Law created one of the first fictional female private eyes with her Anna Peters series, launched in 1976. She has continued writing in the crime fiction genre at both novel and short-story length. Her latest book is 2022’s The Falling Man, which is set in the art world—a milieu she knows about, since she is not only an author but a painter. She has an interesting story to tell about her last story for EQMM, “The Knight-Wizard” (July/August 2023), and she’s provided us with some of her art inspired by the story. For those who did not get a chance to read the ..read more

R. T. Raichev’s articles related to mystery fiction have appeared on this site frequently. This time, he trains his critical eye on Patricia Highsmith, an author whose short stories appeared in EQMM over several decades. R.T. Raichev is also a novelist and short story writer. “Blind Witness,” a new story in his series starring mystery writer Antonia Darcy, is coming up in our May/June 2024 issue. Don’t miss it!  —Janet Hutchings Open Media Ltd, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons What kind of book was a nine-year old American g ..read more

Peter Lance Graves told EQMM that it was his discovery of the Ellery Queen novel The Greek Coffin Mystery, as an adolescent, that sparked his love of crime fiction. He went on to read Agatha Christie and “took way too long to discover John D. MacDonald.” But he soon became fascinated with true crime as well. In this post he brings to life a true crime that, for him, comes very close to home. But then he brings us back to fiction through discussion of a recent crime novel with a similar theme. The Illinois author’s first published work of fiction, the story “Neighborly,” appears in the Dep ..read more

Two years ago, essayist and short story writer Kevin Mims contributed a post to this site about the work of Frederick Forsyth. He’s clearly a big fan of the best-selling English thriller writer, although he prefers the author’s earlier works to those released in the 2000s.  In this post, however, he takes a second, more favorable look at those later works. —Janet Hutchings Das blaue Sofa, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Back in September of 2021, I wrote an essay for this blog about Frederick Forsyth’s 1982 short story collection No Comebacks ..read more

P.D. James once said, in an interview about her famous series sleuth Dalgliesh, “An experienced senior detective told Adam Dalgliesh, when Adam was new to the CID, that all the motives for murder came under the letter L: love, lust, lucre, and loathing. He added: ‘They’ll tell you, laddie, that the most dangerous emotion is hatred. Don’t believe them. The most dangerous emotion is love.’” Since at least the early 1700s in England, an entire day has been associated with the celebration of this “dangerous” emotion—as the saint’s day for St. Valentine was transformed to focus on traditions such a ..read more