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The Short Mystery Story
Volume 15, No. 3, Fall 1999
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE WRITERS WRITE
- Murder Mysteries: America's Game by Kent
Braithwaite
- Contests, Writers' Groups, and That Elusive Letter of
Acceptance by Jim Doherty
- Murder in Small and Varied Doses... by Elizabeth
Foxwell
- A Brief Essay on Vertically-Challenged Mystery Stories
by Kate Grilley
- Going Long: Writing Novella-Length Mysteries by David
K. Harford
- A Banquet for Thousands: The Mystery Anthology by John
Helfers
- Writing and Editing Short Stories by
Edward D. Hoch
- The Short Story Imperative by Wendy Hornsby
- Doing It the Hard Way by Janet LaPierre
- Crime, Color, and Comedy by JoAnne Lucas
- Canine Crimes / Canine Christmas by Jeffrey Marks
- Going Once... by L.C. Mohr
- Short Story Writer to Novelist? by Kris Neri
- A Short Trip Through Time by Sharan Newman
- Finding the Good Stuff by Steven
Saylor
- Publish an Anthology? Sure We Will! by Margaret
Searles
- Oh Lord!: Putting Together an Anthology by Serita
Stevens
- Magazine Publishers' Secret Guidelines and How To Find
Them by Sunnye Tiedemann
- Themeless in America by Marilyn Wallace
COLUMNS
- Mystery In Retrospect: Reviews by Carol Harper
- On the Net: E-zines--Pulps of the 21st Century? by Kate
Derie
- Just The Facts: The Cigar Girl And The Storyteller by
Jim Doherty
- A Mystery Reader Abroad: Some Like It Hot! by Carol
Harper
- MRI Mayhem by Janet A. Rudolph
- Letters to the Editor
- From the Editor's Desk by Janet A. Rudolph
A Small World with a Big View
by Janet Hutchings (New York, New York)
My work is confined to a small area of publishing. Most
New York publishing houses expect their editors to acquire both
fiction and nonfiction, and even those who work exclusively with
fiction usually cover everything from mainstream to mystery to
other genres. That rare publishing professional who wears only the
mystery editor's hat often edits the occasional short story
collection in between full-length novels. Only I, at Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine, and Cathleen Jordan, my counterpart
at Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, devote ourselves
full-time to the mystery short story. We occupy a tiny outpost in
the vastness of publishing.
Our less trafficked place is a happy spot for me due to an
enduring appreciation for the richness of the mystery and suspense
story in particular and the short story in general -- an
appreciation I try to convey, through EQMM, to readers who
might otherwise have virtually forgotten this splendid literary
form.
The first and most obvious pleasure of a short story is that it
can be consumed in a single reading. If a work of fiction is good,
the impression it makes will generally be more powerful and longer
lasting if taken in all at once rather than in separate segments,
interrupted by the humdrum of daily life.
Because shortness demands economy of words, the successful
short story writer is necessarily a master of the art of
selectivity, and this gives him or her a great advantage in
effectively delineating character. For those of us whose chief
pleasure in reading fiction derives from characterization, the
short story is more satisfying than most novels, for in the short
story we are given the essentials of a personality and left with
our imagination to fill in the rest. When I pick up a novel now,
after so many years of daily immersion in the short story, I feel
like the boy who on first seeing the newly invented television
declared, in disappointment, that what he'd been used to hearing
on radio was so much more vivid. (A case like many others in the
arts in which, for me, less turns out to be more.)
To complement its vividness, the short story provides a sense
of completeness I rarely experience reading a novel. This is
probably a matter of perspective: The shorter work is small enough
to be viewed as a whole, and for the events of the story to be
seen to bring us back to where they started -- as they so often do
in fine fiction.
Readers who enjoy short fiction at all, whether for my reasons
or others of their own, usually also have a special predilection
for mystery short stories. In fact, most lovers of the mainstream
short story have carried on at least a flirtation with the crime
or mystery story, often without even knowing it. In the early
1940s, Fred Dannay, the founding editor of Ellery Queen's
Mystery Magazine, demonstrated to his readership that many of
the greatest works of literature, by Nobel and Pulitzer prize
winners, were actually crime stories. Readers simply hadn't
thought of them in that way before. As EQMM's current
editor, I accept Dannay's generous definition of what constitutes
a crime story; how could I not when it allows us such wide scope
to indulge our own literary preferences in acquiring stories for
the magazine?
Besides, Dannay was clearly right. The number of short story
readers who subscribe to the so-called literary magazines only to
find there, and enjoy, stories that most writers and editors
nowadays would classify as crime tales is larger than some
literati might like to admit. (After all, wasn't last year's Edgar
Allan Poe Award winner for best short story from just such a
literary stronghold?) Fred Dannay's view of crime fiction has
become the accepted view. But this goes to show that the mystery
magazines are not marooned in an out-of-the-way space after all.
