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.