The Short Mystery Fiction Society

2012 Derringer Awards Submission Instructions

2012-01-01T13:52:00.002-05:00

The period to submit stories for the Derringer Awards is open as of Sunday, Jan. 1, 2012, at 12:00 p.m. (noon), Eastern Standard Time. The following link will take you to the blog page which details the complete rules and guidelines for the Derringer process. http://shortmystery.blogspot.com/2008/08/smfs-derringer-awards-procedure.html

1.) Who can submit: Members of SMFS as of Dec. 31, 2011 or editors of publications (print or online; see link above to read qualifications for 'publication') that feature short mystery fiction.

2.) Submission limits: Each member of SMFS may submit up to two (2)stories, your own or someone else's. Please note that a story's author need not be a member of SMFS, but the submission must be made by either a member or the editor of the publication in which the story first appeared in 2011. Submission limits for editors are detailed below, from the blog page: If the publication contains up to 25 stories first appearing in 2011, up to 3 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2012." 26 to 50 stories first appearing in 2011, up to 4 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2012." 51 to 75 stories first appearing in 2011, up to 5 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2012." more than 75 stories first appearing in 2011, up to 6 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2012. By the way, editors who are also SMFS members still have their two-story quota as members, in addition to the number allowed for their magazines.

3.) Publication date: Only stories first published in English in 2011 are eligible for the 2012 awards. If a story appeared, for example, in a "Winter 2010-2011" issue, or a "December 2010-January 2011" issue of a publication, it would be eligible for consideration this year. On the other hand, one appearing in such issues for 2011-2012 would be eligible for consideration in the 2013 award cycle.

4.) Submission format: Please submit each story, with its author and publication data, to me at hypatiax@aol.com in Rich Text Format(*.rtf). I will check the story's eligibility and strip identifying data from it before sending it on to the appropriate judges. The subject line of your email should read: Derringer - Story Title - Category

The Categories are:

Best Flash Story - up to 1000 words
Best Short Story - 1001 to 4000 words
Best Long story - 4001 to 8000 words
Best Novelette - 8001 - 17,500 words

PLEASE NOTE: Again, submissions begin at 12:00 EST Sunday, Jan. 1. Please don't send anything before that time, as it will be discarded.

Gwen Mayo
Derringer Coordinator 2012

SMFS Official Post: 2011 Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Recipient

2011-05-22T08:26:00.000-04:00

The members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society are pleased to announce that this year’s recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement is Ruth Rendell.

The 2011 Derringer Winners

2011-03-31T07:58:00.003-04:00

The Short Mystery Fiction Society is pleased to announce the winners of the 2011 Derringer Awards for short mystery fiction:

Best Flash Fiction Story (under 1,000 words) - (TIE)

"The Book Signing," by Kathy Chencharik, Thin Ice: Crime Stories by New England Writers, Leslie Wheeler, Mark Ammons, Barbara Ross, Kat Fast, Eds., Level Best Books, November, 2010

and

"The Unknown Substance" by Jane Hammons, A Twist of Noir, December 27, 2010

Best Short Story (1,001-4,000 words) - "Pewter Badge," by Michael J. Solender, Yellow Mama, August, 2010

Best Long Story (4,001-8,000 words) - (TIE)

"Care of the Circumcised Penis" by Sean Doolittle, Thuglit Presents: Blood, Guts & Whiskey, Todd Robinson, Ed., Kensington Publishing Corp., May, 2010

and

"Interpretation of Murder" by B. K. Stevens, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, December, 2010

Best Novelette (8,001-17,500 words) - "Rearview Mirror" by Art Taylor,
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March, 2010

Recipient of Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement - Ruth Rendell

We offer hearty congratulations to these authors for their demonstrated excellence in short fiction, and our sincere thanks to all who submitted stories.

Presentation of the Awards will take place in conjunction with the short story panel at Bouchercon 2011, held in St. Louis, MO in September.

Larry W. Chavis
Derringer Coordinator, 2011

2011 SMFS Derringer Award Finalists

2011-03-03T09:14:00.008-05:00

Listed below are the finalists in each category for the 2011 Derringer Awards.

Flash Story (under 1001 words)

"Blues in the Night" by Carol Kilgore published in Dark Valentine
"Homeless" by Patricia Morin published in Mystery Montage
"Stick a Needle in My Eye" by Julia Madeleine published in Powder Burn Flash
"The Book Signing" by Kathy Kencharik published in Thin Ice" Crime Stories By New England Writers
"The Unknown Substance" by Jane Hammons published in A Twist of Noir

Short Story (1001 - 4000 words)

"My Asshole Brother" by Eric Beetner published in A Twist of Noir
"Seventy-two Hours or Less" by Michael J. Solender published in A Twist of Noir
"Broken Down on the Bonneville Flats" by Jack Bates published in Beat to a Pulp
"Angel of Mercy" by David Price published in Beat to a Pulp
"Pewter Badge" by Michael J. Solender published in Yellow Mama

Long Story (4001 - 8000 words)

"A Tour of the Tower: by Christine Poulson published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
"Care of the Circumcised Penis" by Sean Doolittle published in Thuglit Presents: Blood, Guts, and Whiskey
"Interpretation of Murder" by B. K. Stevens published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
"Silicon Kings" by Richard Helms published in The Back Alley Webzine
"The Little Nogai Boy" by R. T. Lawton published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

Novelette (8001 - 17,500)

"Deserters" by Chris Muessig published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
"Rearview Mirror" by Art Taylor published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
"The Gods for Vengeance Cry" by Richard Helms published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
"The Man With One Eye" by Stephen Ross published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
"The Scent of Lilacs" by Doug Allyn published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

The winners will be announced on March 31. Congratulations and best wishes to each of the finalists!

2011 Derringer Awards Submission Instructions

2010-12-29T12:15:00.005-05:00

The period to submit stories for the Derringer Awards will open Saturday, Jan.1, 2011, at 12:00 p.m. (noon), Eastern Standard Time. The following link will take you to the blog page which details the complete rules and guidelines for the Derringer process. http://shortmystery.blogspot.com/2008/08/smfs-derringer-awards-procedure.html

1.) Who can submit: Members of SMFS as of Dec. 31, 2010 or editors of publications (print or online; see link above to read qualifications for 'publication') that feature short mystery fiction.

2.) Submission limits: Each member of SMFS may submit up to two (2)stories, your own or someone else's. Please note that a story's author need not be a member of SMFS, but the submission must be made by either a member or the editor of the publication in which the story first appeared in 2010. Submission limits for editors are detailed below, from the blog page:If the publication contains up to 25 stories first appearing in 2010, up to 3 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2011." 26 to 50 stories first appearing in 2010, up to 4 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2011." 51 to 75 stories first appearing in 2010, up to 5 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2011." more than 75 stories first appearing in 2010, up to 6 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2011.By the way, editors who are also SMFS members still have their two-story quota as members, in addition to the number allowed for their magazines.

3.) Publication date: Only stories first published in English in 2010are eligible for the 2011 awards. If a story appeared, for example, in a"Winter 2009-2010" issue, or a "December 2009-January 2010" issue of a publication, it would be eligible for consideration this year. On the other hand, one appearing in such issues for 2010-2011 would be eligible for consideration in the 2012 award cycle.

4.) Submission format: Please submit each story, with its author and publication data, to me at lwchavis @ bellsouth.net in Rich Text Format(*.rtf). I will check the story's eligibility and strip identifying data from it before sending it on to the appropriate judges. The subject line of your email should read: Derringer - Story Title - Category

The Categories are:

Best Flash Story - up to 1000 words
Best Short Story - 1001 to 4000 words
Best Long story - 4001 to 8000 words
Best Novelette - 8001 - 17,500 words

PLEASE NOTE: Again, submissions begin at 12:00 EST Saturday, Jan. 1. Please don't send anything before that time, as it will be discarded.

Larry Chavis
Derringer Coordinator 2011

The Derringer Award Presentation

2010-10-13T07:32:00.004-04:00

Bouchercon 2010 starts tomorrow, October 14, in San Francisco. On Friday, October 15, following the short story panel discussion "In Case of Madness", Jim Doherty will be presenting the 2010 Derringer Award plaques. The panel will be from 4:30 to 5:30 pm in the Grand Ballroom of The Hyatt Regency Hotel with the presentation immediately following.

If you're a member of SMFS or just a lover of the short story form please show your support by attending the panel and the presentation.

Thank you!

New Markets

2010-09-10T07:11:00.001-04:00

PULP METAL MAGAZINE has moved but is still, and is always, open for fiction and non fiction submissions.

It's a non-paying online market.

You can find its new home here:

http://pulpmetalmagazine.wordpress.com/

iPulpFiction.com

Established and agented authors only

Motion for Earlier Derringer Process

2010-07-24T07:07:00.001-04:00

Below is the text of Gerald So's July 9, 2010 motion, seconded by Kevin Tipple. The motion passed 43-0 July 23, 2010:

I move that the Derringer process take place in January-March of each year to simplify the cutoff date for member participation, to allow a full month exclusively for Derringer judging, and to increase the SMFS's opportunities to publish the Derringer results.

All Derringer submissions will be taken January 1 through January 31. In addition to receiving submissions, the Coordinator may begin distributing stories to the Judges, and Judges may submit scores to the Coordinator during this period if they wish.

February 1 through February 28/29 is reserved for the bulk of correspondence between the Judges and Coordinator. The Coordinator will have distributed all Derringer submissions to the Judges by February 1. The Coordinator may also draft new judges during this period if any existing judge becomes unresponsive or unable to judge. By February 28/29, the judges must have scored all submissions, and the Coordinator must have reported all scores and final averages back to the Judges, thereby determining the five finalists in each length category.

The group vote on the finalists will take place March 1 through March 30 on the Derringer Voting Group. The Voting Group will be used to store the finalist stories for the duration of the voting period and no longer. The Voting Group will also be used to verify that all voters have valid SMFS memberships dating back to at least one day before the start of the Derringer process (i.e. December 31 of the previous year).

The polls will close end-of-day March 30, but the results will not be official until the Coordinator officially announces them on March 31. The Coordinator or President will re-post this announcement to the SMFS blog, Finally, the President, as the SMFS's chief public representative, will send the announcement to as many publications related to our field as possible.

Vote here.

More markets

2010-06-30T12:45:00.003-04:00

http://thrillskillsnchills.blogspot.com/ - online, no payment

http://www.plotswithguns.com/ - online, no payment

Parting Thoughts

2010-06-29T11:54:00.000-04:00

Hello, all.

I wanted to get a jump on some parting thoughts as we prepare to welcome Sandra, Pat, and Larry on Thursday. It's been my honor facilitating discussion of everyone's ideas the past two years. May our progress continue and the SMFS's reputation spread as a group open and helpful to anyone interested in short mystery fiction, the kind of group we all want.

My thanks to VP Jim Doherty; Derringer Coordinators Nikki Dolson and Suzanne Rorhus; Golden Derringer Committee members Babs Lakey, Brian Thornton, and Larry Chavis; and everyone onlist for your support.

Gerald So
SMFS President (2008-2010)

Short Mystery Fiction Hall of Fame Induction Procedure

2010-06-27T00:38:00.003-04:00

Vice President Jim Doherty's motion for a Short Mystery Fiction Hall of Fame, detailed below, passed by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent on June 26, 2010.

1) The Short Mystery Fiction Society (hereafter, the "SMFS") shall establish a Short Mystery Fiction Hall of Fame (hereafter, "the Hall") to honor significant writers of short crime fiction who are no longer alive.

2) Except for charter inductees, who shall be named later, inductees into the Hall shall be selected by a special committee.

3) The committee already established to select recipients of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer shall also serve as the special committee to select inductees into the Hall. All members of the committee, while acting in their capacity as members of the Hall committee, shall serve the same functions, and serve for the same terms, as they do when acting in their capacity as members of the Golden Derringer committee.

4) a) The Hall shall be maintained on the SFMS website, and shall consist of a photo or, if no photo is available, an artist’s depiction of the inductee, below which shall be a description of the inductee’s career and his/her significant contribution to short crime fiction.

b) If possible, a physical site for the Hall shall also be established, if an appropriate venue can be found. Officers shall, among their other duties, be alert for opportunities to establish a physical site for the Hall at libraries, academic institutions, or other similar venues. Rank-and-file members shall are encouraged to be alert for possible venues as well, and to bring such venues to the attention of the officers and membership.

5) The criteria for selecting an inductee into the Hall shall be the same as the criteria for selecting a recipient for the Golden Derringer, with the following exceptions:

a) The requirement that a candidate for the Golden Derringer be alive at the time s/he was considered for the award shall be eliminated, and instead there shall be a requirement that a candidate for induction into the Hall shall have passed away at the time s/he is under consideration, and that the date of his/her passing shall be at least ten years prior to his/her being considered, in order that there can be some historical perspective brought to bear upon the consideration of his/her candidacy.

b) The committee shall be free to induct up to two (2) candidates annually. However, the committee is not required to induct any candidates during the course of a year.

c) Not withstanding subsection b) of this section, the committee should, in light of the many fine writers who have graced our genre in the form of short fiction, make every effort, at least during the first few years of the Hall’s existence, to find at least one (1) worthy candidate for induction each year.

d) There shall be one single exception to the requirement that a candidate for induction shall have passed away at least ten years prior to his/her consideration, to be named later in this motion.

6) The deliberations of the committee shall be kept strictly confidential, and all members must agree to this, each year, prior to the beginning of deliberations.

7) Nominations from the general membership shall be encouraged. Nominations shall take the form of short essay of roughly 200 words, sent to the SMFS President, in his/her capacity as the chairman of the committee, off-list. It should not be construed, however, that the candidate who has the most nominations, or who is the subject of the best-written nomination, shall be chosen. The committee members shall seriously consider nominations from the general membership, but are free to ultimately choose any candidate they consider worthy, even if no one from the general membership nominated that particular candidate. In other words, nominations from the general membership are suggestions, not mandates.

8) With the passage of this motion, there shall be twelve immediate inductions into the Hall, and the candidates who are so immediately inducted shall be designated the Charter Inductees. The Charter Inductees shall be listed in the Hall in chronological order according to the date his/her first piece of short crime fiction was published. Future inductees shall be listed in chronological order according to the date of his/her induction. If more than one future inductee is inducted in a single year, each candidate inducted in a single year shall be listed in chronological order according to the date his/her first piece of short crime fiction was published.

9) The names of the twelve proposed Charter Inductees, along with descriptions of their qualifications for induction, are listed below. You can click on the proposed inductees' names to jump to their qualifications (as compiled by Jim Doherty):

Edgar Allan Poe
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Baroness Orczy
R. Austin Freeman
Dashiell Hammett
Agatha Christie
Dorothy L. Sayers
Ellery Queen
Raymond Chandler
Cornell Woolrich
Stanley Ellin
Edward D. Hoch

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
One of the most important of all American literary figures, Poe wrote poetry and book reviews, and edited magazines, in addition to writing short fiction. His stories covered a variety of genres, but he is best-remembered as nothing less than the inventor of the crime fiction genre. More than that, in just a few short stories, he laid the foundation for most of the conventions now associated with that genre. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), and the "The Purloined Letter" (1844), the three stories comprising the trilogy featuring brilliant amateur sleuth C. August Dupin, Poe established the series character as the bulwark of the genre; introduced the device of having the stories narrated by an admiring friend of the hero, thus anticipating characters like Dr. Watson, Captain Hastings, and Archie Goodwin; depicted his hero as an "armchair detective" who was able to solve difficult cases without leaving his room just by the information he was given, a device that would later be used by Baroness Orczy and Rex Stout; wrote the first locked-room mystery, setting the stage for writers like John Dickson Carr, Joseph Cummings, Joel Townley Rogers, and Edward D. Hoch; introduced espionage as a sub-genre of crime fiction, providing a model for writers as diverse as Ian Fleming, Dorothy Gilman, and John le Carré; fictionalized a real-life crime, thus anticipating stories ranging from Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel The Lodger, inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders, to James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, both loosely based on the murder of Albert Snyder by his wife and her lover, to the radio-TV series Dragnet, every episode of which was based on an actual police case with "the names changed to protect the innocent"; had, as a recurring character, a well-meaning but plodding official policeman whose lack of imagination contrasted with the intellectual agility of the gifted amateur, anticipating characters like Inspector Lestrade, Inspector Japp, and Sergeant Holcomb; and created a brilliant master criminal to pit against his brilliant master detective, prefiguring characters like Professor Moriarty, Dr. Fu Manchu, Arnold Zeck, and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. In stand-alones like "The Gold Bug" (1843), "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), "The Black Cat" (1843), and "'Thou Art the Man!'" (1844), he introduced the device of a code or cipher as a clue to the solution of the case, anticipating stories like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" and Dorothy L. Sayers's Have His Carcase; took us inside the minds of murderers, anticipating works like Francis Iles's Before the Fact and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me; used a courtroom scene to heighten suspense, anticipating dozens of legal thriller specialists like Erle Stanley Gardner, Scott Turow, and John Grisham; used the device of a wrongfully accused suspect whom the detective must work to clear, the central theme of novels like William Irish's Phantom Lady and Agatha Christie's Mrs. McGinty's Dead; revealed the hitherto unknown villain to be the least suspected person, a surprise twist that virtually every whodunit writer since Poe has tried to replicate; and used methods of psychological pressure to trick a confession out of that least suspected person, anticipating scores of interrogation scenes and cross-examinations in modern police procedurals and courtroom thrillers. In short, Poe laid the groundwork for so many of the tropes and traditions now commonly associated with our genre, that he left successors with, to quote Conan Doyle, "no new ground they could confidently call their own."

Back to proposed inductees' list

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
Scottish physician who turned to writing crime fiction to supplement the meager income generated by his London medical practice, he would, in 1884, conceive the notion of a brilliant private consulting detective, patterned to a degree on Poe's Dupin, but closely based on one of his medical school professors, Dr. Joseph Bell, who, by observing minute details, was able to make the same kind of deductions in real life that Dupin made in fiction. The character Conan Doyle conceived, eventually dubbed Sherlock Holmes, made his debut in the 1887 novel, A Study in Scarlet. A second novel, The Sign of Four, followed in 1890. But it was the series of short stories featuring Holmes which appeared regularly in The Strand that turned the Baker Street sleuth into the most recognized character in fiction. Beginning with the 1891 entry "A Scandal in Bohemia," the soaring popularity of these stories would ultimately turn Holmes into fiction's first multi-media sensation, featured in stage plays, radio dramas, television series, comic strips and books, and, according to The Guinness Books of World Records, becoming the most frequently depicted character in movies, portrayed by more than 70 different actors in more than 200 films. Conan Doyle would ultimately write 56 short stories featuring Holmes, along with two more novels, two stage plays of his own, and a third play on which he collaborated with famed American actor William Gillette. Those short stories, collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927), are arguably the most popular pieces of short crime fiction ever written. And many, such as "The Red-Headed League" (1891), "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892), "Silver Blaze" (1892), and "The Final Problem" (1893, which introduced arch-fiend Professor Moriarty), are routinely listed as among the finest examples of short mystery fiction ever produced. Holmes's enduring popularity is indicated by the fact that so many writers, including John Dickson Carr, Nicholas Meyer, Edward D. Hoch, Loren D. Estleman, and Stephen King, have all written Holmesian pastiches. Indeed, there are now far more Holmes stories written by other writers than were originally written by Conan Doyle. That fact alone is positive proof of his creation's immortality.

