Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
Website
elleryqueenmysterymagazine.com
About the Publication
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine came on the scene in the fall of 1941 under the ownership of Lawrence E. Spivak of The Mercury Press. It was heralded as the brainchild of Ellery Queen himself, really the two-cousin writing team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Dannay assumed primary editorial responsibility for the magazine, serving as its editor-in-chief from 1941 until his death in 1982. Response to the magazine was enthusiastic, with the first issue selling over 90,000 copies. EQMM quickly established a place as the leading periodical in the genre—a place it has retained for more than three-quarters of a century. Under Dannay’s editorship EQMM’s list of contributors became an honor roll of crime and literary fiction’s great names, from Christie to Hammett to Faulkner. Subsequent editors have added many more luminaries—from Stephen King to Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Ruth Rendell, Charlaine Harris, and Peter Robinson. The magazine has published more than forty Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners. EQMM established its Department of First Stories in 1949; to date, more than 800 new writers have broken into print in EQMM. The magazine has a global orientation, with the Passport to Crime department created in 2003 to make translations a regular feature. EQMM was the first publication to bring together between common covers all different types of mystery and crime fiction, from noir and hard-boiled to the classical whodunit, suspense and psychological suspense thrillers, and private eye, locked room, and impossible crime tales.
Submissions
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine welcomes submissions from both new and established writers. We publish every kind of mystery short story: the psychological suspense tale, the deductive puzzle, the private eye case—the gamut of crime and detection from the realistic (including the policeman’s lot and stories of police procedure) to the more imaginative (including “locked rooms” and “impossible crimes”). We need hard-boiled stories as well as “cozies,” but we are not interested in explicit sex or violence. We do not want true detective or crime stories. We are especially happy to review first stories by authors who have never before published fiction professionally. From the beginning three general criteria have been employed in evaluating submissions: We look for strong writing, an original and exciting plot, and professional craftsmanship. EQMM uses stories of almost every length. 2,500-8,000 words is the preferred range, but we occasionally use stories of up to 12,000 words and we feature one or two short novels (up to 20,000 words) each year, although these spaces are usually reserved for established writers. Shorter stories are also considered, including minute mysteries of as little as 250 words.
Information
- Editors Name Janet Hutchings
- Print publication? Yes
- Circulation Not specified
- Do you take online submissions? Yes provided
- Approx. Response Time? Up to three months
- How often do you publish? Not specified
- Year Founded? 1941
- Do you pay? 5 to 8¢ a word, sometimes higher for established authors Mailing Address: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Attn: Sandy Marlowe, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855 Email Not specified