Here, you will find highlights of each month's print issue – including excerpts from our award-winning short stories, our book-review column The Jury Box, and The Mystery Crossword.The place to be for a good mystery!
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In our June issue: A special In Memoriam section to the late Edward D. Hoch features memories and tributes from his fellow MWA Grand Masters, writers, and editors. Hoch’s unbroken, 35-year-long run of stories in EQMM continues this month with a new adventure for P.I. Al Darlan, who attends an avant-garde arts festival in New York to track down an old friend’s wandering daughter.

Also taking place in New York City: Loren D. Estleman brings us the first installment of his new, humorous series introducing amateur detective Claudius Lyon, who has patterned his career after that of his idol Nero Wolfe; novelist Twist Phelan debuts in the pages of EQMM with a standalone story that illuminates the dark corners on the high-stakes floor of the New York Stock Exchange; and our Department of First Stories entry for this month, by Meredith S. Cole, is set at a Brooklyn public swimming pool, where one swimmer is making up for her lack of athletic prowess with a driving sense of ambition.

Our latest Black Mask installment takes place in 1930s Chicago, where Max Allan Collins’s private dick Nate Heller meets The Blonde Tigress, a real-life gangster’s moll with more criminal smarts than she lets on. Elsewhere in the Midwest, Terence Faherty’s investigative reporter at the Star Republic tries to uncover the story behind the multiple roadside memorials that have appeared around Indianapolis, all with the same teenage girl’s photo. Down South, Clark Howard brings us a state director of corrections, who struggles with his conscience when his high-school sweetheart’s husband ends up on death row . . . for her murder.

Rounding out the issue are a trio of stories about secret identities and organized blackmail. From across the pond, Peter Lovesey brings us the story of a working-class man whose life gets a surprise upgrade, beginning with his wardrobe, courtesy of his friendly neighborhood circle of criminals. This month’s Passport to Crime story comes from pseudonymous pair of authors, writing as Christian X. Ferdinandus, who spin the story of a successful Argentinean businessman who finds himself suddenly, inextricably tangled in the web of a blackmailer from his past. Finally, James Powell sets his story about a family’s “public relations” business in a small Canadian town—for in small towns, it’s even more worthwhile paying somebody to keep things under wraps.

I had a bad feeling when the doorbell rang. Of course, I never like hearing the doorbell. I’d known for a while that someone could file a complaint with social services or the health department at any time. As soon as they stepped through the door, the game would be up. The old man would be off to some home and I’d be out in the cold…

In this issue Loren Estleman begins a new series for us, one we hope will prove as much of a delight to readers and a success commercially as his Valentino series, which was an EQMM exclusive until the release, in April ’08, of the first Valentino novel, Frames, from Forge. In this new series, set in Brooklyn, the Michigan author has placed the sleuthing in the hands of a devotee of another great New York detective, Nero Wolfe.

A writer who’s a better researcher than Clark Howard would be hard to find. The five-time Readers Award winner is always lacing his stories with interesting facts and often, as here, sets them against the background of contemporary issues. Perhaps he’s drawing on skills developed in his complementary career as a top author of true crime.