Back to proposed inductees' list

Baroness Orczy (1865-1947)
Hungarian-born aristocrat who emigrated to England with her family at the age of 15, the Baroness Emma "Emmuska" Orczy is today best-remembered for her romantic historical adventure stories, particularly those featuring Sir Percy Blakeney, the foppish baronet who fought injustice in the guise of the mysterious swashbuckling hero, "The Scarlet Pimpernel." But she was also, in the early days of our genre, one of its most important innovators. Her best-remembered detective character was the elderly sleuth known as "The Old Man in the Corner." Introduced in the short story "The Fenchurch Street Mystery" (1901), the Old Man is perhaps the best-realized example of an armchair detective, solving mysterious crimes without ever leaving his seat in a small London teashop. His stories would be collected in The Case of Miss Elliott (1905), The Old Man in the Corner (1909), and Unravelled Knots (1925). Ranking a close second behind the Old Man is Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk, one of the top detectives in the London Metropolitan Police, and perhaps the first professional policewoman in fiction, whose published adventures actually predated the appointment of London's first women police officers by more than five years. Her twelve cases are collected in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910). Cunning defense lawyer Patrick Mulligan, whose five stories are collected in Skin o' My Tooth (1928), proves his wrongfully accused clients innocent by solving the crimes himself and identifying the actual culprits, precisely the modus operandi adopted by Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason a few years later. The Baroness combined detective fiction with the swashbuckling historical adventure she is better remembered for in ten stories featuring Monsieur Fernand, an agent of the Imperial Police in Napoleonic France, who was featured in ten stories collected in The Man in Grey (1918). Baroness Orczy's admirable facility at plot, characterization, and sheer style is amazing when one considers that English was a second language that she didn't learn to speak until her family moved to Britain from her native Hungary.

Back to proposed inductees' list

R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943)
English physician whose deteriorating health after colonial postings in Africa forced him to largely give up the practice of medicine, he turned to writing fiction to produce income. His earliest mysteries were a series of short stories featuring Romney Pringle, a charming professional thief in the mode of E.W. Hornung's Raffles or Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin, written in collaboration with another physician, J.J. Pitcairn, under the joint pseudonym of "Clifford Ashdown." The stories were collected in The Adventures of Romney Pringle (1902) and The Further Adventures of Romney Pringle (1905). On his own, and under his own name, Freeman created his most famous character, Dr. John Thorndyke, physician, barrister, and perhaps fiction's first forensics investigator. Using carefully researched, and wholly accurate (for the time) scientific methods, Thorndyke was able to solve cases that baffled the police. He first appeared in the 1907 novel The Red Thumb Mark. A collection of short stories, John Thorndyke's Cases, appeared the following year. Ultimately, in addition to 20 more Thorndyke novels, Freeman would write five more Thorndyke short story collections, The Singing Bone (1912), The Great Portrait Mystery (1918), The Blue Scarab (1923), The Puzzle Lock (1925), and The Magic Casket (1927). A posthumous collection, The Best Dr. Thorndyke Detective Stories (1973), cherry-picked some of the best stories from the previous volumes and included the first book publication of the 1911 novelette "The Mystery of 31 New Inn." Of these, the most important collection in the series, arguably one of the most important short story collections in the history of the genre, was The Singing Bone. Each of the stories in that volume is divided into two parts. In the first, told from the point of view of the criminal, the reader sees the murder committed and knows who the killer is. In the second, we see Dr. Thorndyke undertake an investigation in which he tries to figure out what the reader already knows. This grew out of a notion Freeman had of a mystery in which, as he put it, "The reader had seen the crime committed, knew all about the criminal, and was in possession of all the facts. It would have seemed that there was nothing left to tell, but I calculated that the reader would be so occupied with the crime that he would overlook the evidence. And so it turned out. The second part, which described the investigation of the crime, had to most readers the effect of new matter." This made Freeman, not only the first writer to depict authentic methods of forensic investigations in his crime fiction, but also arguably the inventor of what has come to be called the "inverted detective story,” anticipating writers like Roy Vickers with his Department of Dead Ends series, Cornell Woolrich with novels like Rendezvous in Black (1948) and short stories like "One Drop of Blood” (1962), L.R. Wright's Edgar-winning The Suspect (1985), and, most famously, the long-running TV series Columbo.

Back to proposed inductees' list

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)
While Carroll John Daly's first story featuring a tough, colloquial private eye preceded Dashiell Hammett's by a few months, Hammett is nevertheless recognized and revered, and quite properly, as the founding father of what came to be called "The Hard-Boiled School" of mystery fiction. That first PI story of Hammett's, "Arson Plus" (1922), featured an anonymous operative of a national investigative and security firm called the Continental Detective Agency (a fictionalized version of the Pinkerton Agency, where Hammett had himself been employed as a detective for many years). The Continental Op, who told his stories a laconic, spare, sardonic first-person style, was, in some ways, like all of Hammett's heroes, a self-portrait, but, to provide Hammett with some distance, many of the traits of he gave his character were deliberately different. The Op admits to being short (Hammett was over six feet tall), heavy-set (Hammett was cadaverously thin), and 35 to 40 years old (Hammett was still in his 20's when he began the series), a description that more closely matched Hammett's first supervisor at the Pinkerton Agency, James Wright, than it did Hammett himself. All of the Op stories are excellent, and one, "The Gutting of Couffignal" (1925), is often pointed to as perhaps the finest private eye short story ever written. Most of the Op stories were first published in the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask, and the three novels Hammett wrote about the Op, Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and Blood Money (1943), were all serialized in Black Mask prior to book publication. In addition to the Op, Hammett was also the creator of another tough, crafty San Francisco PI named Sam Spade, who debuted in The Maltese Falcon (1930), arguably the finest private eye novel ever written. He followed this with a gritty examination of big-city gangsterism and corrupt politics, The Glass Key (1931), which was his personal favorite of all his books. Like the Op novels, both of these were serialized in Black Mask. Hammett's final novel, The Thin Man (1934), which introduced the crime-solving husband-and-wife team of Nick and Nora Charles, was the only one of his full-length works which was not serialized in Mask. All of Hammett's novels had short story roots. The Thin Man was expanded from a short story that originally appeared in an issue of Redbook. The Op trilogy and The Glass Key were each deliberately constructed so that each magazine serial installment could stand on its own as a short story. The Maltese Falcon, though written as a single piece rather than a series of loosely connected short pieces, nevertheless recycled plot elements and characters that Hammett had developed in previously written Op stories, including "The Gutting of Couffignal." In addition to the 26 (not counting the serial installments) Op stories, Hammett wrote three stories featuring Spade, two featuring a decidedly non-hard-boiled private investigator named Robin Thin, and some 30-odd more featuring stand-alone characters, cops, criminals, private eyes, and ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. He also reviewed mysteries for such publications as Saturday Review and the New York Evening Post, edited an anthology of short horror stories titled Creeps by Night (1931), doctored dozens of movie scripts (though his name appeared on very few movie credits other than as the writer of the source material), and created Secret Agent X-9, a comic strip about a tough, mysterious FBI agent designed to compete with Dick Tracy. Some of the collections of his short fiction include The Adventures of Sam Spade (1944), Hammett Homicides (1946), The Big Knockover and Other Stories (1966), The Continental Op (1974), Nightmare Town (1999), Crime Stories (2001), and Lost Stories (2005). For practical purposes, Hammett's entire literary output was produced during a 12-year period between 1922 and 1934. Yet that comparatively small body of work during a comparatively brief span of time is one of the most influential in our genre.

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Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
Though half-American on her father's side, the woman who is, to this day, more than three decades after her death, one of the best-selling writers in the world, came to epitomize the traditional British "Golden Age" mystery. In addition to novels and short stories featuring such characters as Belgian-born private detective Hercule Poirot, prototypical "little old lady" amateur sleuth Jane Marple, British Intelligence Agent Johnny Race, "Happiness Consultant" Parker Pyne, crime-solving married couple Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, and others, she wrote more than a dozen stand-alone mysteries; straight fiction as "Mary Westmacott"; the script for one of the very first television plays ever broadcast; radio dramas; and numerous stage plays, some original and some adapted from her prose fiction. She also wrote more than 150 short mysteries that would ultimately be preserved between hard covers in 20-odd collections, some like Poirot Investigates (1924), Partners in Crime (1929), and Miss Marple's Final Cases (1979), featuring series characters she had developed in novels; others like The Mysterious Mr. Quinn (1930) and Mr. Parker Pyne – Detective (1934), featuring series characters developed especially for short fiction; still others, such as The Hound of Death (1933), The Listerdale Mystery (1934), and When the Light Lasts (1997) consisting of stand-alone stories. Her short fiction has been adapted for stage, screen, radio, and television. "Wasp's Nest," a half-hour TV play adapted by Miss Christie from her identically titled 1928 short story and broadcast on the BBC on 18 June 1937, starred Francis Sullivan as Poirot (a part he had been associated with on the British stage since 1931), and may possibly have been the first dramatic script ever written especially for television. The Mousetrap (1952), based by Miss Christie on her 1948 short story "Three Blind Mice," has been running continuously in London for nearly 60 years. Witness for the Prosecution (1953), was adapted from her 1925 short story of the same name into one of the most famous courtroom dramas ever staged, earning Miss Christie both a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play and an Edgar for Best Mystery Stage Play, and was, in turn, adapted by Billy Wilder into an award-winning film. Miss Christie's captivating characters, incredibly ingenious plots, and smooth, even writing continue, years after her death, to make her a favorite with mystery readers all over the world. In 1954, the Mystery Writers of America awarded her a Special Edgar for Lifetime Achievement. In retrospect, the MWA has designated this award as its first ever "Grand Master" presentation, though that title had not yet been coined at the time she received the award, making her the very first recipient of any award, given by any organization, for Lifetime Achievement in crime fiction. In 1956, in recognition of her literary accomplishments, she was made a Commander of the British Empire. The following year, she was elected president of the Detection Club, the first-ever organization of mystery writers, of which she had been a charter member when it was founded in 1930. In 1971, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the British Empire. She is now, and always will be, a legend in our genre.

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Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
A clergyman's daughter, Dorothy L. Sayers grew up to be one of the first women to earn a baccalaureate from Oxford, which she received, with honors, in 1915. She went on to earn a master's degree from the same institution five years later. While eking out a meager living at a London advertising agency, she created the character who would make her famous, a wealthy British aristocrat whose surface "Bertie Wooster" persona concealed a broken heart, a combat-hardened resilience, and a brilliant deductive mind. Lord Peter Wimsey, the second son of the fifteenth Duke of Denver, was introduced in her first novel, Whose Body? (1923), and is today chiefly remembered for his 11 book-length cases (12 if one counts the unfinished Thrones, Dominations, 1998, which was posthumously completed by a collaborator), but he also was the star of 20 short stories. During Miss Sayers's lifetime 17 of the Wimsey shorts were collected in Lord Peter Views the Body (1929), Hangman's Holiday (1933), and In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939). All of these stories, plus three that were never collected during Miss Sayers's lifetime, were gathered together in the massive Lord Peter (1972). While many series writers use short stories only for comparatively minor, plot-driven episodes in their characters' sagas, Miss Sayers often reserved major events in Lord Peter's life for his shorter appearances. "The Learned Adventure of the Dragon's Head" (1928), told from the point of view of Lord Peter's nephew, St. George Wimsey, gives us some insight into his extended family. "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba" (1928), spans two full years, during which Lord Peter is presumed to be dead, but is, in fact, deep undercover infiltrating a powerful organized crime cartel. "The Haunted Policeman" (1938) takes place during the birth of Lord Peter's first son. And in "Talboys" (1972), the final piece of fiction, short or long, that Miss Sayers ever wrote about Wimsey, we see how His Lordship has adapted after several years of life as a settled family man. Aside from the Wimsey series, Miss Sayers wrote 11 short stories about crime-solving wine salesman Montague Egg, which appear in Hangman's Holiday and In the Teeth of the Evidence, and 12 stand-alone short mysteries. She was also one of the first anthologists of short mystery fiction, editing the classic Omnibus of Crime (1929), as well as three separate editions of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror in 1928, 1931, and 1934, thus insuring that some of the earliest examples of our genre would be preserved between hard covers. Miss Sayers stands second only to Agatha Christie in the regard she is held by lovers of traditional "Golden Age" mysteries, a level of respect she accomplished this while completing far fewer novels and stories during a far shorter span of time. In fact, many admirers, including P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, noting the depth she gave her characters, her literate style, and her success, at least to a degree, in elevating detective fiction to a level of literary excellence, regard her as superior to Miss Christie as a writer. Though she gave up mystery writing in the early 1940's, devoting the rest of her life to writing religious pieces, her status in the mystery community is, like her character, without peer.

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Ellery Queen
Probably no other name is more identified with the mystery short story in the 20th Century than the pseudonym adopted by cousins Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971) and Fredric Dannay (1905-1982) in 1929, when their first novel The Roman Hat Mystery, featuring a crime-solving mystery novelist who was also named Ellery Queen, was published. Yet it was not until they had completed six more novels featuring Queen, and four additional novels as "Barnaby Ross" which featured actor-turned-sleuth Drury Lane, that the partners tried their hand at the short form. That first effort, "The Adventure of the One-Penny Black" (1933), was quickly followed by ten more Ellery stories, which were then almost immediately gathered together in their first collection, The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1934). Like their novels, the Ellery shorts were crisply written, eminently readable, rigorously fair-play whodunits. Indeed, just as the Queen novels are widely regarded as perhaps the best book-length fair-play whodunits, their short stories are regarded as among the finest examples of fair-play detection in the short form. Over the rest of their career, the partners would write nearly seventy more short stories featuring their fictional doppelganger, along with at least one non-series short, "Terror Town," about a small rural community brought to the brink of panic by a serial killer. They also wrote most of the episodes for an Ellery Queen radio series, which might be regarded as a form of short fiction in dramatic rather than prose form( especially since they adapted several of them into short stories), and dozens of true crime articles. In addition to Adventures, most of their remaining short fiction was collected in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (1940), Calendar of Crime (1952), QBI – Queen's Bureau of Investigation (1955), Queen's Full (1965), QED – Queen's Experiments in Detection (1968), and The Tragedy of Errors (1999). Yet as fine as these stories were, the team's greatest contribution to short mystery fiction was not as writers of the form, but as editors, anthologists, and commentators on the form. In 1933, the same year their first story was published, they started a new magazine, Mystery League, which they hoped would raise the literary level of short crime fiction. This worthy, but ill-fated effort died after four issues. Over the next few years, the team (and particularly Dannay, though the collaborative pseudonym was used in all of their editing efforts) would start making a name for themselves as anthologists. Their first was the rather odd yet fun Challenge to the Reader (1938), in which stories featuring well-known detective characters were collected, with the names of the characters changed, and the authors' names concealed. Readers were then challenged to see if they could identify the character from their investigative styles. This was followed by 101 Years' Entertainment (1941), which gathered together what they regarded as the finest crime stories written since Poe's invention of the genre with the 1841 publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; Sporting Blood (1942), which featured mysteries revolving around sports; The Female of the Species (1943), collecting stories featuring female detectives and criminals; and The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1944), featuring parodies and pastiches of Conan Doyle's immortal character, all followed in quick succession. Over the next forty-odd years, the cousins (or Dannay wholly on his own after Lee's death) would edit more than 80 different anthologies. Aside from their prodigious work as anthologists, they took another stab at magazine publication in 1941. This second attempt, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, was far more successful than Mystery League and remains to this day the single most important periodical devoted to short crime fiction. Because of their stature as editors, their opinions on short crime fiction are regarded as near-Scriptural. The Detective Short Story (1942), a bibliography of important short story collections; Queen's Quorum (1953), a more comprehensive list with commentary; and In the Queen's Parlor (1957), a collection of introductions to stories that had appeared in EQMM, are sought after by collectors as much for their scholarly content as for their rarity and high value. But EQMM itself was undoubtedly their most effective vehicle for upgrading the status of short mystery fiction. Thanks to their magazine, the short fiction of Dashiell Hammett was preserved from the decaying pulps in which they had first appeared, making it possible for later collections to be gathered. Thanks to their magazine, Roy Vickers's relatively obscure series of inverted stories featuring a fictional cold case squad at Scotland Yard called the Department of Dead Ends had a ready market and became one of the benchmarks of short crime fiction. Thanks to their magazine, writers like Ross Macdonald, Stanley Ellin, Harry Kemelman, Richard Levinson and William Link, Kay Nolte Smith, David Morrell, Stephen King, and Nancy Pickard all had a place to be discovered. Thanks to their magazine, over 700 writers have had a market where their first piece of fiction could be published. Thanks to their magazine, African-American writer Hughes Allison had a market that would accept his story "Corollary," a police procedural about a black homicide detective, ten years before Chester Himes wrote the first novel to feature Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, and twenty years before John Ball wrote the first novel to feature Virgil Tibbs. Thanks to their magazine, major literary figures not generally associated with mysteries, such as Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, Pearl S. Buck, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, and Alice Walker were all able to try their hands at crime fiction. Virtually every sub-genre of crime fiction, from hardest of hard-boiled PI's to the softest cozies, from the most grittily realistic police procedurals to the wildest fantasies, from spy stories with international implications to stories set in a single room, from fair-play whodunits to criminal protagonists, have been published in EQMM. Virtually every important mystery writer who ever wrote a short story, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Mickey Spillane, from Agatha Christie to Ian Fleming, from Margaret Millar to Michael Avallone, from Erle Stanley Gardner to Earl Derr Biggers, from Edgar Allan Poe to Ed McBain, have appeared at least once in EQMM. In 1948, the team received the first MWA Edgar ever awarded in the short story category. They went on to win a second in the same category for 1950. At that time, the Short Story Edgar was not awarded for an individual short story, but for the best achievement in the short story field. That first award was for general continued excellence as short story writers and anthologists. The second was for ten years of successfully editing EQMM. Since 1954, the first year that the short fiction Edgar was awarded for an individual story, over 17 stories published in EQMM have won, and dozens have been nominated. In 1960 the cousins were awarded the MWA's Grand Master title. Had they never edited a single mystery anthology, never written a single sentence of scholarly criticism on short crime fiction, never given a thought to publishing a mystery magazine, they would undoubtedly have been recognized just for their own impressive body of crime fiction. But their activities as the premiere editors of and proselytizers for short mystery fiction are their most distinguished contribution to our genre.

