A commonly asked question (probably the most commonly asked) posed to authors is “Where do you get your ideas?” One of the most asked questions of me is its cousin, “Where do you find the stories for the book?” and its corollary, asked by beginning mystery writers, “Where can I submit my stories?”
I cannot answer the first question, which to me is one step away from being a miracle, and it’s too glib to respond to the others with “Any place that publishes fiction,” though it is largely true.
If a writer is just discovering mystery fiction, the most obvious answer is Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, which has been publishing first-rate detective stories for more than eighty years. If they have been working in this literary genre for even a short time, it is too obvious to mention, which is also true of its sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. If we add the third most likely choice, The Strand Magazine, the home of most Sherlock Holmes stories during the Victorian and Edwardian eras and brought back to life twenty-five years ago after a long hiatus, I have exhausted all the most prominent candidates.
Sadly, fewer and fewer short fiction works appear in general magazines. Such women’s magazines as Redbook (which first serialized Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, among much else), Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal proudly ran stories (many of them mysteries), as did such men’s magazines as Esquire, Argosy, Stag, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and Playboy (and some men actually did read the fiction, contrary to common belief). Now, if they still exist, the publication of fiction is as rare as a conservative defense lawyer.
There were other mystery specialty magazines in the 1950s, 1960s, and a few held on into the 1970s: Manhunt (in which original stories by Ross Macdonald, Mickey Spillane, and Ed McBain first appeared), The Saint Mystery Magazine, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and eponymous digest-size publications named for Rex Stout, Ed McBain, Michael Shayne, Edgar Wallace, and John Creasey (the latter two published in England).
Some years earlier, there were such high-paying and prestigious general interest magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty, Scribner’s, and Cosmopolitan (before it changed its target readership to primarily women).
There were, too, pulp magazines, which flourished in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, before the creation of mass-market paperback books doomed them. Pulps, which in some years saw as many as five hundred different titles at newsstands, contained mostly fiction and featured authors who went on to become successful book writers. In the mystery field, the most notable were Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner, though some British authors also frequently introduced works in these cheap magazines with their garish covers, notably Agatha Christie.
The New Yorker still publishes quality fiction, including the occasional mystery story, and several others still throw a bone to authors by offering a single story per month. There are numerous other outlets, but not for authors who want to earn a living by the pen.
There are hundreds of literary journals that publish thousands of stories every year but they only provide nourishment for the soul, unable to pay more than a few dollars and copies of the magazine for a work over which a serious writer may have labored for a month or more. And this is princely compared to electronic magazines, e-zines, where payment is largely restricted to a sincere thank you.
More recently, a good source of original mystery and crime stories has been anthologies. Whereas anthologies were once relatively uncommon, scores now seem to be published each year, focused on a region or an organization that publishes them, restricting contributors to members of their particular coterie. Some of these modest publications have been especially well-represented in this volume.
A high percentage of stories in this edition were discovered in literary journals, most of whom deny that they publish crime fiction until I’m able to supply the parameters of how to define mystery.
While it is redundant to write it again, since I have already done it in so many “Best of …” anthologies that I’ve edited (although it is painful to acknowledge, I do recognize that not everyone reads and memorizes my forewords), it is fair warning to state that many people erroneously regard a “mystery” as a detective story. Though important, detective stories are only a subgenre of the much bigger literary category of mystery fiction (generally referred to in the UK as crime fiction), which I define as any work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or the plot. While I love good puzzles and tales of pure ratiocination, few of these are written today as the mystery genre has evolved (or devolved, depending upon your point of view) into a more character-driven form of literature, with more emphasis on the “why” of a crime’s commission than a “who” or “how.” The line between mystery fiction and general fiction has become more and more blurred in recent years, producing fewer memorable detective stories but more significant literature.
To find the best of these stories is a yearlong quest, largely enabled by my invaluable colleague Michele Slung, who culls the mystery magazines, both printed and electronic, for suitable stories, just as she does short story collections (works by a single author) and anthologies (works by a variety of authors), popular magazines, and literary journals. As the fastest and smartest reader in the world, she examines somewhere between three thousand and four thousand stories a year, largely to determine if they are mysteries (you can’t tell a story by its title), and then to determine if they are worth serious consideration. I then read the harvested crop, passing along some of the best (or at least those I liked best) to the guest editor, and we select the twenty that are then reprinted, with another ten that just missed the cut being listed in an honor roll as “Additional outstanding stories.”
It is almost impossible to adequately thank the guest editor for the 2024 edition of The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Year’s Best Mystery Stories, Anthony Horowitz, one of the most talented and hardworking writers I’ve ever known.
He has been remarkably successful in so many areas of crime fiction that it would be difficult to point to a single one as primary.
As a television writer, which is where I became a fan, he created and wrote Foyle’s War, arguably the most compelling TV series in history. He also created and wrote the vastly popular Midsomer Murders, as well as such limited-run shows as Collision and Injustice.
His young adult novels featuring Alex Rider have sold more than twenty million copies and have been the basis for a much-loved TV series. His adult books have shown his range: two Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty; three James Bond novels, Trigger Mortis, Forever and a Day, and With a Mind to Kill; the massive bestsellers Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders (both also successful television programs); and, perhaps the most fascinating and challenging of all, the most recent series featuring Detective Hawthorne and a sidekick named Anthony Horowitz, The Word Is Murder, The Sentence Is Death, A Line to Kill, The Twist of a Knife, and Close to Death.
There is much, much more, but the big question is, after more than fifty novels and all those television shows, how he found time and energy to work on this volume.
A word of thanks is also more than appropriate for the previous guest editors of this series: Lee Child, Sara Paretsky, and Amor Towles. I am deeply in debt to all four for their generous participation.
While I engage in a relentless quest to locate and read every mystery/crime/suspense story published, I live in terror that I will miss a worthy story, so if you are an author, editor, or publisher, or care about one, please feel free to send a book, magazine, or tear-sheet to me c/o The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. If it first appeared electronically, you must submit a hard copy. It is vital to include the author’s contact information. No unpublished material will be considered, for what should be obvious reasons. No material will be returned. If you distrust the postal service, enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard and I’ll let you know that your submission was received.
To be eligible for next year’s edition, a story must have been published in the calendar year 2024. The earlier in the year I receive the story, the more fondly I regard it. For reasons known only to them, some dunderheads wait until Christmas week to submit a story published the previous spring. This occurs every year, causing serious irritability as I read a stack of stories while friends trim Christmas trees, do their holiday shopping, meet for lunches and dinners, or otherwise celebrate the holiday season. It had better be a damned good story if you do this. I am being neither arrogant nor whimsical when I state that the absolute firm deadline for me to receive a submission is December 31 due to the very tight production schedule for the book. If the story arrives one day later, it will not be read. Sorry.
Otto Penzler
February 2024