In a way, you might say that we sit right at the center of the
fiction universe, where every writer interested in the darker
motives for human behavior will probably decide to come, sooner or
later, if he or she decides to make the journey in less than
20,000 words.
Our magazines' central position in the world of mainstream
fiction is assured by the fact that so many short stories, at
least peripherally, involve crime: The important place we occupy
in crime fiction as a genre has even firmer roots, for no one who
claims to like only the detective or crime novel can get around
the fact that the earliest detective tales, those of Edgar Allan
Poe, were short stories. In the century and a half since Poe's
first detective story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was
published, the mystery short story has developed diverse forms.
The classical detective story of Poe's devising is less often seen
these days, but we have, in addition to it, police procedurals,
cases for fictional private eyes (both male and female), cozies,
woman-in-jeopardy tales, British noir, the psychological suspense
story, the twist-in-the-tail Hitchcockian thriller, and more. At
EQMM, the oldest mystery short-story magazine continuously
in print, we publish them all. We do so with a view to
representing not only the mystery genre as classically understood,
but as it has developed over the last few decades.
As every serious reader of crime fiction knows, there has been
an expansion in recent years in the various mystery sub-genres.
Where we once had simply hardboiled private eyes, for example, we
now have male and female ops, hard- and soft-boiled cases, and
British and American versions of the form. This breaking open of
the categories has resulted in a greater variety of authors
finding a home in our genre than ever before. Gone are the days
when the mystery -- short or long -- was largely or exclusively
concerned with the presentation and solution of a puzzle. After
World War II, and most noticeably in the 1980s and 90s, mystery
and crime writing began consciously to include serious subjects,
and to strive to be more than pure entertainment. Though many of
the very best contemporary mysteries still contain some form of
puzzle, most also treat realistic themes and pose the same kinds
of questions about human nature that absorb writers of general
fiction. This is true of short-story mysteries no less than of
mystery novels.
To some, the world of the mystery magazines may appear small,
but, surprisingly, they provide a vantage point from which we have
the pleasure of seeing and assessing nearly every type of short
fiction being written. My greatest satisfaction in editing
EQMM comes from finding and presenting to our readers the
finest examples I can of the inexhaustibly rich and growing form
we call the mystery short story.
Writing and Editing Short Stories
by Edward D. Hoch
As I write this in September of 1999, I find that I have
published 812 short stories over a period of forty-four years, a
figure that staggers even me. That's more than eighteen stories a
year, every year, and I'm still writing them at about the same
rate. I suppose I started writing short stories, and have
continued writing them, because the ideas have always come easily
to me. The few novels I published back in the late 1960s and early
1970s were a real effort for me to complete -- and perhaps they
showed it. The stories, on the other hand, come relatively easily.
Unfortunately, this is not the golden age of the mystery short
story. We're a full century removed from those days when British
train travelers would purchase a copy of the Strand or its
imitators to wile away an hour or so on their rides home from
London. For today's travelers it's usually a paperback novel
picked up at an airport, or a laptop computer so they can continue
working during the flight.
Still, the detective story was born in its short form. It could
be argued that Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in addition
to its other perfections, is the perfect length for a detective
story -- about 14,000 words. That length is a hard sell for an
author these days. The mystery magazines and original anthologies
are more comfortable with something about half as long.
Since I often mention how easily ideas seem to come to me, I'm
sometimes asked how this happens. With me the answer is simple. I
read a great deal, see movies, watch television. I'm constantly
looking for something that's both intriguing and unfamiliar. A
tiny incident from a novel can trigger a plot idea. A
hundred-year-old fantasy about a disappearing room can become the
problem in an impossible crime story with a perfectly logical
solution. A travel book about Hong Kong can furnish material for a
spy story. Even an occasional incident in my own life, like a trip
to the emergency room at a hospital or a visit to the dentist, can
provide a plot.
Authors often complain that there's not enough money to be made
writing short stories, but anthology reprints, collections,
foreign sales in Europe and Japan, and occasional television sales
can make it rewarding. In my own case, I have labored in the short
story field as both writer and editor. For twenty years I edited
an annual anthology series of the year's best mysteries, and I've
published six additional anthologies, two of them for the Mystery
Writers of America.
Editing a collection of reprinted stories is not the same as
choosing new stories for a magazine or anthology, of course. In my
annual series of best mysteries, I felt the author and original
editor had done most of the work for me. Except in rare instances
where an obvious error or typo cropped up, the stories were
reprinted as they originally appeared. More than once I had to
dissuade my editor at a publishing house from making changes so a
particular story (even an Edgar winner!) would conform to the
publisher's style standards. Obviously an award-winning story
should be reprinted in its original form.