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Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
If Hammett's "The Gutting of Couffignal" is arguably the finest private eye short story ever written and The Maltese Falcon arguably the finest private eye novel, then Raymond Chandler's "Red Wind" (1938) and The Long Goodbye (1954) are the reasons that there's an argument. American-born and British-raised and educated, Chandler had worked as a journalist in his young adulthood, and had once had ambitions of being a poet. After a stint of WW1 combat duty in a Canadian infantry regiment, he found employment, and affluence, as an oil executive in Southern California. Then, in 1932, the Depression (and, frankly, his own drinking habits) put him out of work. A fan of crime fiction in the pulps, and particularly of Hammett's work, he became captivated by the creative possibilities of American colloquial speech and by the portrayal of the gritty urban backgrounds in the stories he read, and resolved to try to write the same kind of fiction himself. His first two stories, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" and "Smart-Aleck Kill," published in Black Mask in 1933 and 1934 respectively, were imitations of the spare third person style Hammett had used in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key. They featured a Chicago private eye named Mallory, who relocates two Los Angeles for his two recorded cases. Chandler was not particularly happy with either of these stories, feeling they were too derivative. He found his own voice in his third Black Mask story, "Finger Man" (1934), which, for practical purposes, introduced his most famous character, Philip Marlowe, the archetype for virtually every hard-boiled private eye character to appear since. At this point, however, the character was, like the Continental Op, nameless. By his third appearance, "The Man Who Liked Dogs" (1936), the character had acquired a last name, Carmady, but was still operating sans a first name. When, in late 1937, Chandler was wooed away from Black Mask by the editors of rival Dime Detective, he brought his character with him, changing his name to John Dalmas. In 1939, Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, was published, and the character finally appeared under the name by which he is best-remembered, Philip Marlowe. Altogether Chandler wrote eleven short stories about his private eye character for the pulps. Four of these, the aforementioned "Finger Man" and "Red Wind," as well as "Goldfish" (1936) and "Trouble Is My Business" (1939), were collected in Chandler's short story collection The Simple Art of Murder (1950), with the original names of "Carmady" and "John Dalmas" replaced by "Philip Marlowe." The remaining "Carmady" and "Dalmas" stories were combined and expanded ("cannibalized" to use Chandler's term) into the novels The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Lady in the Lake (1943). Chandler once said that he thought book-length fiction suited him better, but his short stories contain some of his best writing, and the opening of "Red Wind," with its haunting description of the hot, dry desert air blowing through the city, is probably the most quoted passage in Chandler's entire corpus. Despite his obvious talent for short fiction, Chandler, motivated by the need to generate an income, largely abandoned stories for novels after The Big Sleep was published. For a time, he even abandoned novels for movie scripts when he found he could make more money as a screenwriter. But he never lost his love for prose fiction, nor, despite his misgivings about his own ability in the medium, for the short form. He would eventually return to both. His last piece of fiction, taken up after he had abandoned the barely-begun novel Poodle Springs as not worth continuing with, was a short story, the last Marlowe story of any length, and the first Marlowe short story to originally feature Marlowe by name. Most often appearing under the title "The Pencil" (1959, though it has also been printed as "Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate," "Wrong Pigeon," and "Philip Marlowe's Last Case"), it pitted the detective against Mob hit men. Chandler's stand-alone stories also deserve mention. In addition to his prototypical PI, Chandler wrote about tough cops in stories like "Spanish Blood" (1935) and "Pick-Up on Noon Street" (1936), hotel security officers in "The King in Yellow" (1938) and "I'll Be Waiting" (1939), and ordinary guys dragged into criminal proceedings against their will in "Nevada Gas" (1935). In "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (1939), he satirizes the "gentleman amateur" school of detection as exemplified, in the U.S., by writers like S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen. In "No Crime in the Mountains" (1941), published a few months before Pearl Harbor, he combines the private eye story with WW2 espionage. But the character of Marlowe towers over all of Chandler's other heroes. In addition to the stories Chandler himself selected for The Simple Art of Murder, several posthumous short story collections have been published, among them Killer in the Rain and Other Stories (1964), consisting mainly of stories Chandler "cannibalized" for his novels, which he did not allow to be reprinted during his lifetime, and Collected Stories (2002), which reprints all of Chandler's short fiction, including his stories outside of the crime genre. The dispute over who is the greater writer of hard-boiled private eye fiction, Hammett or Chandler, will probably never be settled. But there can be no denying that, whether or not Hammett was superior, Chandler was, through his creation of a character who would ultimately solidify into the paradigm followed by virtually every PI writer who followed, the more influential.

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Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968)
Unlike contemporaries Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who started out in pulps and, by dint of hard work, broke into hard cover books put out by major publishers, the sad, tragic figure whose crime stories and novels would come to be regarded as prototypical exemplars of the noir style began his literary career by writing critically regarded straight novels in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The break-up of an ill-advised, short-lived (and apparently unconsummated) marriage and the subsequent publication of his sixth novel, Manhattan Love Song (1932), was followed by a two-year drought during which the young writer sold nothing. Giving up his hopes of a prestigious career as a serious novelist, he turned to the pulps, and to crime fiction, selling his first mystery, "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair," to Detective Fiction Weekly in 1934. This tale, the first of some 200 short mysteries, and 17 mystery novels, had many of the hallmarks that would come to be associated with Woolrich. Bizarre coincidences, a trenchant depiction of Depression-era New York, a race against time to save a doomed protagonist, and a dark, sinister atmosphere, what Chandler once called "the smell of fear," all elements that would become Woolrich's stock in trade, were all present in that first story. In Woolrich, there was none of the carefully worked out feats of logic that marked writers like Ellery Queen, none of the matter-of fact, laconic pragmatism of Hammett, none of the breezy, wise-cracking toughness of Chandler. In an amazingly productive decade and a half Woolrich wrote everything from fast-action thrillers like "Hot Water" (1935), to early police procedurals like "Detective William Brown" (1938), from criminal protagonist studies like "Three O'Clock" (1938) to stories with a touch of occult or supernatural elements like "Dark Melody of Madness" (!935), but what set all his fiction apart was unbearable, nail-biting suspense, an impending sense of claustrophobic doom, and uncontrollable randomness. Coincidence ruled the day in Woolrich's universe. Doom fell on the just and the unjust alike. Some of his stories had happy endings. Some didn't. And if the technical details of his plots often couldn't stand up to even a cursory examination, what did it matter? You read Woolrich for the full-throttle ride, a that ride ended in a fatal crash as often as in a safe stop. In 1940, Woolrich's first crime novel, The Bride Wore Black, was published, the first of six suspense novels, unrelated save for all sharing the word "black" in the title, culminating in Rendezvous in Black (1948). By 1942, he was producing enough book-length work that it seemed advisable to adopt pseudonyms to accommodate his prodigious output. "William Irish," a name possibly derived from a screenwriter Woolrich may have met or known of during his own short stint in Hollywood, was the name under which one of Woolrich's most famous novels, Phantom Lady (1942), was published. "George Hopley," derived from his middle names, was used as the byline for Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945). As his novels became more and more popular, Woolrich was able to develop a market for collections of his pulp stories, such as I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (1943), After-Dinner Story (1944), If I Should Die Before I Wake (1945), and Dead Man Blues (1947). Though virtually all of the stories in these collections made their initial magazine appearances under Woolrich's own name, the collections were bylined "William Irish." In 1949, Woolrich was awarded the second Edgar award ever given in the short story category, apparently for continued general excellence as a writer of short crime fiction. Oddly, perhaps because all of his short story collections to that point had been published under the Irish pseudonym, the prize was awarded to him as "William Irish." Even more oddly, it was at about the same time he received the Edgar, an event that roughly coincided with the death of his estranged father, that his frenzied productivity came to a sudden end. For the next 20 years, he was able to produce only a tiny fraction of the protean output he'd so easily managed during the previous 15. His income (and it actually wasn't a bad one), mostly derived from adaptations of his work for radio, television, and film, and from collections of previously published short material, like Nightmare (1956) and Violence (1958), now finally appearing under the Woolrich byline. Two of the most successful dramatic adaptations of his work, the 1949 noir classic, The Window, based on his story "The Boy Cried Murder" (1947), and the Hitchcock-directed Rear Window (1954), based on "It Had To Be Murder" (1942), both came out during this dry period (and, coincidentally, both won Edgars in the screenplay category). What little original short fiction he was able to produce during this period was due largely to the efforts of Frederic Dannay at EQMM and Hans Stefan Santesson at The Saint Magazine, who both made a point of encouraging him to keep writing, but most of it fell below the standards he'd reached during his peak years. Occasionally, though, he was still able to give readers a glimpse of the talent that had made him a legend in the mystery community between 1934 and 1948. "One Drop of Blood" (1962) is a masterful inverted tale about the battle of wits between a tough cop and a clever killer. "For the Rest of Her Life" (1968), the last story to be published in Woolrich's lifetime, is a harrowing story of the doomed efforts of a brutalized wife to escape her abusive husband. And the posthumously published "New York Blues" (1970), a haunting character study of a man who may (or may not) have killed the girl he loved, is Woolrich at his bleakest. Woolrich's biographer, Francis M. Nevins, gave perhaps the best description of the lonely, tormented man who became noir's definitive practitioner. "He was," said Nevins, "the Poe of the 20th century, the poet of its shadows, the Hitchcock of the written word."

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Stanley Ellin (1916-1986)
Highly regarded as a writer of crime novels, including the Edgar-winning private eye novel The Eighth Circle (1958), the Edgar-nominated The Valentine Estate (1968), and Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall (1972), winner of France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, Stanley Ellin was one of the few popular, critically acclaimed mystery novelists who was actually better-known for his short stories. Yet, oddly, he was not a particularly prolific short story writer, managing only about one a year during nearly 40 years as a professional wordsmith. Yet the excellence of that relatively small output assures him of a place in the Hall of Fame. Indeed, had he written no other short story except his first, "The Specialty of the House" (1948), a wonderfully twisted and justly famous tale about an exclusive restaurant with a signature dish both delicious and sinister, it would have arguably qualified him for inclusion all by itself. But his first story was not his last, and, while Ellin was never as productive as such contemporary short story specialists as Edward D. Hoch, Clark Howard, or Jack Ritchie, he did go to extreme lengths to make each annual short story as perfect as possible. After working out his plot, he would write the first page, then rewrite it, then rewrite it again. And again. And again. He would not even begin the second page until he had a perfect, and perfectly typed, first. Then he would repeat the process on each succeeding page until he reached the end. Even Ellin admitted that this painstaking approach was "madness." But no one could argue with the results. Despite a relatively small output, he took a wider variety of approaches, covered a wider spectrum of subjects, and consistently reached a higher level of quality than many far more prolific writers. His stories ranged from comparatively straightforward whodunits like "The Crime of Ezekial Coen" (1963) to a kid's eye view of organized crime like "The Day of the Bullet" (1959), from a nifty variation on the "lady-or-tiger" dilemma in "The Moment of Decision" (1955) to one of the most imaginative murder methods ever used in fiction in "The Last Bottle in the World" (1968), from a character study of a successful actor who finds his success a kind of hell in "The House Party" (1954) to a typical story about murder with a show business background that isn't really typical at all in "Beidenbaur's Flea" (1960). Ellin also used his short fiction to tackle the issues of the day, capital punishment in "The Question" (1962), the prospect of unemployment in "Reasons Unknown" (1978), or the ethical consequences of economic development in "Unacceptable Procedures" (1985). Every story Ellin wrote was completely different from every other story, and each story was a masterpiece. His professional peers recognized this time and again. Ellin won an Edgar for "The House Party," the first time an Edgar in the short story category had been awarded for an individual tale (in previous years they had been awarded to collections, magazines, anthologies, or merely for continued excellence). Two years later he walked off with a second Edgar in the same category for "The Blessington Method" (1956). His aforementioned Edgar for Best Novel for The Eighth Circle made it a hat trick. He was nominated four more times in the short story category, for "The Day of the Bullet," "The Crime of Ezekial Coen," "The Last Bottle in the World," and "Graffiti" (1983). In 1969, he was elected President of the MWA in recognition of his accomplishments in crime fiction. And in 1981, he received the MWA's greatest honor, the title of Grand Master. No short story writer ever achieves actual perfection, but no short story writer ever tried harder to achieve it than Stanley Ellin. And few came closer.

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Edward D. Hoch (1930-2008)
In 1950, Edward D. Hoch, a young man serving his stint of Army duty as a Military Policeman at Fort Jay in New York Harbor, began attending the monthly MWA chapter meetings in Manhattan, and joined the organization as an affiliate member. Over the next few years, as he returned to civilian life, moved back to his home town of Rochester, New York, and found work as an advertising copy writer, he strived to upgrade his membership status to "active" by getting at least one of his short mysteries published, but, like many a novice writer, spent several years collecting rejections slips before making a sale. That first story, "Village of the Dead," was published in 1955 and introduced Simon Ark, a supernatural detective (he's a 2000-year-old Coptic priest) who solves non-supernatural crimes. "Village" was the first of nearly 1,000 short mysteries Hoch would write over the next half-century, and Ark the first of over two dozen series characters who would star in many of those stories. The variety of different detectives he created gives an idea of the breadth of approaches he was able to take within the genre. There was virtually no sub-genre of crime fiction Hoch did not write. Police procedurals, featuring perhaps his most popular series character, Captain Jules Leopold, the commander of the homicide detail in an upstate New York police force, formed a large part of his output. But he also wrote hard-boiled private eye stories featuring California gumshoe Al Darlan; small-town "cozies" featuring physician and amateur sleuth Sam Hawthorne; spy stories featuring British Intelligence code expert Jeffery Rand; criminal protagonist stories featuring professional thief Nick Velvet; international thrillers featuring Sebastian Blue and Laura Charme of Interpol; religious detective stories featuring Father David Noone, a crime-solving Catholic priest in the tradition of Chesterton's Father Brown; historical mysteries featuring Alexander Swift, George Washington's chief intelligence officer during the American Revolution; western-mystery hybrids featuring Ben Snow, an itinerant gunfighter in the tradition of Shane or Paladin who is also a deductive genius; and many more. He was also adept at writing about the characters of other writers. In his long career he wrote such pastiches as "Essence D'Orient" (1988), featuring Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe; "Chessboard's Last Gambit" (1990), featuring Chester Gould's Dick Tracy; "The Circle of Ink" (1999) and "The Wrightsville Carnival" (2005), both featuring Ellery Queen's "Ellery Queen"; and "The Return of the Speckled Band" (1987), "The Christmas Client" (1996), "The Case of the Anonymous Author" (2001), and "A Scandal in Montreal" (2008), among several others, all featuring the Master of Baker Street himself, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. These along with hundreds and hundreds of stand-alone stories. Whatever detective he was writing about, series or non-series, what almost all his stories had in common was a strict adherence to fair-play puzzles, an adherence that rivaled the similar commitment of his mentor(s), Ellery Queen. Hoch was particularly adept at the "locked room" or "impossible murder" story, built around a crime that couldn't have happened, but did, and not only happened, but turned out to have a perfectly reasonable explanation for how it happened. His facility for this kind of story, displayed in tales like "The Tomb at the Top of the Tree" (1969), "The Leopold Locked Room" (1971), "The Problem of the Covered Bridge" (1974), and "The Flying Fiend" (1982), was comparable to John Dickson Carr's, and he actually wrote more short stories in this vein than Carr himself. Hoch's best-known, most frequently reprinted, and arguably finest story is probably "The Oblong Room" (1967), an entry in the Leopold series for which Hoch received the Edgar. The same year he won the award, Hoch quit his day job and became a full-time free-lancer, one of the very few authors able to make his living exclusively from short stories, and perhaps the only one making that living exclusively on short crime fiction. But he was up to the challenge. He made his first sale to EQMM in 1962. 11 years later, in the May 1973 issue, he began a streak that lasted for over 35 years. From that date until several months after his death, Hoch had a story in every single issue of EQMM, making him the short mystery equivalent of Lou Gehrig or Cal Ripken, crime fiction's "Iron Man." Hoch's voluminous output and popularity with readers provided a ready source of material for collections and a ready market for those collections. Some of the best of the many volumes collecting Hoch's work include Leopold's Way (1985), The Quests of Simon Ark (1985), Diagnosis: Impossible (1997), The Ripper of Storyville (1997), The Old Spies Club (2001), and The Velvet Touch (2001), all devoted to one or another of Hoch's series sleuths, and The Night, My Friend (1992) and The Night People (2001), both devoted to Hoch's non-series work. In addition to his own collections, Hoch's broad knowledge of the mystery genre in general, and the short mystery in particular, led to his becoming a very active anthologist. He was the editor of Dear Dead Days (1972), an anthology of historical mystery fiction, and All But Impossible! (1982), an anthology of locked room mysteries. In 1976 he replaced Allen J. Hubin as the regular editor of Dutton's annual Best Detective Stories of the Year series, holding that post through 1981, then continuing in the same position through 1995 after the series moved to Walker, and changed its name to The Year's Best Mystery and Suspense Stories. He also edited Murder Most Sacred (1989), devoted to mysteries with a Roman Catholic background (Hoch was a devout, practicing Catholic), and a general survey of US crime fiction for Oxford University Press, Twelve American Detective Stories (1997). The Edgar Hoch won for "The Oblong Room" was only the first of many awards he'd earn for his short fiction. Another Leopold story, "The Most Dangerous Man Alive" (1980), was nominated for a short story Edgar. He also won two Anthonys at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, the first for "One Bag of Coconuts" (1998), a Rand story, and the second for "The Problem of the Potting Shed" (2000), which featured Dr. Hawthorne. After literally dozens of nominations, but never a win because his many eligible stories had the effect of putting him in competition with himself, he finally won a posthumous Ellery Queen's Reader Award for a Nick Velvet story, "The Theft of the Ostracized Ostrich" (2007). His brother and sister MWA members elected him National President in 1982, in recognition of his eminence in the field. He also was presented with four different lifetime achievement awards, the first Golden Derringer ever awarded by the SMFS in 1999, the Eye from the Private Eye Writers of American in 2000 for his Al Darlan series, the Grand Master from MWA in 2001, and a Lifetime Achievement Anthony, also in 2001. After his passing, in recognition of his achievements in short crime fiction, the SMFS, with the permission of Hoch's widow, Mrs. Patricia Hoch, changed the name of its Lifetime Achievement award to the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer. It's hard to believe he could have had time, given the incredible number of short stories he wrote, but Hoch did occasionally write novels. It was, however, never a task that he undertook with great enthusiasm. His first love, both as a reader and writer, was the short story. Of that form, he once said, "Writing a short story is a pleasure one can linger over, with delight in the concept and surprise at the finished product." Throughout his career, Hoch provided his fans with many moments of delight and surprise at his finished product.

