Thursday, September 12, 2013

Why I Love Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

It arrives through my letter box every month or so in its neat transparent wrapper. It's the perfect size and weight - better even than a Kindle - to slip in my handbag for emergency reading. I encounter old friends in its pages and read work by writers new to me. I like the old-fashioned feel to the cover and the fact that it actually has illustrations. It's a treasured survival from the golden age of short story publishing, but it also has a great blog, somethingisgoingtohappen.net, written by the editor, Janet Hutchings, and guest contributors. So I love it as a reader, but perhaps I love it even more as a writer. I've just had a short story accepted (the one that's a kind of riff on the locked room theme). It only took six weeks from submission to contract. They pay a proper fee and they pay it when you've returned the contract instead of waiting for publication. Every Christmas a card arrives from New York signed by the editor and her assistant, and when one of my stories was short-listed for an award Janet wrote me a personal letter. It's a beacon of light in a publishing world where good manners are too often in short supply.

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2 Comments:

Blogger Martin Edwards said...

Just come belatedly to this post and I couldn't agree more. It's a terrific magazine, and deserves to be celebrated by all crime fiction fans.

Tuesday, 15 October, 2013  
Blogger Christine said...

The latest edition has just arrived and the first story by Lisa Cody is a cracker.

Wednesday, 16 October, 2013  

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