With my annual best mystery anthologies, I was chosen to take
over the job after Al Hubin retired from the position. I edited
the series for Dutton for six year and for Walker (with a title
change) for fourteen additional years. My other six anthologies
were all suggested to me by the publishers or by MWA. It is a sad
truth today that publishers demand a certain number of big names,
preferably best-selling mystery novelists, in the anthologies they
publish. I've always tried to balance these with at least a few
lesser-known writers.
The criteria for inclusion in one of my anthologies depended
upon circumstances. With my annual series I was choosing my
favorite stories of the year, always including the MWA Edgar
winner. With themed anthologies I wanted stories that fit the
themes -- historical mysteries and impossible crimes in the pair of
volumes I edited for MWA. I was limited to MWA members in those
books, but still came up with a wealth of material. In others like
Murder Most Sacred (1989), a collection of Catholic tales
of mystery and suspense, my extensive reading and a good memory
served me well, shortening the time of the selection process. Once
the stories were chosen, there was an introduction to be written,
along with headnotes for the individual stories. Their order of
appearance in the volume had to be decided. Often they were
arranged alphabetically by author, although sometimes I like to
start and finish the book with the strongest stories. In my recent
anthology, Twelve American Detective Stories (OUP, 1998),
the arrangement was chronological.
It's quite possible in the years to come that mystery magazines
may be replaced by anthologies of original stories, providing less
opportunity for beginning writers. But I doubt if the short story
form will ever completely vanish, either in mainstream or mystery.
It is a particularly American sort of fiction. At its best it can
be a memorable character sketch, a fascinating tale with an
unexpected ending, or even a novel in miniature. It's fun to read,
and even more fun to write.
Finding the Good Stuff
by Steven Saylor (Berkeley, California)
In 1998, I served as chair of the Mystery Writers of
America short story committee, which selected the nominees and
winner of the Edgar Award. By year's end, the committee had
reviewed a total of 617 entries. Sources were as varied as
Playboy and a self-published children's book of Mexican
folk tales, but most of the stories came from EQMM and
AHMM and from original anthologies published in hardback or
paperback.
Out of that experience, I have a few observations to make on
the state of the mystery short story at the end of the millennium.
There are scores of good stories being published every year.
Good, I said; not great. Our problem wasn't wading through dreck;
we weren't dealing with slush pile material, but for the most part
with stories written by professional writers, accepted or
commissioned by professional editors. But while there is a lot of
B+ and A- material out there, stand-out stories that boldly
announce "This is award-winning stuff!" are few and far between.
Even among good-to-fair stories, there's a lot of clutter. Many
more short stories are being published every year than should be,
stories that simply reiterate ideas and characters and plots from
other stories, that add nothing new or noteworthy or even
enjoyable to the genre. I blame this clutter chiefly on the
original anthologies produced by professional editors who choose a
theme, contact a given number of pro writers, and then seem to
accept pretty much whatever the writers turn in. (This type of
"high concept" anthology is typical of the current market; the
theme may be cats, dogs, geographical regions, historical setting,
fairy tales retold as crime stories, etc.) While a few of the
contributors seem to really "get" the idea of the project and
produce genuinely inspired gems, many more of the authors seem
almost to begrudge the effort, like students who resent a rigid
and uninspiring class assignment. Consequently, most of these
anthologies produce just a handful of stories worth reading, while
simultaneously producing many more stories that need never have
been written at all. The world does need any more stories written
simply for the purpose of filling pages.
So where is the good stuff? Three of our nominees came from
tried-and-true EQMM, including two stories by past Edgar
winners. But our winner came from a surprising source -- an academic
journal called The Texas Review. Tom Franklin's "Poachers"
was unlike anything else we read, and was far and away the
consensus choice of the committee. Atmospheric, chilling,
unforgettable, it's about as far you can get from an arbitrary
effort churned out to satisfy a theme anthology. Someone at
William Morrow thought so, too; even before our Edgar balloting,
"Poachers" was chosen to be the title story for Franklin's debut
collection of short fiction. Quality gets noticed.
"Poachers" marked the first time that a story from an academic
journal was nominated for the Edgar. Another of our nominees,
"Sacrifice" by L.L. Thrasher, marked the first story to be
nominated from the small-circulation Murderous Intent Mystery
Magazine. "Sacrifice" proves that stand-out stories don't
appear just in the mass-market publications, but also in smaller,
less prestigious, less lucrative venues... where they can still
get noticed.
Steven Saylor's "Roma Sub Rosa" series set in ancient Rome
includes the short story collection The House of the
Vestals (St. Martin's, 1997).
Buy this back issue!
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