Back to proposed inductees' list

Show your SMFS membership on your Web site

2010-06-19T10:29:00.018-04:00

To show the SMFS logo (150 x 150 pixels) on your Web site with a click-through to the Shortmystery Yahoo! Group, copy and paste the following HTML code where you'd like the logo to appear.

Congratulations to the Officers-Elect

2010-06-16T00:28:00.001-04:00

Congratulations to the SMFS Officers-Elect for 2010-12, President Sandra Seamans and Vice President Pat Harrington, and to the Derringer Coordinator-Elect for 2011, Larry Chavis.

Thanks to Tim Wohlforth, John Lindermuth, and Aldo Calcagno for making it a true election.

I will now grant Sandra, Pat, and Larry moderator privileges for Shortmystery and the SMFS Blog and invite them to explore the management features. If they have any questions, I, Jim Doherty, and Suzanne Rorhus are ready to answer offlist.

The new board is officially installed July 1.

Gerald So
2008-2010 SMFS President

2010 SMFS Election Results

2010-06-16T00:23:00.004-04:00

FOR PRESIDENT (July 1, 2010 - June 30, 2012)

Sandra Seamans (Early statement)
Tim Wohlforth (Statement)

Winner: Sandra Seamans, 57% of the vote

FOR VICE PRESIDENT (July 1, 2010 - June 30, 2012)

Patricia Harrington (Statement)
John Lindermuth (Statement)

Winner: Patricia Harrington, 73% of the vote

FOR DERRINGER COORDINATOR (July 1, 2010 - June 30, 2011)

Aldo Calcagno
Larry Chavis (Statement)

Winner: Larry Chavis, 78% of the vote

Archival Post: Interested in Serving as an SMFS Officer or Coordinator?

2010-06-15T14:36:00.009-04:00

Are you an SMFS member interested in serving as an officer? Here are the officers' duties and the candidacy calendar:

SMFS Positions and Duties

PRESIDENT
VICE PRESIDENT
DERRINGER AWARDS COORDINATOR

Candidacy Calendar

PRESIDENT (2-year term) - SMFS President moderates the group's discussion forum and membership roll at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shortmystery. They must ensure the free flow of ideas while maintaining a cordial atmosphere and quelling any flame wars that threaten to erupt.

The president must confer with the vice president regularly, so that, should the president be unavailable, the vice president can continue day-to-day operations.

As the SMFS's main representative with the public, the president must also maintain the SMFS blog at http://shortmystery.blogspot.com, where the public goes for information about the SMFS.

Each year, the president organizes the Golden Derringer committee, deciding who should receive the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement, and the Hall of Fame committee, deciding who should be inducted into the Short Mystery Fiction Hall of Fame.

As for the regular Derringer process, the president may answer general policy questions if asked by the Coordinator, but the president may neither collect Derringer submissions, nor judge the regular Derringer Awards, nor win a Derringer Award while in office.

Back to SMFS Officers' Duties

VICE PRESIDENT (2-year term) - SMFS Vice President is co-moderator of the discussion forum and consultant on any group business. The vice president assumes all of the president's duties, including representing the SMFS in person, when the president is unavailable (sickness, vacation, etc.).

The vice president serves with the president on the Golden Derringer committee and the Hall of Fame committee, and is subject to the same restrictions as the president regarding the regular Derringer process.

Back to SMFS Officers' Duties

DERRINGER AWARDS COORDINATOR (1-year term) - The Coordinator runs the annual Derringer Award process, including collecting Derringer submissions, coordinating the judging, and announcing the winners.

Independent of the Officers (President and Vice President), the coordinator has the authority to resolve all issues that arise throughout the submission, judging, and voting periods.

The coordinator moderates the Derringers Voting Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Derringers), posting the Derringer finalist stories for the voters to read, and verifying members' voting eligibility as they join the group.

The coordinator serves with the president and vice president on the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer selection committee and the Hall of Fame committee, and like them, may neither judge the regular Derringers nor win a Derringer Award while in office.

Back to SMFS Officers' Duties

Candidacy Calendar

May 15-30, nominations will be accepted for SMFS President and Vice President 2010-12 and for Derringer Coordinator 2011. Nominations must be seconded to become official. Members may nominate or second themselves.

May 31-June 4, each nominee is allowed to post a single message announcing him/herself to the group and supporting his/her candidacy.

June 5-15, SMFS members vote to select the new officers.

June 16-30, The current officers coordinate with the Officers-Elect to ensure a smooth transition.

July 1, the new SMFS officers take office.

Archival Post: SMFS Board Members by Year

2010-06-13T04:00:00.010-04:00

SMFS Board Members by Year:

2010-2012
2008-2010
2006-2008
2004-2006
2002-2004
2000-2002
1998-2000
1996-1998

2010-2012

President: Sandra Seamans

Vice President: Patricia Harrington

Derringer Awards Coordinator: Larry Chavis (2011), Gwen Mayo (2012)

Market Listings Coordinator: Joy Seymour

Back to SMFS Board Members by Year

2008-2010

President: Gerald So

Vice President: Jim Doherty

Derringer Awards Coordinator: Nikki Dolson (2009), Suzanne Rorhus (2010)

Market Listings Coordinator: Joy Seymour

Back to SMFS Board Members by Year

2006-2008

President: Stephen Johnston

Vice President: Molly MacRae

Derringer Awards Coordinator: Jeanne Edna Thelwell (2007), Joyce Holland (2008)

Market Listings Coordinator: Joy Seymour

Web Designer: Kevin Burton Smith

Back to SMFS Board Members by Year

2004-2006

President: Michael Bracken

Vice President: Carol Kilgore

Derringer Awards Coordinator: Diane Grace (2005), Pam Skochinski (2006)

Web Designer: Kevin Burton Smith

Back to SMFS Board Members by Year

2002-2004

President: Earl Staggs

Vice President: Michael Bracken

Web Designer: Kevin Burton Smith

Back to SMFS Board Members by Year

2000-2002

President: G. Miki Hayden

Vice President: Earl Staggs

Web Designer: Kevin Burton Smith

Back to SMFS Board Members by Year

1998-2000

President: G. Miki Hayden

Vice President: Michael Mallory

Historian: Jiro Kimura

Newsletter Editor/Web Designer: Robert K. Foster

Back to SMFS Board Members by Year

1996-1998

President: Margo Power

Vice President/Publicity Chief: Kate Grilley

Treasurer: G. Miki Hayden

Secretary/Asst. Newsletter Editor: Deborah J. Benoit

Historian/Archivist: Jiro Kimura

Newsletter Editor/Web Designer: Robert K. Foster

Back to SMFS Board Members by Year

Statement from SMFS VP Candidate John Lindermuth

2010-06-03T09:39:00.000-04:00

Being vice president (or holding any other office) was not my goal in joining SMFS. Like most of you, I already have an overflowing quota of responsibilities. Though I haven't been a member as long as some others, I share a love of the short story form and believe in the goals of the
organization.

My first response when asked to run was to say, thanks, but no. I do believe we have an obligation to serve in whatever way we can the organizations to which we belong.

I've published seven novels to date and a goodly number of short stories. I worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for nearly 40 years. I'm currently librarian and secretary to the board of my county historical society. I've also served on a community hospital, Red Cross and several other charity boards, which gives me some insight into what it takes to run an organization.

If you think that qualifies me to be VP I would do my best to assist the president and promote SMFS and the short story form.

Thanks for considering me.

John Lindermuth

Statement from SMFS Vice Presidential Candidate Patricia Harrington

2010-06-02T10:50:00.002-04:00

I've been a SMFS member since the organization's early days, after the group was formed by Margo Power. And, a few years ago, I was fortunate to be a Derringer Flash Fiction award winner.

I have a knowledge of the history of the organization as well as a love for the short story form.

In my other writing life, I'm a consultant to nonprofit organizations, writing grants, training staff and providing assistance on organizational development. And I'm a charter member of the American Association of Grantwriting Professionals (AAGP).

My view of serving in the vice-president position includes the following:

1) Be of assistance to the president, 2) help promote SMFS, 3) listen and respond to members' desires for the organization's growth, and 4) help foster recognition of the short mystery form and its authors, past and present.

Statement from SMFS Presidential Candidate Tim Wohlforth

2010-06-01T14:14:00.000-04:00

I believe the Short Mystery Fiction Society has the potential of being more than a email discussion group. We should be able to represent short mystery writers as effectively as MWA represents mystery writers as a whole and the Private Eye Writers of America represents a subgenre. Of course, with the Derringers, we have made progress in this direction. However, I feel we have a considerable distance still to travel.

I have been a member of SMFS since the days when Michael Bracken was president, many of us had books published by Quiet Storm, and Babs Lakey published us in her marvelous Futures magazine. I have had over 75 short stories published. These include stories in MWA's Death Do Us Part, Hardcore Hardboiled published by Kensington, and an anthology of Plots With Guns. I have participated in, and in some cases moderated, short story panels at Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime.

As President I would first and foremost promote SMFS and short mystery stories. I would pursue the suggestion of getting an anthology of Derringer winners published. Another project could be to sponsor an anthology of unpublished stories blind submitted by members along the lines of MWA collections. It might also be possible to arrange with Bouchercon, LCC, and perhaps other regional mystery conferences, to have SMFS sponsor its own short story panel and/or a short story workshop as part of a writers track.

As we speak enormous changes are taking place in publishing with the spectacular growth of e-publishing. There are now over three million Kindles and iPad sales could reach ten million by the end of the year. This could lead to a revival of the short story market. I believe SMFS can play a role in opening up this market for our members. For example we could explore how short stories can be marketed and sold through the Apple Store as well as expand access on Kindles and the new Nook.

I would also like to encourage a discussion in the SMFS group on the art and craft of short story writing.

Tim Wohlforth

Statement from Derringer Coordinator Candidate Larry Chavis

2010-06-01T11:39:00.000-04:00

I'm Larry Chavis, and my name is on the ballot for this year's Derringer Coordinator. This isn't as much a 'campaign' post as it is an informative one.

I'm 57 years old, I teach high school physics and mathematics (my degree is in physics), and I am a lover of mystery/crime/thriller fiction in general, and the short story form in particular. I did begin writing three or so years ago, but have little to report thus far. You won't have heard of me ;-) I had two stories published in the now-defunct *Crime and Suspense* ezine (don't think there was a causal relationship), one of which placed second in a reader-judged contest, and was subsequently published in the anthology TEN FOR TEN, edited by Tony Burton and published by Wolfmont Press. Other than those, and some encouraging letters from editors, I am just one of many plugging away at it, trying to learn from my mistakes.

I have served once as a Derringer judge, and was the at-large member of this year's Golden Derringer committee. If elected, I will do my dead-level best to see that the process runs as smoothly and fairly as humanly possible. If not elected, I stand ready to help in any way I can.

Thanks for your patience.

Larry Chavis
Mississippi

Early Statement from SMFS Presidential Candidate Sandra Seamans

2010-05-28T08:23:00.000-04:00

The Derringers are an important part of this group but they're not everything. I'm happy that they're getting the recognition they deserve but not because they're an award but because it makes people sit up and take notice of short stories. What bothers me about the submission process is that there a great many editors who don't bother to submit stories because the Derringers lean toward the more cozy friendly stories. This isn't a bad thing but we've got a
whole group of writers and editors and zines that feel they're not good enough to be included in the process. I'd like to see that change. I'd like to see every short story writer feel welcome at the SMFS, no matter if they write cozy or dark. Only the strength of the story should count.

I'd also like to see if we could get editors to post more often on the list - get them to give us insights into their selection process or maybe just do a Q & A interview that we could post. Right now, Duotrope is posting this sort of interview on their site and I've run across several other blogs that do the same thing. No reason we couldn't do that here with mystery related magazines and zines. It might also be nice if we could have one day a week where everyone
could post their BSP's with links to their stories so we can find new markets to explore and stories to read. As for stories, I'd like the members to feel free to post links to shorts they find online that they think are great, not their own, but someone else's.

Shorts are starting to come into their own via the online markets, there are more and more people talking about them and I know of several sites that actually review individual stories and collections. As a short fiction society we should be a part of this.

Well, I know I'm not supposed to be posting this before I'm asked, but the membership deserves to know where I stand so they can nominate someone to run against me if they don't agree with what I believe the SMFS should be about. And I'd really prefer that this be an election not just a put her in office because nobody else wants the job situation.

Candidacy Statement from Jim Doherty

2010-05-24T16:48:00.001-04:00

I've been asked by several members off-line if I'm willing to run for either president or vice-president. ...[L]ike Gerald, I think it would be better for the organization if new blood were injected. If there are others willing to run for either position, I'd prefer to step back and let others take up the flag.

Also, as at least one other person has pointed out, as long as I'm an officer, I'm ineligible to compete for a Derringer myself.

If others are willing to take up the officer's positions, I am certainly more than willing (and I'm sure I speak for Gerald here, too) to make myself available to help and provide assistance to the incoming administration. Certainly I'm willing, if the new officers wish, to finish up any uncompleted tasks that are still hanging fire if and when the new officers assume their
positions.

For example, I'm in contact with folks at Bouchercon about making the Derringer presentations a part of the convention as it was in 2009. I'd be happy to follow through with that if it's still unresolved by the time my term of office ends.

I'm also more than willing to get the actual physical trophies made, as I did last year.

But as for actually serving, put me down as willing but not particularly enthusiastic.

Candidacy Statement from Gerald So

2010-05-17T07:54:00.003-04:00

With the opening of SMFS officer nominations this past Saturday, I'd like to inform the group of my own status. I've enjoyed my time as president. I believe we've clarified much of the Derringer Award process and raised the SMFS's profile as a whole. I also believe it's important to allow for new voices and leadership styles.

I remember that several of you initially wondered how I would moderate discussion here. I hope the vast majority of members has found the atmosphere open and informative, including feeling informed and heard during every policy decision the past two years.

I prefer to give others a chance to represent the SMFS for the next two, so I invite any member up to the task to step forward.

My preference does not speak for Vice President Jim Doherty, who may choose to run on his own.

POLL RESULTS: Should author's name and publication title appear on Derringer submissions sent to judges?

2010-05-15T05:32:00.001-04:00

By a margin of 53 AGAINST, 31 FOR, the membership has voted that author's name and publication title should not appear on stories submitted to the Derringer judges.

Upcoming SMFS Elections

2010-05-05T08:14:00.021-04:00

Hello, all.

It was an honor to represent the SMFS personally sending the 2010 Derringer certificates to the winners. My public congratulations and thanks to all who were part of the process.

Presentations made, my two-year term as SMFS president is drawing to a close. As part of the transition to the new officers, I have outlined the duties of president, vice president, and Derringer Coordinator below, and call for nominations from the group.

May 15-30, nominations will be accepted for SMFS President and Vice President 2010-12 and for Derringer Coordinator 2011.

May 31-June 4, each nominee will be allowed to post a single message announcing him/herself to the group and supporting his/her candidacy.

June 5-15, SMFS members will vote to select the new officers.

June 16-30, Jim Doherty, Suzanne Rorhus, and I will coordinate with the Officers-Elect to ensure a smooth transition.

July 1, the new SMFS officers take office.

SMFS Officers' Duties

PRESIDENT (2-year term) - SMFS President moderates the group's discussion forum and membership roll at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shortmystery. They must ensure the free flow of ideas while maintaining a cordial atmosphere and quelling any flame wars that threaten to erupt.

The president must confer with the vice president regularly, so that, should the president be unavailable, the vice president can continue day-to-day operations.

As the SMFS's main representative with the public, the president must also maintain the SMFS blog at http://shortmystery.blogspot.com, where the public goes for information about the SMFS.

The president organizes the selection committee deciding who should receive the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement.

As for the regular Derringer process, the president and the Derringer Awards Coordinator may confer about the spirit of the rules, but the president may neither collect Derringer submissions, nor judge the regular Derringer Awards, nor win a Derringer Award while in office.

VICE PRESIDENT (2-year term) - SMFS Vice President is co-moderator of the discussion forum and consultant on any group business. The vice president assumes all of the president's duties, including representing the SMFS in person, when the president is unavailable (sickness, vacation, etc.).

The vice president serves with the president on the Edward D. Hoch Golden Derringer selection committee, and is subject to the same restrictions as the president regarding the regular Derringer process.

DERRINGER AWARDS COORDINATOR (1-year term) - The Coordinator runs the annual Derringer Award process, including collecting Derringer submissions, coordinating the judging, and announcing the winners.

The coordinator has the authority to resolve issues that arise throughout the submission, judging, and voting periods, conferring with the president to clarify the spirit of Derringer procedure.

The coordinator moderates the Derringers Voting Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Derringers), posting the Derringer finalist stories for the voters to read, and verifying members' voting eligibility as they join the group.

The coordinator serves with the president and vice president on the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer selection committee, and like them, may neither judge the regular Derringers nor win a Derringer Award while in office.

Archival Post: 2008 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T13:06:00.004-04:00

(For Stories Published in 2007. Winners bolded.)

Some titles are linked to stories in online magazine archives. The SMFS encourages you to read these free stories.

BEST FLASH (UP TO 1,000 WORDS)

"My Hero" by Patricia Abbott (2007, D.Z. Allen’s Muzzle Flash)
"Saved" by Keri Clark (Fall 2007,Mysterical-E)
"Dreaming of a Spite Christmas" by B.V. Lawson (Winter 2007, Mouth Full of Bullets, )
"A Woman Scorned" by Jillian Berg (Autumn 2007, Mouth Full of Bullets)
"Your New Fan" by Keri Clark (Winter 2007, Mouth Full of Bullets)

BEST SHORT STORY (1,001-4,000 WORDS)

"In the Shadows of Wrigley Field" by John Weagly (November 2007, The Back Alley)
"Brimstone P.I." by Beverle Graves Myers (May 2007, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)
"We All Come from Splattertown" by Hugh Lessig (July 2007, ThugLit #17)
"Joyride" by Rick Noetzel (December 2007, Shred of Evidence)
"Handful of Stars" by Jack Hardway (Autumn 2007, Mouth Full of Bullets)
"The Promise" by Camille LaGuire (March-April 2007, Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine)

BEST LONG STORY (4,001-8,000 WORDS)

"The Gospel According to Gordon Black" by Richard Helms (Fall 2007, The Thrilling Detective Web Site)
"A Trader’s Lot" by Twist Phelan (from Wall Street Noir)
"Devil’s Lake" by John Schroeder (January/February 2007, Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine)
"A Private Hanging" by Herschel Cozine (Summer 2007, Mysterical-E)
"Mr. McGregor’s Garden" by Kate Flora (Still Waters)
"Growing Up Is for Losers" by Rosemary Harris (Still Waters)

BEST NOVELETTE (8,001-17,500 WORDS)

"Paper Walls/Glass Houses" by Eric Shane (June 2007, The Back Alley)
"The Bookworm’s Demise" by Beverle Graves Myers (December 2007, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)
"The Enlightenment of Magnus McKay" by John Burdett (Wall Street Noir)
"Wasting Assets" by Mike Wiecek (September 2007, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)
"Forget Me Not" by Clifford Royal Johns (Fall 2007, Mysterical-E)

Archival Post: 2007 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T13:01:00.001-04:00

2007 DERRINGER AWARDS
(For Stories Published in 2006. Winners bolded.)

Some titles are linked to stories in online magazine archives. The SMFS encourages you to read these free stories.

BEST FLASH STORY

"Vigilante" by Barry Ergang (Summer 2006, Mysterical-E)
"Matched Set" by Jan Christensen (Winter 2006, Long Story Short)
"Snowflake Therapy" by Michelle Mach (June 2006, Thereby Hangs a Tale)
"Flight School" by Jill Maser (August 28, 2006, Flashshots)
"Home Entertainment" by Sandra Seamans (July/August 2006, A Cruel World)

BEST SHORT-SHORT STORY (tie)

"Elena Speaks of the City, Under Siege" by Steven Torres (September/October 2006, Crimespree Magazine)
"Four For Dinner" by John M. Floyd (Seven by Seven)
"Even Steven" by Gail Farrelly (Winter 2006,Mouth Full of Bullets)
"Interview" by Justin Gustainis (October 2006, Cape Fear Crime Festival)
"The Worst Door" by Frank Zafiro (January 2006, Dispatch)

BEST MID-LENGTH SHORT STORY

"Cranked" by Bill Crider (Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir)
"Eden's Bodyguard" by David Bareford (September 2006, Thuglit)
"Shadow People" by Rex Burns (June 2006,Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)
"Uncle Blinky's Corner of the World" by Robert S. Levinson (March/April 2006, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Shanks on the Prowl" by Robert Lopresti (May 2006, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)

BEST LONGER SHORT STORY

"Strictly Business" by Julie Hyzy (These Guns for Hire)
"A Signature in Blood" by Annette Dashofy (Winter 2006, Mysterical-E)
"Daphne MacAndrews and the Smack-Head Junkies" by Stuart MacBride (Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir)
"See Also Murder" by Larry Sweazy (December 11, 2006, Amazon Shorts)
"The Valley of Angustias" by Steven Torres (October 2006, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine)

Archival Post: 2006 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T12:56:00.002-04:00

Winners bolded.

Some titles are linked to stories in online magazine archives. The SMFS encourages you to read these free stories.

BEST FLASH STORY

"Secondhand Shoe" by Patricia Harrington (2005, A Flasher’s Dozen)
"The Last Journey" by Mary Schenten (July 2005, Flashshot)
"Word Power" by Michelle Mach (March 2005, Flashshot)
"Hell Hath No Fury" by BJ Bourg (March 2005, Mysterical-E)
"No Athiests in Foxholes" by Stephen D. Rogers (May 2005, Kwickee)

BEST SHORT-SHORT STORY

"Zipped" by Stephen D. Rogers (2005, Windchill: Crime Stories by New England Writers, Level Best Books)
"Twilight of the Fireflies" by John Weagly (December 2005, Big Muddy: Journal of the Mississippi River Valley)
"Roses at His Feet" by Todd Robinson (writing as "Dana Frittersmash"; December 2005, Thuglit)
"The Day the Bad Men Came" by Andy Henion (January 2005, Thieves Jargon)
"Hangman's Tree" by Deanne Boast (December 2005, Crime and Suspense)

BEST MID-LENGTH SHORT STORY

"One Step Closer" by Iain Rowan for (2005, Hardluck Stories)
Best Wishes" by JR Chabot (September 2005, Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine)
"The Spare" by Woody Hanstein (October 2005, Level Best Books)
"Johnny Cash is Dead" by Jordan Harper (October 2005, Thuglit)
"A Death in Ueno" by Mike Wiecek (March 2005, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)

BEST LONGER SHORT STORY

"The Safest Place on Earth" by Mark Best (Spring 2005, Thrilling Detective Web Site)
"Monday, Sweet Monday" by John F. Dobbyn (June 2005, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)
"Good Shepherd" by Frank Zafiro (May 2005, Ascent Aspirations Magazine)
"Fish" by Stephen Johnston (Fall 2005, Web Mystery Magazine)
"The Cherries of Lucullus" by Steven Saylor (May 2005 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

Archival Post: 2005 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T12:52:00.004-04:00

2005 DERRINGER AWARDS
(For Stories Published in 2004. Winners bolded.)

Some titles are linked to stories in online magazine archives. The SMFS encourages you to read these free stories.

BEST FLASH STORY

"The Big Guys" by JA Konrath (2004, Small Bites; edited by Garrett Peck and Keith Gouveia, Coscom Entertainment)
"Housesitter" by J. K. Cummins (Summer 2004, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine)
"Sand Scam" by Nick Andreychuk (Fall 2004, Crimestalker Casebook)
"Theda" by Beverly Brackett (November 2004, Flash Fantastic)
"Widow’s Peak" by S.A. Daynard (2004, Riptide: Crime Stories by New England Writers; edited by Skye Alexander, Kate Flora, Susan Oleksiw, Level Best Books)

SHORT-SHORT STORIES

"The Test" by Mike Wiecek (November 20, 2004, Woman’s World)
"Experience Required" by Michael Giorgio (March 2004, Lunatic Chameleon [Print Edition]) (M)
"Sweet Smell of Success" by Beverle Graves Myers (2004, Who Died in Here?; edited by Pat Dennis, Penury Press) (M)
"The Big Store" by Stephen D. Rogers (Spring 2004, Hardluck Stories)
"Up in Smoke" by Jan Christensen (January/February/March 2004, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine)

MID-LENGTH SHORT STORIES

"Viscery" by Sandy Balzo (December 2004, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine)
"Brethren of The Sea" by Joan Druett (November 2004, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine)
"Freddie Swings In" by David Terrenoire (2004, Fedora III; edited by Michael Bracken, Betancourt & Company)
"Hilly Palmer’s Last Case" by Duane Swierczynski (September/October 2004, Plots With Guns)
"Phillie's Last Dance" by Ray Banks (March 2004, Shots Magazine)

LONGER SHORT STORIES

"Secondhand Heart" by Doug Allyn (January/February 2004, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine)
"God's Dice" by David White (Spring 2004, The Thrilling Detective Web Site)
"A Sunday in Ordinary Time" by Terence Faherty (August 2004, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine)
"The Franklin Fiasco" by Beverle Graves Myers (September 2004, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine)
"The Girl in Apartment 2A" by G. Miki Hayden (2004, Dime; edited by Babs Lakey, Quiet Storm)

M = Photocopies of these stories available for loan by Michael Giorgio

Archival Post: 2004 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T12:48:00.001-04:00

Winners bolded:

BEST FLASH STORY (Up to 500 Words)

"All My Yesterdays" by Michael Bracken (2003, Suddenly V)
"Patience" by Nick Andreychuk (Fall 2003, Futures)
"Motive For Murder" by Guy Belleranti (Spring 2003, Futures)
"How to Become a Rodeo Queen" by Michelle Mach (October 2003, Mslexia)
"At Thirty Paces" by Graydon Miller (The Havana Brotherhood)

BEST SHORT SHORT (501 to 2000 Words)

"Nailbiter" by Rob Lopresti (September 2003, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)
"Coyotes Find" by Gay T. Kinman (February 2003, Detective Mystery Stories)
"Waiter, There's a Clue in My Soup" by Camille LaGuire (Spring 2003, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine)
"Children Seen and Heard" by K. G. McAbee (July 2003, EWG Presents: Without a Clue)
"Packy Run" by Stephen D. Rogers (Spring 2003, Hardluck Stories)
"Silky's Getaway" by Earl Staggs (Summer 2003, Futures)

BEST MID-LENGTH SHORT STORY (2001 to 6000 Words)

"Notions of the Real World" by Dorothy Rellas (Summer 2003, Futures)
"A Mother Scorned" by Michele R. Bardsley (Writer's Digest)
"Big Winner" by Terry Black (November 2003, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)
"Sara Morningsky" by Lee Driver (March 2003, A Mystery in Mind)
"Wanda Wilcox is Trapped" by Eddie Muller (September/October 2003, Plots With Guns)

BEST LONG SHORT STORY (6001 to 15000 Words)

"The Mask of Peter" by Clark Howard, April 2003, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Bombshell" by Loren D. Estleman (August 2003, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"The Windsor Ballet" by Deborah Morgan (Flesh and Blood: Guilty as Sin)
"Henry and the Idiots" by Robert J. Randisi (High Stakes)
"Amazing Grace" by Harriet Rzetelny (February 2003, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)

Archival Post: 2003 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T12:43:00.004-04:00

2003 DERRINGER AWARDS
(For Stories Published in 2002. Winners bolded.)

Some titles are linked to stories available in online magazine archives. The SMFS encourages you to read these free stories.

BEST SHORT SHORT STORY

"A Cut Above" by Del Tinsley (Fall 2002, Hardluck Stories)
"Sending Out an S.O.S." by Nick Andreychuk (Apr/May/June 2002, Futures)
"Jumping the Fence" by Stephen Rogers (Fall 2002, Hardluck Stories)
"What A Day" by Seymour Shubin (January 2002, Futures)
"Shark Infested Pudding" by John Weagly (November 2002, Judas Ezine)

BEST SHORT MYSTERY STORY

"Closure" by Dave White (Fall 2002, The Thrilling Detective Web Site)
"Top of the World" by Bill Crider (Flesh and Blood: Dark Desires)
"Just Looking" by Bill Pronzini (Flesh and Blood: Dark Desires)
"Mexican Gatsby" by Raymond Steiber (March 2002, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"More Than a Scam" by Dave Zeltserman (Mysterical-E)

BEST LONG SHORT STORY

"The Murder Ballads" by Doug Allyn (March 2002, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Medicine Water" by David Edgerly Gates (September 2002, AHMM)
"To Live and Die in Midland, Texas" by Clark Howard (September-October 2002, EQMM)
"Painter of the Seven-Eyed Beast" by Catherine Mambretti (November 2002, AHMM)
"Henry's Power" by Bob Stevens (March 2002, HandHeldCrime)

Archival Post: 2002 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T12:41:00.000-04:00

2002 DERRINGER AWARD
(For Stories Published in 2001. Winners bolded.)

BEST SHORT MYSTERY

"All The Fine Actors" by Earl Staggs (April 2001, EWG Presents Without A Clue)
"The Last Letter" by Mike Wiecek (January 2002, AHMM)
"Smoky Didn't Send Me" by Charles Cutter (December 2001, AHMM)
"Tunnel of Malice" by Margaret DiCanio (October 2001, Futures)
"Cuts Like A Knife" by Michael Bracken (Fedora)

BEST SHORT-SHORT MYSTERY

"In the Heat of the Moment" by Nick Andreychuk (February 2001, Futures)
"Greenhouse Pest" by Tim Myers (November 2001, Futures)
"A Matter of Interest" by Stephen D. Rogers (September 2001, HandHeldCrime)
"Lucrezia and The Thief" by Henry Slesar (April 2001, EQMM)

FOR THE BEST LONGER MYSTERY

"Early Morning Rain" by Jean McCord (Futures #4)
"Lesser-Included Offense" by Jeffery Deaver (May 2001, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"The Mondo Whammy" by David Handler (September/October 2001, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Avenging Miriam" by Peter Sellers (December 2001, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Harry's Lament" by Bentley Dadmun (June 2001, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

THE SILVER DERRINGER FOR EDITORIAL EXCELLENCE

Cathleen Jordan (posthumous)
For 20 benchmark years at the helm of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

Archival Post: 2001 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T12:36:00.000-04:00

2001 DERRINGER AWARD
(For Stories Published in 2000. Winners bolded.)

BEST SHORT MYSTERY STORY

"Erie's Last Day" by Steve Hockensmith (May 2000, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine)
"The Disappearance of Miss Sarah Oswald" by Jennifer Ashley (Spring 2000, Over My Dead body)
"Amish Butter" by Jacqueline Fiedler (Unholy Orders)
"The Dark Tower" by Gwen Moffat, (Malice Domestic)
"Tom Wasp and Anybody's Child" by Amy Myers (Scenes of Crime)

BEST MYSTERY NOVELLA

"Lilacs and Lace" by Lynda Douglas (June 2000, Futures)
"The Death Row Pet Show" by Doug Allyn (April 2000, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Attitude Thing" by William J. Carroll, Jr., (May 2000, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine)
"Blood Paths" by Clark Howard (June 2000, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"The Sedgemoor Strangler" by Peter Lovesey (2000, Criminal Records)

BEST FLASH MYSTERY (tie)

"Polls Don't Lie" by Earl McGill (Blue Murder)
"The New Lawyer" by Mike Wiecek (Spring 2000, Crimestalker Casebook)
"Accident" by Guy Belleranti (About.com Mysteries)
"Sunken Dreams" by Tim Myers, (December 2000, Futures)
"Lucky Man" by Ali Seay (About.com Mysteries)

BEST PUZZLE STORY

"The Cabin Killer" by Henry Slesar (July 2000, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Happy Acres Homicide" by Richard Ciciarelli (Solve-It #227, MysteryNet.com)
"Killing the Old Survivors" by Gary Sensening (Solve-It #215, MysteryNet.com)

THE GOLDEN DERRINGER FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

John Lutz

THE READERS SUPPORT AWARD

Babs Lakey

Archival Post: 2000 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T12:32:00.000-04:00

2000 DERRINGER AWARDS
(For Stories Published in 1999. Winners bolded.)

BEST SHORT STORY

"The Way to a Man's Heart" by Elizabeth Dearl (February 10, 1999, The Case.Com Twist)
"The Bread of Affliction" by Michael Kahn (September/October 1999, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Let Sleeping Dogs Lie" by Chris Huntington (Blue Murder Magazine #9)
"Taking Care of Frank" by Anthony Mann (Crimewave #2)
"One More Kill" by Matt Hughes (December 1999, Blue Murder)

BEST SHORT SHORT (tie)

"When in Rome" by Dorothy Francis (December/January 2000, Murderous Intent Mystery Magazine)
"Just a Man on the Sidewalk" by Carol Kilgore (March 12-18, 1999, TheCase.Com)
"Absent-Minded" by L. C. Mohr (June/July 1999, Futures)
"Blind Justice" by Lynda Douglas (August 15, 1999, Novel Advice)
"The Armored Car" by Tim Myers (August 4, 1999, MysteryNet Twist)

BEST NOVELLA

"Saint Bobby" by Doug Allyn (April 1999, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
"Annie's Dream" by Bentley Dadmun (December 1999, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)
"Death in the Dales" by C. M. Chan (January 1999, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)

HONORARY BEST FIRST SHORT STORY

"Death in Full Bloom" by Ray Wonderly (August 1999, Futures)

GOLDEN DERRINGER AWARD
For Lifetime Achievement of Short Mystery Fiction

Henry Slesar
For his extensive and outstanding body of short mystery fiction.

DERRINGER AWARD FOR READER SUPPORT

Robert Foster
The long-time editor of The Short Order, the online newsletter serving the Short Mystery Fiction Society.

Jiro Kimura
The Short Mystery Fiction Society Historian, and Producer/Author of The Gumshoe Site.

Archival Post: 1999 SMFS Derringer Awards

2010-05-03T12:27:00.000-04:00

1999 DERRINGER AWARDS
(For Stories Published in 1998. Winners bolded.)

SHORT STORY CATEGORY

"Capital Justice" by Kris Neri (1998, Blue Murder #1)
"The Murder of Ernest Trapnell" by Erik Arneson (Fall 1998, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine)
A Loss of Income" by Seymour Shubin (Spring 1998, Murderous Intent)
Drop Dead Zone" by M.E. Troy (April 1998, Mystery Buff Magazine)
"Just Like in the Movies" by Kate Thornton (Blue Murder)
"To the Farm" by Dina Leacock (writing as Dianne Arrelle) (1998, Blue Murder # 2)
"Gator Bayou" by Joyce Holland (Spring 1998, Fogfire Magazine, Vol. 1, Issue 2)
"The Deadly Diamonds" by Robert Iles (1998, Blue Murder #5)
"Two Tickets to Paradise" by Barbara White-Rayczek (Death Knell III)

FLASH CATEGORY

"Pretty Kitty" by Joyce Holland (Winter 1998, Vol. 4. No. 4, Murderous Intent)
"Daddy's Pet" by Fay Thompson (January 14, 1898, TheCase.com [Twist 98])
"Rough Times" by Paul Harrison (March 6, 1998, TheCase.com [Flash 51])
"The Used Car" by Sheryl Snell-Massie (May 1, 1998, TheCase.com [Flash 55])
"Pocket Picked" by Jesse Knight (March 18, 1998, TheCase.com [Twist 69])
"Key to Success" by Richard Ciciarelli (November 4, 1998, TheCase.com [Twist 98])
"The Christmas Guest" by Dorothy Francis (December 16, 1998 [Twist 103])
"The Other Woman" by Kate Thornton (October 21, 1998, TheCase.com [Twist 96])
"Checkmate!" by Dale B. Hall (October 2, 1998, TheCase.com [Flash 65])
"Exchange of Information" by Kimberly Brown (February 6, 1998 [Flash 49])
"Anything for the Chief" by Linda K. Wright (as, Geri Myerson) (October 14, 1998, TheCase.com [Twist 95])

GOLDEN DERRINGER AWARD
For Lifetime Achievement of Short Mystery Fiction

Edward D. Hoch

DERRINGER READER AWARD
For Supporting Short Mystery Fiction

Kate Derie

Archival Post: 1998 SMFS Derringer Award Winners

2010-05-03T12:22:00.000-04:00

BEST FLASH

"Curiosity Kills" by Michael Mallory (Fall 1997, Murderous Intent)

BEST SHORT-SHORT STORY

"Guavaberry Christmas" by Kate Grilley (Fall 1997, Murderous Intent)

BEST SHORT STORY (TIE)

"The Adventurers" by Barbara White-Rayczek (Winter 1997, Murderous Intent)
"L.A. Justice" by Kris Neri (Murder by 13)

BEST FIRST SHORT STORY

"Back Stairs" by Eileen Brosnan (Fall 1997, Murderous Intent)

BEST NOVELLA

"Image of Conspiracy" by Margo Power (1997, Image of Conspiracy: A Mystery Adventure)

2010 SMFS Derringer Award Winners

2010-05-01T08:23:00.015-04:00

For stories first published in 2009. The winners as voted by the Short Mystery Fiction Society membership at large are in bold.

Some titles are linked to stories available in online magazine archives. The SMFS encourages you to read or listen to these free stories.

BEST FLASH STORY (Up to 1,000 Words)

"And Here's To You, Mrs. Edwardson" by Hamilton Waymire
Published in the webzine Big Pulp, November 23, 2009

"Awake" by David Dean
Published in EQMM, July 2009

"Gutterball" by Stephen D. Rogers
Published in Woman's World Magazine, September 7, 2009

"The Right Track" by R.T. Lawton
Published in Woman's World Magazine, October 26, 2009

"Unplanned" by Libby Cudmore
Published in Thrillers, Killers 'n' Chillers, August 2009

BEST SHORT STORY (1,001 - 4,000 Words)

"Identity Theft" by Robert Weibezahl
Published in Beat to a Pulp, March 14, 2009

"The Biography of Stoop the Thief" by Steven Torres
Published in Uncage Me!, July 2009

"The Hard Sell" by Jay Stringer
Published in Beat to a Pulp, May 3, 2009

"The Right to Remain Silent" by Debbi Mack
Published in The Back Alley, August 2009

(Debbi also read this story on Seth Harwood's CrimeWAV podcast. Download her episode here, or listen with the player below.)

"Twas the Night" by Anita Page
Published in The Gift of Murder, October 2009

("'Twas the Night" was also accepted to be read by Alan Vogel on Lit103.3. Listen with the player below.)

BEST LONG STORY (4,001 - 8,000 Words)

"A Stab in the Heart" by Twist Phelan
Published in EQMM, February 2009

(Twist also read this story on Seth Harwood's CrimeWAV podcast. Download her episode here, or listen with the player below.)

"Famous Last Words" by Doug Allyn
Published in EQMM, November 2009

"Regarding Certain Occurrences in a Cottage at the Garden of Allah" by Robert S. Levinson
Published in AHMM, November 2009

"Snow on Bloedkoppie" by Berhard Jaumann (translated from the German by Mary Tannert)
Published in EQMM, August 2009

"The Shipbreaker" by Mike Wiecek
Published in EQMM, March/April 2009

BEST NOVELETTE (8,001 - 17,500 Words)

"Adjuncts Anonymous" by B.K. Stevens
Published in AHMM, June 2009

"Julius Katz" by Dave Zeltserman
Published in EQMM, September/October 2009

"The Last Drop" by R.W. Kerrigan
Published in EQMM, February 2009

"The Pirate's Debt" by Toni L.P. Kelner
Published in EQMM, August 2009

"Uncle Brick and Jimmy Kills" by Allan Leverone
Published in Mysterical-E, Summer 2009

2010 RECIPIENT OF THE EDWARD D. HOCH MEMORIAL GOLDEN DERRINGER FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Lawrence Block

2010 SMFS Derringer Award Finalists

2010-04-01T08:26:00.008-04:00

As determined by volunteer judges from the SMFS membership.

Some titles are linked to stories available in online magazine archives. The SMFS encourages you to read or listen to these free stories.

BEST FLASH STORY (Up to 1,000 Words)

"And Here's To You, Mrs. Edwardson" by Hamilton Waymire
Published in the webzine Big Pulp, November 23, 2009

"Awake" by David Dean
Published in EQMM, July 2009

"Gutterball" by Stephen D. Rogers
Published in Woman's World Magazine, September 7, 2009

"The Right Track" by R.T. Lawton
Published in Woman's World Magazine, October 26, 2009

"Unplanned" by Libby Cudmore
Published in Thrillers, Killers 'n' Chillers, August 2009

BEST SHORT STORY (1,001 - 4,000 Words)

"Identity Theft" by Robert Weibezahl
Published in Beat to a Pulp, March 2009

"The Biography of Stoop the Thief" by Steven Torres
Published in Uncage Me!, July 2009

"The Hard Sell" by Jay Stringer
Published in Beat to a Pulp, May 3, 2009

"The Right to Remain Silent" by Debbi Mack
Published in The Back Alley, August 2009

(Debbi also read this story on Seth Harwood's CrimeWAV podcast. Download her episode here, or listen with the player below.)

"Twas the Night" by Anita Page
Published in The Gift of Murder, October 2009

BEST LONG STORY (4,001 - 8,000 Words)

"A Stab in the Heart" by Twist Phelan
Published in EQMM, February 2009

(Twist also read this story on Seth Harwood's CrimeWAV podcast. Download her episode here, or listen with the player below.)

"Famous Last Words" by Doug Allyn
Published in EQMM, November 2009

"Regarding Certain Occurrences in a Cottage at the Garden of Allah" by Robert S. Levinson
Published in AHMM, November 2009

"Snow on Bloedkoppie" by Berhard Jaumann (translated from the German by Mary Tannert)
Published in EQMM, August 2009

"The Shipbreaker" by Mike Wiecek
Published in EQMM, March/April 2009

BEST NOVELETTE (8,001 - 17,500 Words)

"Adjuncts Anonymous" by B.K. Stevens
Published in AHMM, June 2009

"Julius Katz" by Dave Zeltserman
Published in EQMM, September/October 2009

"The Last Drop" by R.W. Kerrigan
Published in EQMM, February 2009

"The Pirate's Debt" by Toni L.P. Kelner
Published in EQMM, August 2009

"Uncle Brick and Jimmy Kills" by Allan Leverone
Published in Mysterical-E, Summer 2009

The SMFS membership at large will read the finalist stories and vote between April 1-30, 2010. Winners announced May 1, 2010.

Yahoo! Groups Planned Downtime April 1

2010-03-31T07:14:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! Groups members and owners may experience intermittent downtime beginning at 1pm PT on Thursday, April 1, 2010 while the Groups team performs regular maintenance on some of the systems. During this time Yahoo! Group members and owners may not be able to access the Yahoo! Groups site or receive Yahoo! Groups mails.

We will update you as soon as the maintenance is complete. Thank you for your patience!

2010 Derringer Submissions - Final Tally

2010-03-16T09:15:00.001-04:00

From Awards Coordinator Suzanne Rorhus:

The submission period for the Derringers has officially ended. Please see below for a list of stories in each category.

Flash (Up to 1,000 Words):

A Matter of Opinion
An Old-Fashioned Vacation
And Here's To You, Mrs. Edwardson
Awake
Bottled Up
Confessions of a Telemarketer
Gutterball
Night Fall
Organization Girl
The Enumerator
The Right Track
Unplanned
Verdict

Short (1,001-4,000 Words):

A Bad Day at the Office
A Christmas Tail
All Set
An Inconvenient Killing
Anything
Avenging Angel
Baby, It's Cold Outside
Bad to the Corps
Biography of Stoop the Thief
Brew's Clues
Brotherly Love
Bye Bye Baby
Caught on Christmas Eve
Dream Catcher
Due Consideration
Dying For Chocolate
Eddie's Dungeon
Excuse Me, But There's a Kidney
Family Man
Grounds for Divorce
Gun Love
Identity Theft
Insatiable
Jibber Jabber
Keeping It Clean
Lights Out
Maker's and Coke
New Year's Eve Surprise
Nice Climate, Miami
One Good Turn
Pinked Off
Preferred Customer
Quick on the Draw
Raising the Dead
Reader of Dreams
Running to Zero
Shanks on Misdirection
Some Call It Revenge
Spare Change
Stephen Colbert's Ameri. Night.
Suitcase and Slow Time
Survival Instincts
Swim in the Sunshine
Taking Care of Our Own
The Big Switch
The Bite
The Good Woman
The Hard Sell
The Kindle Did It
The Lap of Luxury
The Night Before Christmas
The Right to Remain Silent
The Scene of My Second Murder
The Seven Dollar Clue
The Tortoise and the Tortoise
The Worst Noel
Trouble with Wind
Twas the Night
Unanswered Prayers
Undying Love
Unexpected Endings
Where there's Smoke
You Can Be Too Thin

Long (4,001-8.000 Words):

A Fellow of Infinite Jest
A Hollywood Ending
A Stab in the Heart
Bad Trip
Between Sins
Between Us Girls
Bismarck Rules
Bob's Superette
Boudin Noir
CHRISTMAS CAME LATE
Don't Call Me Simon
Famous Last Words
Fictional History
Finish the Job
FM is for Murder
For the Love of the Grape
Handbaskets, Drawers, and Killer Cold
Horns
Like Father, Like Son
London Calling
Los Simpaticos
Lucky is Another Country
Message in the Sand
On the House
Preminger's Gold
RED DOG
Regarding Certain Occurrences in a Cottage at the Garden of Allah
Shut Up and Kill Me
Sling
Snow on Bloedkoppie
Stepmonster
That Kind of Guy
The Case of the Piss-Poor Gold
The Center of the Universe
The Devil's Dumping Ground
The Gas Leak
The Greenhouse Effect
The Last Resort
The Shanty Drummer
The Shipbreaker
The Sleepy Pines Nursing Home
The Taskmaster
There's a Dead Elf in Santa's Workshop
Time Will Tell
Timing is Everything
Trust to Dust
Vacation
What Price Retribution?
White Wolves
Yule Night

Novelette (8,001-17,500 Words):

A Model for Murder
A Murder of Crows
A Voice From The Past
Adjuncts Anonymous
Bacon
How the Story Goes
Julius Katz
Killing Mum
Price Tag Attached
The Candy-Factory Girls
The Last Drop
The Pirate's Debt
Uncle Brick and Jimmy Kills

2010 Derringer Awards Voting Reminder

2010-03-01T07:54:00.000-05:00

A reminder that this year's group voting for the Derringer winners will take place on The Derringers Voting Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Derringers/ from April 1 through April 30, 2010.

Derringer Coordinator Suzanne Rorhus will upload the five finalist stories in each category to the Derringer Voting Group's Files section for members to read. Automated polls will be created for each category.

To vote for the Derringer winners, you must subscribe to the Derringer Voting Group. When you subscribe, Suzanne will check your eligibilty to vote based on whether you joined the SMFS prior to February 1, 2010. If you did so, you are eligible to vote for this year's Derringer winners. If you joined Shortmystery on or after February 1, 2010, you are not eligible to vote. This measure is in place to prevent last-minute ballot-stuffing.

The polls will close at midnight ET May 1, and the winners will be announced later that day.

Golden Derringer Panel Volunteer Needed

2010-03-01T07:26:00.001-05:00

As ratified last year, the Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement is given after deliberations by a five-member panel including the SMFS president and vice president, Derringer Awards Coordinator, lifetime member, and one randomly-selected member-volunteer.

If any SMFS member would like to volunteer, please e-mail me at g_so AT yahoo DOT com with the subject line "Golden Derringer Volunteer". I will put the volunteers' names into a randomizer program, and announce the chosen member on April 1.

While the group voting on the regular Derringers is going on (April 1-30), the Golden Derringer panel will be considering recipient candidates.

SMFS members may submit 200-word max essays nominating Golden Derringer candidates. E-mail them to g_so AT yahoo DOT com in the body of a message with the subject line "Golden Derringer Essay".

2010 Derringer Awards Submission Instructions

2010-01-19T08:37:00.001-05:00

From Awards Coordinator Suzanne Rorhus:

Please submit stories as an email attachment in Rich Text Format (.rtf) to rorhus AT sbcglobal DOT net. No other special spacing or format requirements need be followed, as long as identifying information does not appear in the attachment.

The covering email should state the title, author, name of submitting person or publication, where and when published, and category being entered. I'd prefer one entry per email. Subject line: Derringers (Title).

Submissions can be sent from noon ET February 1 to midnight ET March 15, 2010. Please check the submission guidelines found at http://shortmystery.blogspot.com/2008/08/smfs-derringer-awards-procedure.html before submitting to make sure your entry is eligible.

The SMFS at Bouchercon 2009

2009-10-08T08:45:00.009-04:00

Here is a running tally of SMFS members attending Bouchercon 2009, October 15-18, in Indianapolis, IN:

Patricia Abbott
Victor J. Banis
Jack Bates
Joseph Benedetto
Jack Bludis
Gary R. Bush
Bill Crider
Libby Cudmore
Jim Doherty
Laura Elvebak
Beth Groundwater
Dennis Leppanen
Molly MacRae
Ruth McCarty
Jim O'Keefe
Suzanne Rorhus
Kieran Shea

The presentation of plaques to the 2009 Derringer Award winners will be held in the Main Ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Indianapolis, Thursday, October 15, at 6:00 PM. SMFS VP Jim Doherty is MC.

Derringer Winners, Are You Coming to Bouchercon?

2009-10-01T12:16:00.002-04:00

From SMFS Vice President Jim Doherty:

Debi Watson, the Special Events Coordinator at this year's Bouchercon, has notified me that the presentation of the Macavitys, Barrys, CRIMESPREE Awards, and our own Derringers will be on Thursday, 17 Oct, at 6pm in the Main Ballroom.

Clark Howard has already notified me that he will be there to receive his award personally.

For the rest of you winners, I need you to contact me OFF-LIST with the answers to the following questions:

First, are you coming to Bouchercon? If the answer to that question is yes, you can skip all the rest of these questions.

Second, if you are not coming, do you plan to designate anyone who WILL be there to accept the award plaque on your behalf (and, importantly to deliver the plaque to you)? If you don't want to designate someone, can you send me your physical address so that I can mail the award to you? This is VERY important. If you aren't coming and no one will be designated to accept the award for you, and I know in advance, I don't have to bring your award to the 'con. On the other hand, if you aren't coming, and aren't designating a surrogate, and I DON'T know about it in advance, not only will I have to bring your trophy with me to the 'con, I will also have to take it back with me.

Third, if you are not coming, and not designating a surrogate, are there any remarks you'd like to have read at the awards event? If so, e-mail those remarks to me prior to the 'con.

Whether you're planning on "thanking all the little people" in person, or having me read your acceptance speech, try to keep your remarks brief. The event lasts only one hour, and three other sets of awards are being given out. Each organization giving awards is alloted only ten minutes.

Thank you for your prompt response to these questions. I'm hoping that all of the winners will be able to accept their well-deserved Derringers in person, but, if that's not possible, please let me know.

JIM DOHERTY
jimdohertyjr AT yahoo DOT com

SMFS Lapel Pin by Pattie Tierney

2009-09-05T08:11:00.012-04:00

Members requested an SMFS lapel pin so they might recognize each other at conventions, conferences, and the like.

To order the pin, e-mail Pattie Tierney (pattie DOT tierney AT gmail DOT com). The cost is $9.00 ($6.50 for the pin + $2.50 shipping and packaging) payable by check or PayPal.

Click on the image to enlarge.

SMFS in EQMM

2009-08-29T08:02:00.003-04:00

Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer winner Clark Howard is featured in the November 2009 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Congratulations once again, Mr. Howard.

Poll Results: Editors' Control over Derringer Submissions

2009-06-17T03:03:00.000-04:00

By a margin of 25 FOR, 1 AGAINST, the following clarification has been added to the Derringer Rules:

"An editor may personally decide not to submit his/her publication's stories for the Derringers. This decision cannot forbid the stories' submission by their SMFS-member authors or by other SMFS members UNLESS the editor has purchased such controlling rights from the author."

2010 Derringer Awards Coordinator

2009-05-31T19:32:00.003-04:00

By acclamation, Suzanne Berube Rorhus has been elected Derringer Awards Coordinator for 2010. She will serve from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010.

Poll Results: Privacy of Shortmystery Members Section

2009-05-20T04:48:00.000-04:00

By a margin of 10 FOR, 47 AGAINST, SMFS members have rejected the motion to make Shortmystery's Members list visible only to moderators as a means of preventing e-mail address harvesting and spam. The Members list will remain visible to all members of Shortmystery.

Derringer Awards Voting

2009-05-07T05:18:00.009-04:00

To be eligible to vote for the 2012 Derringer winners, you must join the Shortmystery Yahoo! Group before January 1, 2012. This cutoff is in place to prevent ballot-stuffing and recruiting people to the group simply to vote for any particular finalists.

On March 1, 2012, the finalist stories will be uploaded to the Files section of the Derringers Yahoo! Group for SMFS members to read. There is no discussion in the Derringers group, only polling. Admittance to the group is monitored to ensure that each voter's SMFS membership dates back before the start of Derringers submissions, January 1, 2012.

After reading the finalist stories, visit the Polls section of the Derringers Yahoo! Group. For each poll, indicate your choice by clicking on the circle next to it. Then click the "Vote" button.

You can check your vote by returning to the poll page. There will be a black dot in the circle next to your recorded choice. If you don't see a dot, your vote has not been recorded.

If you decide to change your vote before polling ends, return to the poll page, click the circle next to your new choice, and click the "Vote" button.

Voting on the 2012 Derringer Awards ends Friday, March 30, 2012.

The 2009 Derringer Awards

2009-05-01T06:20:00.014-04:00

Winners bolded.

Some titles are linked to stories in online magazine archives. The SMFS encourages you to read these stories.

BEST FLASH STORY (Up to 1,000 Words):

Black Pearls by James C. Clar (CRIME AND SUSPENSE)
Incident in Itawamba by Gary Hoffman (TEACAKES AND AFTERNOON TALES)
No Flowers for Stacey by Ruth McCarty (DEADFALL: CRIME STORIES BY NEW ENGLAND WRITERS)
No Place Like Home by Dee Stuart (MYSTERICAL-E)
This Bird has Flown by BV Lawson (ARMCHAIRINTERVIEWS.COM)
A Killing Season by J.F. Benedetto (WOMAN'S WORLD)
Rainy Day Fund by J.K. Cummins (WOMAN'S WORLD)*

*Correcting an oversight discovered late, "A Killing Season" and "Rainy Day Fund", tied for sixth place in the judging, were added as finalists.

**To correct an oversight discovered after the group vote, two winners were declared for Best Flash Story.

BEST SHORT STORY (1,001 to 4,000 Words):

Independence Day by Allan Leverone (CRIME AND SUSPENSE)
Regrets, I’ve Had a Few by Allan Leverone (TREI LITERARY MAGAZINE)
Stalkers*** by Lew Stowe (CRIME AND SUSPENSE)
Taste for It by Sophie Littlefield (DARKEST BEFORE DAWN)
The Cost of Doing Business by Michael Penncavage (THUGLIT)
Wishing on Whores*** by John Weagly (THIEVES JARGON)

***tie score in the judging

BEST LONG STORY (4,001-8,000 Words)

Bonnie and Clyde Caper by O’Neil De Noux (EQMM)
Dead Even by Frank Zafiro (MEDIUM OF MURDER)
The Art of Avarice by Darrell James (POLITICS NOIR)
The Big Score by Chris Holm (BACK ALLEY)
The Quick Brown Fox by Robert S. Levinson (AHMM)

BEST NOVELETTE (8,001 to 17,500 Words):

Haven’t Seen You Since the Funeral by Ernest B & Alice A. Brown (AHMM)
Jack Best and the Line in the Sand by Steve Olley (MYSTERICAL-E)
Panic on Portage Path by Dick Stodghill (AHMM)
Too Wise by O’Neil De Noux (EQMM)

2009 Recipient of the EDWARD D. HOCH MEMORIAL GOLDEN DERRINGER AWARD FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT:

Clark Howard

Yahoo! Groups Planned Downtime, Monday April 13

2009-04-11T07:24:00.001-04:00

On Monday, April 13th, 2009 Yahoo! Groups will undergo scheduled maintenance. During this time your group will be unavailable for 30-60 minutes.

The outage is currently scheduled to begin at 1 pm PT, 8 pm GMT. At this time, 1/4 of all Yahoo! Groups will become unavailable while the team services these groups. Once maintenance is complete on that 1/4 of Groups, they will be made available again, and the next 1/4 will become unavailable until all of the groups have been serviced.

In total the maintenance period should last around 5 hours, with the maintenance concluding around 6 pm PT, midnight GMT.

While your group is being serviced, all features of your group, including messages, photos, attachments, etc. will be completely unavailable. However, once your outage time concludes, your group and all of its features should return and any messages that were posted to the group via email during this downtime will be sent out. Please note that your group's outage should only last
around an hour.

In an effort to better communicate to all of you, a blast message will be posted to all groups starting today and continuing on through April 13th, 2009, linking to this message on the blog. This blast message is visible on all groups to all members and moderators.

Thank you for your patience—during the outage, the blog (http://www.ygroupsblog.com) will remain up (and comments will remain open) and we will update you all as information becomes available.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

2009 Derringer Awards Voting

2009-04-01T12:56:00.005-04:00

My congratulations to this year's Derringer finalists. The finalist stories are posted here to be read and voted on by SMFS members. To be eligible to vote for the Derringer winners, you must have joined Shortmystery before February 1, 2009. This cutoff is in place to prevent ballot-stuffing and recruiting people to the group simply to vote for any particular finalists.

Voting opened April 1 and will end April 30, at 11:59 PM ET. The Derringer polls record members' Yahoo! IDs so Awards Coordinator Nikki Dolson can check that each voter joined the group before February 1, 2009.

The automated results are unofficial. Nikki will do the official vote count and announce the winners on May 1.

2009 Derringer Finalists

2009-04-01T08:04:00.009-04:00

The finalists for the 2009 Derringer Awards are:

BEST FLASH STORY (Up to 1,000 Words)

Black Pearls by James C. Clar (CRIME AND SUSPENSE)
Incident in Itawamba by Gary Hoffman (TEACAKES AND AFTERNOON TALES)
No Flowers for Stacey by Ruth McCarty (DEADFALL: CRIME STORIES BY NEW ENGLAND WRITERS)
No Place Like Home by Dee Stuart (MYSTERICAL-E)
This Bird has Flown by BV Lawson (ARMCHAIRINTERVIEWS.COM)
A Killing Season by J.F. Benedetto (WOMAN'S WORLD)
Rainy Day Fund by J.K. Cummins (WOMAN'S WORLD)*

*Correcting an oversight discovered late, "A Killing Season" and "Rainy Day Fund", tied for sixth place in the judging, were added as finalists.

BEST SHORT STORY (1,001-4,000 Words)

Independence Day by Allan Leverone (CRIME AND SUSPENSE)
Regrets, I’ve Had a Few by Allan Leverone (TREI LITERARY MAGAZINE)
Stalkers** by Lew Stowe (CRIME AND SUSPENSE)
Taste for It by Sophie Littlefield (DARKEST BEFORE DAWN)
The Cost of Doing Business by Michael Penncavage (THUGLIT)
Wishing on Whores** by John Weagly (THIEVES JARGON)

**tie score in the judging

BEST LONG STORY (4,001-8,000 Words)

Bonnie and Clyde Caper by O’Neil De Noux (EQMM)
Dead Even by Frank Zafiro (MEDIUM OF MURDER)
The Art of Avarice by Darrell James (POLITICS NOIR)
The Big Score by Chris Holm (BACK ALLEY)
The Quick Brown Fox by Robert S. Levinson (AHMM)

BEST NOVELETTE (8,001-17,500 Words)

Haven’t Seen You Since the Funeral by Ernest B & Alice A. Brown (AHMM)
Jack Best and the Line in the Sand by Steve Olley (MYSTERICAL-E)
Panic on Portage Path by Dick Stodghill (AHMM)
Too Wise by O’Neil De Noux (EQMM)
Vegetable Matters by Terry W. Ervin II (MINDFLIGHTS)

Congratulations to the finalists! And a HUGE THANK YOU to the judges without whom this never would have happened. But now folks it's your turn. The stories are in FILES section of our group page. Head there to read our finalists stories then head over to the polls to place your vote. The polls be up shortly.

Remember to be eligible to vote you need to have joined SMFS before Feb. 1st.

Poll Results: Derringer Eligibility of Issues with Overlapping Years

2009-03-09T05:48:00.001-04:00

By a margin of 24 AGAINST, 10 FOR, SMFS members have rejected the proposed Derringer rules change.

Derringer eligibility of magazine issues with overlapping years stands as follows:

In the case of magazines or e-zines which cover more than one month and overlap years, the later year shall be the determining factor. (Example: December 2008/January 2009 issues would be eligible in 2010.)

DERRINGER SUBMISSIONS

2009-03-08T12:47:00.001-04:00

This is it! THE FINAL WEEK! So send in those stories to me!

Below are the current accepted stories. If you've sent me stories and haven't received a reply email and don't see your submitted story below, please email me. I'll be accepting submissions until March 15th and then I close up shop. The judges will read and score the submissions, the scores will be tallied and the finalists will be announced. Then it will be up to the SMFS members to choose the winners. So keep sending in your favorite mystery and crime stories from 2008!

CURRENT SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED::

1,000 words or less:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND COMMON CENTS
BLACK PEARLS
BIRTHDAYS
BORED TO DEATH
I GOTTA GO
ICE SHACK
INCIDENT AT ITAWAMBA
KILLING SEASON
NO FLOWERS FOR STACY
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
RAINY DAY FUND
RAINY DAY ROBBERY
RIVAL PASSIONS
SECRETS
SERIAL KILLER
SWEETHEART
THE NAME GAME
THIN ICE
THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN

1,001-4,000 words:

A CHRISTMAS CAROLE
A SIMPLE KINDNESS
AN APPOINTMENT UP THE MOUNTAIN
BAD LUCK, GOOD FORTUNE
BUTTERFLY
CAB RIDE
COMING UP ROSES
COMPULSIVE BUBBA
COURTESY CALL
CRUCIAL MOMENT
DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL
DEATH HAS POUTY RED LIPS
DING DONG THE SNITCH IS DEAD
DUGOUT DUDES
FLOWERS FOR AMELIA
FRUITS
GRACIE’S GIFT FROM THE EAST
HARD CASE
HEIDEGGER'S CAT
IN THE NICK OF TIME
INDEPENDENCE DAY
JUST CALL ME NICK
LAP DANCE
LOVE IN VAIN
MARSDEN MEETS SCARFACE
NO EXCEPTIONS
NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET
OUT OF ORDER
REGRETS, I'VE HAD A FEW
RETRANSFORMATION
SANCTUARY LOST
SHUTTERBUG
STALKERS
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE
TEMECULA REVENGE
THAT NIGHT IN GALVESTON
THE BIG BASH
THE DEVIL TO PLAY
THE LAST DANCE
THEY TAKE YOU
TIME TO SETTLE UP
THOROUGHLY YOURS
TODAY YOU DIE
TRASH TALK
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
VENGENCE IS MINE
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MARILYN?
WHEN A BRIGHT STAR FADES
WHO’S BEEN SLEEPING IN MY BED?
WISHING ON WHORES

4,001-8,000 words:

AN ARBITRARY DEPRIVATION OF LIFE
ART OF AVARICE
BAGGING THE TROPHY
BALLPOINT
BETWEEN US GIRLS
BITTER HONEY
BONNIE AND CLYDE CAPER
BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
CEMETARY PLOT
CHARM CITY
CIRCULATION
COMPULSIVE BUBBA
COOKIES
DARK
DEAD EVEN
DIVINE HEALING
DOG ON BALMY BEACH
EGYPTIAN EYES AND IRISH LIES
FAMILY PLOT
GIRL OF MY DREAMS
GEORGIE
IT TORE THE LAUGH FROM MY THROAT
JOHNNY, REMEMBER ME
MEAN STREETS
MISSING BUT NOT MISSED
SOLDIERS
SPRAY THAT IS SHED BY THE STAR
THE BIG SCORE
THE BONEHOLDER
THE LENGTH OF A STRAW
THE INSTRUMENT OF THEIR DESIRE
THE QUARRY
THE QUICK BROWN FOX
THERAPY
VACATIONLAND

8,001-17,500 words:

HAVEN'T SEEN YOU SINCE THE FUNERAL
JACK BEST AND THE LINE IN THE SAND
PANIC ON PORTAGE PATH
TOO WISE
VEGETABLE MATTERS

Derringer Award Nominations

2009-02-01T19:33:00.000-05:00

Nominations for the Derringer Awards will be accepted beginning February 1st. So think back about all those great stories you read in 2008. The ones you had to tell other people about. Pick the ones you love best and send them to me in an email. In the subject line type DERRINGER SUBMISSION – TITLE OF STORY and attach the story file, preferably in Word format but send it however. If I can’t open it we’ll figure out something. Please remove the author’s name from the stories. The attached files should have the title of the work and a word count included at the top of the story.

In the body of the email tell me the author's name, when and where the story was published. Also tell me who published the story. I’ll need to know if the person submitting the story is an editor, the author or a member of SMFS. Include indicate the length-category the work is to be entered in.

And last but not least, the submission must be a mystery of some sort.

Market update

2009-02-01T18:02:00.002-05:00

ezine, non-paying:

http://Darknessbefore.blogspot.com

ezine, non-paying:

www.powderburnflash.com

Poll Results: Derringer Category Names

2009-02-01T04:03:00.001-05:00

With 54.9 percent of the vote, the following Derringer category names have been chosen:

Best Flash Story (Up to 1,000 words)

Best Short Story (1,001-4,000 words)

Best Long Story (4,001-8,000 words)

Best Novelette (8,001-17,500 words)

The category lengths in parentheses are not part of the category names, but they will stay in effect for sorting the Derringer submissions.

Overall Tone

2009-01-23T14:49:00.007-05:00

The SMFS Officers cannot be expected to police every phrase that may possibly offend. However, if a member's posts devolve from reasoned argument to impulsive reaction, that is cause to be placed on moderated status, whereupon the member's posts must be approved by the President or Vice President before reaching the list. Moderated members will be returned to normal posting status when a sufficient number of their posts show reasoned argument.

Poll Results: Golden Derringer Panel Permanent Member

2009-01-22T13:00:00.001-05:00

By a margin of 46 FOR, 7 AGAINST, the membership has approved Babs Lakey as permanent member of the Golden Derringer panel, serving a term of her choosing.

Avoid Automated Invitations

2009-01-15T04:55:00.005-05:00

Automated invitations (such as those sent by various social networking sites to a member's entire address book) should not be posted to Shortmystery. If an invitation is unintentionally sent to the list, I will place the sending member's account on moderated status to prevent further invitations from reaching the list until the member addresses the problem independently.

SMFS Market update

2009-01-07T21:29:00.006-05:00

Here's a list of markets that aren't on our markets page on the website:

Yellow Mama ezine: http://blackpetalsks.tripod.com/yellowmama/index.html non-paying

A Twist of Noir ezine: http://a-twist-of-noir.blogspot.com/ non-paying

Beat to a Pulp ezine: http://www.beattoapulp.com/ non-paying

Crooked ezine: http://easternstandardcrime.blogspot.com/ non-paying

Thug Lit ezine: http://www.thuglit.com/home.html non-paying

Orchard Press Mysteries ezine: http://www.orchardpressmysteries.com/index.html fiction, non-paying

Feel free to send market updates to Joy Seymour (joyleenseymour@earthlink.net)

Poll Results: Shortmystery and Grouply

2008-11-23T05:02:00.006-05:00

In accordance with a group vote of 51 FOR, 2 AGAINST, I have changed Shortmystery's settings via Grouply Owner Controls:

- I have disabled Grouply invitations, which means no member of Grouply will be able to post invitations to Shortymystery or invite Shortmystery members individually.

- I have unlisted Shortmystery's name at Grouply.

- I have blocked access to Shortmystery from Grouply.

- I have requested that all Shortmystery messages currently on Grouply be deleted. This deletion will take up to 48 hours.

As I've mentioned, I don't trust Grouply to follow through, but at least we've made the attempt. If you continue to receive messages from Grouply, know that I have made these changes, and as always, messages from Grouply are NOT AUTHORIZED by me.

Onlist threads discussing Grouply:

Moderator's Note: Beware of Grouply started by Gerald So

GROUPLY WARNING started by Eva Batonne

grouply started by Victor J. Banis

my understanding regarding GROUPLY started by Eva Batonne

Grouply started by Susanne

How to Vote in SMFS Polls

2008-11-16T06:40:00.004-05:00

SMFS polls are created within the Shortmystery Yahoo! Group. They are designed to hide voting results until polling has ended. Members vote by visiting specific poll pages announced onlist when a poll opens and included in the list message footer for the duration of polling.

On the poll page, indicate your choice by clicking on the circle next to it. Then click the "Vote" button.

You can check your vote by returning to the poll page. There will be a black dot in the circle next to your recorded choice. If you don't see a dot, your vote has not been recorded.

If you decide to change your vote before polling ends, return to the poll page, click the circle next to your new choice, and click the "Vote" button.

When polling ends, the voting results are e-mailed to the list and stored in Shortmystery's Polls section.

SMFS Golden Derringer Procedure

2008-10-20T06:33:00.010-04:00

In July 2008, with permission from Patricia Hoch, the SMFS voted to rename its Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement after her late husband, Edward D. Hoch.

In October 2008, the SMFS voted to adopt the following procedure, composed by Vice President Jim Doherty, to determine who receives the Golden Derringer Award each year:

1) The Short Mystery Fiction Society (hereafter, the "SMFS") shall give an annual award for Lifetime Achievement, to be called the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer (hereafter, "the award").

2) The recipient of the award shall be selected by a special committee.

3) The committee shall consist of the following members:

a) The SMFS President, who shall serve as the committee's chairman.
b) The SMFS Vice-President
c) The SMFS Derringer Coordinator

All of the above committee members shall serve for the duration of their terms of office.

In addition, there shall be two more committee members selected:

d) A Permanent Member, who shall serve for life or for as long as s/he chooses to serve. The permanent member should be selected on the basis of his/her long-standing membership in the SMFS (if possible a founding or charter member should be chosen), and his/her broad knowledge of the mystery genre in general and the mystery short story in particular. The permanent member's function, in addition to being a voting member, is, first, to provide some long-term continuity to the committee, and, second, to bring to the committee a sense of historical perspective and institutional memory. The permanent member shall be proposed by the SMFS President, based on suggestions from members and his/her own judgment, and ratified by the general membership.
e) A member selected from the general membership, chosen at random from among those rank-and-file members volunteering for the position. This member shall serve for one year. His/her fuction, in addtion to being a voting member, is, first, to insure that the rank-and-file membership has some say in the selection, and, second, to bring the total membership of the committee to an odd number, thus insuring against tie votes.

4) a) The criteria for selecting a recipient should be having produced an impressive body of short crime fiction, and having made a major impact on the genre.
b) The award should be reserved for writers, not editors, who may be honored by other awards. Notwithstanding this, if a candidate, who is a writer, is also well-known as an editor, and his/her editing is part of what has made a major impact on the genre, the committee shall be free to consider this aspect of the candidate's career in making the selection.
c) Candidates who are better-known as novelists than as short story writers, but who have nevertheless produced an impressive body of short fiction, shall not be barred from consideration because they are primarily perceived as novelists.
d) The lack of recent productivity shall not be regarded as a bar to consideration, as long as the work produced when the candidate was active meets the criteria described above.
e) Only living candidates should be considered, with the exception that if a candidate was alive at the time deliberations began, but died while they were going on, in such a case the award might be given posthumously.

5) The deliberations of the committee shall be kept strictly confidential, and all members must agree to this, each year, prior to the beginning of deliberations.

6) Nominations from the general membership shall be encouraged. Nominations shall take the form of short essay of no more than 200 words, sent to the SMFS President, in his/her capacity as the chairman of the committee, OFF-LIST. It should not be construed, however, that the candidate who has the most nominations, or who is the subject of the best-written nomination, shall be chosen. The committee members shall seriously consider nominations from the general membership, but are free to ultimately choose any candidate they consider worthy, even if no one from the general membership nominated that particular candidate. In other words, nominations from the general membership are suggestions, not mandates.

Poll Results: Golden Derringer Procedure

2008-10-05T05:36:00.002-04:00

By a margin of 35-4 votes, members have adopted a procedure to determine recipients of the Short Mystery Fiction Society's lifetime achievement award, the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer.

The Ongoing Derringer Debate

2008-09-09T10:16:00.003-04:00

I offer this response to various reactions to ongoing debate of the SMFS Derringer Awards. Any organization that gives awards constantly debates fairness. For now, the SMFS has tried to document its fairness with the recent rules change. In the continuing interest of fairness we may need to change things in the future, but we won't realize anything needs to be done if we stop discussion.

For example, the previous regular Derringer process was to sign up to a separate group just to read the Derringer stories, and voting involved e-mailing two volunteer vote counters. In the current process, the Derringer stories are posted to Shortmystery's Files section and the votes are counted by polls created in Shortmystery—allowing a greater portion of the group to find the stories and vote. The change would have never been made if no one brought it up. And if no one brought it up, I'm sure quite a few people would have stood by the previous process because "it's the way we've always done things."

So as heated as these debates get, I see them as ultimately helpful to the SMFS.

SMFS Derringer Awards Procedure

2008-08-31T06:17:00.121-04:00

The annual Derringer Awards were established by the Short Mystery Fiction Society (SMFS) in 1997 to honor excellence in short mystery fiction. The name "Derringer," after the palm-sized handgun, was chosen as a metaphor for a short mystery or crime story.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Though the Derringer Awards Coordinator will check that all entries are eligible, the submitting party has the first responsibility to read the guidelines below and submit accordingly.
SELECTION OF FINALISTS
DETERMINATION OF DERRINGER WINNERS
2012 DERRINGER TIMELINE
GUIDELINES FOR DERRINGER JUDGES

Who may submit for the 2012 Derringer Awards:

Derringer stories may be written by SMFS members or non-members, but all stories must be submitted by:

SMFS members as of December 31, 2011 or earlier

OR

Editors of publications featuring mystery or crime fiction.

To join the SMFS, simply subscribe to the free Shortmystery Yahoo! Group.

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Story eligibility:

To be considered for the awards presented in 2012:

a) Submissions must mystery or crime stories

b) first appearing in English in 2011.

c) The publication must have been one with an editor and editorial process -- not purely a self-publishing venture or one that publishes every submission without editing.

d) The publication may be print or electronic; paying or non-paying; a single issue, periodical, collection, or anthology.

e) The publication does not have to originate from the United States of America. It must, however, be published in English.

f) Works previously published in any language other than English are eligible if they first appeared in English in 2011.

g) The author of the submission does not have to be a member of SMFS.

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Publication date and year of eligibility:

The date printed on the publication's cover or indicated within the publication is considered its publication date and determines when a particular story is eligible for the Derringers. Only stories first published in English in 2010 are to be considered for Derringer Awards in 2011.

When a publication date overlaps years, such as 'Winter 2011-2012' or 'Dec-Jan 2011-2012,' the SMFS considers the later year the year of publication. (The examples given are considered published in 2012, eligible for the Derringers presented in 2013.)

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Award categories:

Submissions will be accepted and awards will be given in the following length categories:

Best Flash Story (Up to 1,000 Words)

Best Short Story (1,001 to 4,000 Words)

Best Long Story (4,001 to 8,000 Words)

Best Novelette (8,001 to 17,500 Words)

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Submission limits:

Any member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society as of December 31, 2011 may submit up to TWO (2) stories for consideration for the 2011 Derringer Awards. The two stories may be written by the member, written by others, or one of each.

The number of editorial submissions allotted to a publication for the 2011 Derringer Awards is based on the publication's total number of stories first appearing in 2010:

If the publication contains up to 25 stories first appearing in 2011, up to 3 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2012.

" 26 to 50 stories first appearing in 2011, up to 4 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2012.

" 51 to 75 stories first appearing in 2011, up to 5 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2012.

" more than 75 stories first appearing in 2011, up to 6 of these may be submitted by the editor for Derringer consideration in 2012.

Multiple editors for a single publication share one of the above limits based on the publication's total number of stories first appearing in 2011.

Editors of more than one publication are assigned one of the above limits based on the total number of stories they edited that first appeared in 2011. Where it reads "If the publications contains" above, substitute "If the editor has edited".

If an editor of more than one publication is also one of many editors for a single publication, and uses his/her personal limit to make all of the editorial submissions allotted to a single publication, no additional editorial submissions can be accepted for that publication.

An editor may personally decide not to submit his/her publication's stories for the Derringers. This decision cannot forbid the stories' submission by their SMFS-member authors or by other SMFS members UNLESS the editor has purchased such controlling rights from the author.

Editors who are also SMFS members may submit, in addition to their editorial limit, up to TWO (2) stories of their own or others' writing that first appeared in 2011 in publications they did not edit. To clarify, editors may not submit stories that they have self-published in their own publications.

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Officer ineligibility:

To avoid the appearance of any impropriety, Officers of the SMFS (President and Vice President) and the Derringer Awards Coordinator are not eligible for consideration for the Derringers during the terms of their office.

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Formatting and sending submissions:

As a new Awards Coordinator is elected each year, the instructions for formatting and sending submissions may change according to his or her preferences.

The Coordinator is obliged to post regular updates of the stories received throughout the Derringer process. This avoids duplicate submissions and serves to check that stories submitted are received. If any story submitted does not appear in an update and you have met the listed eligibility requirements, notify the President or Vice President along with the Coordinator, and we will investigate.

Full instructions from 2012 Coordinator Gwen Mayo at http://shortmystery.blogspot.com/2012/01/2012-derringer-awards-submission_01.html

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SELECTION OF FINALISTS

The Coordinator divides the eligible submissions among the four length categories. To encourage open-minded judging, the Coordinator removes author's name and publication name from submitted manuscripts before sending them to the Judges (SMFS member-volunteers).

Judges rate each story in their category according to the Judging Guidelines below and return their ratings to the Coordinator. The Coordinator adds the three judges' ratings and divides by three to get each story's average ratings.

The Coordinator is obliged to report all ratings and final averages to the judges in each category to ensure they have been properly received and tallied. These reports are to be made without revealing the judges' identities to each other. (See a sample report.)

For each category, the five stories with the highest averages become the Finalists.

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DETERMINATION OF DERRINGER AWARD WINNERS

The Coordinator posts the twenty Finalist stories -- with author and publication names restored -- to the Derringers Voting group, where they are read and voted on by SMFS members as of December 31, 2011 or earlier. The winner of this popular vote in each category is presented a Derringer Award.

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2012 DERRINGER AWARDS TIMELINE

Submissions will be accepted from Noon ET, January 1, 2012, to 11:59 PM ET January 31, 2012

Judges will score Derringer submissions February 1–29, 2012

Finalists will be announced March 1, 2012

SMFS members as of December 31, 2011 will vote to determine Derringer winners from March 1-30, 2012

Derringer winners will be announced March 31, 2012

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GUIDELINES FOR DERRINGER JUDGES

SMFS members may volunteer to judge by contacting the Derringer Coordinator in private. This is to protect the identity of each judge and the privacy of the judging process.

Volunteers should specify the length category they wish to judge. If the Coordinator does not assign them to that category, they have the right to un-volunteer.

Volunteers should be prepared to read all the stories in their category except those for which they have a legitimate conflict of interest. Judges may not be assigned particular stories by taste; however, judges may rate all the stories in their category by personal taste within the six headings below.

Three judge positions and one alternate are filled for each award category. The Derringer Coordinator sends a story to the alternate if a regular judge is unable to score it due to illness, other commitments, or conflicts of interest.

Conflict of interest may be claimed if a judge is the author, the editor, or had a role in the acceptance for publication of a Derringer submission. Ideally, as keeper of identifying information, the Coordinator should be first to see conflicts and distribute stories accordingly.

Judges should notify the Coordinator if they receive stories they wrote, edited, or accepted for publication. A judge's recognition of a story's author or original publication from its text is not a conflict of interest and does not disqualify the judge from scoring.

Judges are asked to rate each story for each of the headings below on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best. Under each heading are some suggested thoughts to consider.

1. OVERALL WRITING

- Does the beginning catch your attention?
- Is there too little action? Too much?
- Is it too wordy? Too terse?
- Is there a good balance between dialogue and narration?
- Is the dialogue realistic and believable?

2. CHARACTERS

- Are they well-developed and convincing?
- Is there good interaction between characters?
- Is it clear in whose POV the story is told?
- Is there at least one character interesting enough for you to care what happens to him or her?

3. SETTING

- Is the setting well described?
- Is there enough description of the setting? Too much?

4. PLOT

- Is it fresh and imaginative?
- Is it believable?
- Does one thing lead to another as it develops?
- Are there plot gaps you wish had been filled?

5. ENDING

- Is the ending acceptable and satisfying to you?
- Were all loose ends neatly tied up?
- Did you feel more ending was needed? Less?

6. OVERALL FEELING

- In addition to or in spite of the above, rate your overall reaction to this story in comparison to others you have read.

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Poll Results: Derringer Eligibility for SMFS Officers

2008-08-31T06:00:00.000-04:00

By a margin of 38 to 30 votes, SMFS members have voted to amend the Derringer Rules as follows:

To avoid the appearance of any impropriety, Officers of the SMFS executive (president, vice-president, secretary and awards coordinator) will not be eligible for consideration for the Derringers during the terms of their office.

How Shortmystery will fight spam

2008-08-06T13:05:00.002-04:00

Jim Doherty and I have come up with a policy to deal with the listserv equivalent of spam:

If a post 1) comes from someone unfamiliar to us, who is on moderated status, 2) sounds too canned, and 3) shows no desire to be a part of the community, we will reject it.

Obviously, a long-standing member, talking about a new service, or a new publication s/he's starting, or passing along info on such a service/publication, would be not only welcome to do so, but encouraged to do so.

Under Review: SMFS officials' eligibility for Derringer Awards

2008-08-03T08:40:00.002-04:00

A two-week discussion period began August 2 on whether the SMFS President, Vice President, and Derringer Coordinator should by rule be ineligible to win Derringer Awards during their terms in office.

The motion as worded by Kevin Burton Smith, seconded by Kevin R. Tipple:

To avoid the appearance of any impropriety, Officers of the SMFS executive (president, vice-president, secretary and awards coordinator) will not be eligible for consideration for the Derringers during the terms of their office.

Onlist discussion ends Saturday, August 16, followed by two weeks for a group vote.

New SMFS Site Layout

2008-07-30T07:44:00.000-04:00

The following site layout was approved by group vote ending July 29, 2008

Statement of Purpose

The Short Mystery Fiction Society is a worldwide group of writers, editors, publishers and readers. Through informative discussions, publicity efforts, and annual awards, we promote the creation, publication, and appreciation of short crime and mystery fiction.

Join Us

Subscribe to the free Shortmystery Yahoo! Group. Send an e-mail to Shortmystery-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or visit the Shortmystery subscription page.

The current front page descriptions of the Derringer Awards and officers' roles will be shifted to the "Awards" and "Officers" pages respectively. The more informal description of the group will be on a new "Members' Welcome" page.

Members' Welcome

The Short Mystery Fiction Society includes wonderful and friendly people across the USA and Canada, the UK, India, South America, Australia and other exotic lands.

SMFS members engage in daily discussions about short mystery and crime fiction in particular and fiction writing in general. Ask questions about crime scene technology, police procedures, how PIs really operate, the best way to poison someone, how long does a dead body stay warm, or any other genre-related topic. You'll get answers from qualified experts in the field or from fellow SMFSers who have researched and written about it.

Have a problem with a story you're working on? Not sure how to develop a plot, plant clues and red herrings, add substance and life to your characters? Ask and you'll get help from others who struggle through the same problems with every story they write, whether it's their first or their hundred and first.

Members of SMFS also share information about where the best stories can be found for your reading pleasure, as well as where and how to submit your own stories for publication in this ever-evolving marketplace.

Poll Results: Site Layout, Web Archive, Golden Derringer

2008-07-29T04:27:00.001-04:00

Polls on the following issues are now closed:

1) Whether to adopt the proposed new site layout

By a margin of 58-20 votes, the proposed new layout is adopted.

2) Whether to make the list Web archive private

By a margin of 56-28 votes, the Web archive is made private.

3) Whether to rename the Golden Derringer lifetime achievement award in honor of Edward D. Hoch

By a margin of 73-14 votes, the Golden Derringer is renamed the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer.

Problems Accessing Yahoo! Groups?

2008-07-19T06:58:00.012-04:00

If you receive group e-mail but are unable to visit our Yahoo! Groups site or vote in the polls -

Here are two Yahoo! help links:

Q: I'm receiving email from a group, but when I try to visit the group's webpages, it says that I "need to enable web access".

Q: I get Group email, but I’m not in the Member list and I don’t see the Group when I sign into groups.yahoo.com -- what’s up?

If you are in the Member list and can access the Yahoo! Groups site, but have not received messages as expected -

Your account may be "bouncing".

If you are in the Member list and have web access but have not received group email for some time and cannot access the Yahoo! Groups site specifically -

Yahoo! Groups delivery may be delayed or the site may be down. Visit the Official Yahoo! Groups Blog for the most current information.

If you're having an issue not covered here -

Let me know offlist, and I'll see what I can do.

SMFS Has Patricia Hoch's Permission to Rename Golden Derringer

2008-07-15T06:00:00.000-04:00

The SMFS today received permission from Edward D. Hoch's wife Patricia to rename its Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement in Short Mystery Fiction "The Edward D. Hoch Golden Derringer." SMFS members are voting on this issue.

List Guidelines at Work: More on Trimming Posts

2008-07-15T05:57:00.005-04:00

From the Shortmystery FAQ:

When posting, avoid irrelevant quoting (e.g. entire messages or digests) and long signature files. These are wastes of network bandwidth, causing slower dowloads.

Trimming a post (or, more often, a reply) is deleting anything extraneous to the point you are trying to make with your message.

When you create a reply with most e-mail software, the message you are replying to is often automatically quoted. If you are not replying to everything in an original message, there is no need to quote the entire message. You can delete the parts you're not addressing.

Trimming also applies to the signature lines or ads added by many ad-supported e-mail services (Yahoo!, Hotmail, Netzero).

My opinion on trimming posts is similar to mine on congrats and thanks.

It makes no difference whether a post is individual or digest; trimming a post shows I take more care with it, like taking the "trouble" to send private congrats. It shows I don't want to bother others with anything irrelevant to my post. I wouldn't include anything irrelevant if I were giving a speech or writing a letter. I give e-mail the same attention.

I make it an easy-to-read dialogue. Quote the original poster in angle brackets, then give my response without brackets:

<< Text from original message. >>

My response.

List Guidelines at Work: Offlist Dealings

2008-07-14T06:19:00.000-04:00

The reason I direct people to send their questions of list policy and personal disputes offlist is I can often answer them without inconveniencing the members who don't want to see the list bogged down in policy. I bring matters to the list's attention when I believe members' input will be valuable or the issue is important enough that members should be made aware.

List Guidelines at Work: More on Congratulations and Thanks

2008-07-14T05:53:00.000-04:00

If I may inject an opinion on congrats and thanks, I don't see how public congrats and thanks are better than private congrats and thanks. Public congrats makes sense if the one congratulated was too shy to mention his accomplishment himself onlist, but otherwise congrats can come off as the congratulator trying to score appearance points.

Likewise public thanks make sense if the thanker has no other means of communicating with the congratulator, but otherwise it can be done just as well offlist.

The way I see it—more opinion—if one were really sincere in wanting to congratulate another, the congratulator wouldn't mind the "trouble" of a private message. Onlist congrats can have the feeling of piggybacking and can be pretty hollow, and a cookie-cutter congratulations most often elicits a cookie-cutter thanks.

As a congratulator, when searching the list for publication announcements also check whether an announcement has already received congrats. If so, please send your congrats privately.

Moderated Status

2008-07-10T05:08:00.003-04:00

You will occasionally see the term "moderated status" onlist. When on moderated status, a member's posts are subject to moderator approval before they reach the list.

People first joining Shortmystery begin on moderated status until a moderator determines they are actually interested in Shortmystery and not simply spammers.

Moderated status is also applied if a member's posts devolve from reasoned argument to impulsive reaction (insults, etc.), or if any spam is sent from a member's account.

Regular posting status is restored when the member returns to reasoned argument or the member's account proves to be spam-free.

Under Review: Should list archives be made private?

2008-07-04T17:42:00.003-04:00

The Shortmystery message archive is currently readable by non-member visitors to the Yahoo! Groups site. Should we make the archive private so only members can read the messages by signing in?

A group vote on this is forthcoming.

SMFS Official Time

2008-07-01T13:57:00.016-04:00

The official time as relates to all list deadlines and events is U.S. Eastern. This will be specified on all time-sensitive announcements.

For your reference, the current U.S. Eastern date and time:

Under Review: Statement of Purpose

2008-07-01T05:24:00.005-04:00

SMFS membership is currently discussing proposed rephrasing of its statement of purpose. To prepare for the onlist discussion, read the existing statement and the proposed rephrased statement.

Onlist discussion of the proposal runs through July 14, with a group vote July 15-29.

Existing Statement of Purpose

2008-07-01T05:14:00.004-04:00

Below is a copy of the SMFS's existing statement of purpose at http://www.shortmystery.net. It is currently under review by the members along with a proposed, reworded statement. A group vote on which statement to adopt will take place July 15, 2008.

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

The Short Mystery Fiction Society seeks to actively recognize writers and readers who promote and support the creative artform of short mysteries in the press, in other mystery organizations, and through awards.

The Short Mystery Fiction Society is an email list group of writers, readers, fans, editors and publishers of mystery and crime fiction from all around the globe. Membership includes wonderful and friendly people across the USA and Canada, the UK, India, South America, Australia and other exotic lands.

SMFS members engage in daily discussions about short mystery and crime fiction in particular and fiction writing in general. Ask questions about crime scene technology, police procedures, how PIs really operate, the best way to poison someone, how long does a dead body stay warm, or any other genre-related topic. You'll get answers from qualified experts in the field or from fellow SMFsters who have researched and written about it.

Have a problem with a story you're working on? Not sure how to develop a plot, plant clues and red herrings, add substance and life to your characters? Ask and you'll get help from others who struggle through the same problems with every story they write, whether it's their first or their hundred and first.

Members of SMFS also share information about where the best stories can be found for your reading pleasure, as well as where and how to submit your own stories for publication in this ever-evolving marketplace.

THE DERRINGER AWARDS

You'll also participate in choosing the best mystery stories published each year. The annual Derringer Awards were created by the Short Mystery Fiction Society in 1997 to honor excellence in the field of short mystery fiction. The name "Derringer," after the palm-sized handgun, was chosen as a metaphor for a mystery or crime short story-small, but deadly.

Any mystery or crime story published in a professional print or electronic magazine or book length anthology is eligible for a Derringer. The author does not have to be a member of SMFS to be considered. Winners in each category are chosen by SMFS member vote.

OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY

SMFS has two officers, elected every two years through a nomination and voting process by members.

TO PARTICIPATE

To join the Short Mystery Fiction Society, send an email to:
Shortmystery-subscribe@ yahoogroups.com

Or simply visit our discussion list web page.

Then, sit back, relax and join in. There are no membership dues, no dumb questions and no wrong opinions. It's all about sharing a common interest in mystery and crime fiction with friends.

Group FAQ / Guidelines

2008-06-21T01:34:00.075-04:00

Compiled by Gerald So, SMFS President (2008-2010)

What is the Short Mystery Fiction Society?
Boundaries of Discussion
Reading, Posting, and Replying to Shortmystery
BSP (Blatant Self-Promotion)
Congratulations and Thanks
The Derringer Awards
Service Advisories

What is the Short Mystery Fiction Society?

A group for anyone who writes, edits, publishes, or just enjoys short mystery/crime stories. Join us via the Shortmystery Yahoo! Group.

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Boundaries of Discussion

We aim for a discussion open to any aspect of short mystery fiction, equally worthwhile to authors, editors, publishers, and fans.

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Reading, Posting, and Replying to Shortmystery

You must subscribe to receive messages by e-mail and to post your own. You must sign in to Yahoo! Groups to read our messages via the Web.

Yahoo! Groups and most e-mail programs automatically quote entire messages when you hit "Reply". In order to keep our messages and digests quickly downloadable for members with varying Internet access speeds, please quote only the specific points to which you are replying. Delete any extraneous text and and keep signature lines short.

Do not post works of fiction, whole or excerpted, to the list. Posting is a form of publishing and may cost you rights as author or violate another author's copyright.

For the same reasons, do not post entire nonfiction articles or interviews to the list. Instead, please quote with attribution. Comment, paraphrase, and provide URLs to the full text stored elsewhere.

Automated invitations (such as those sent by various social networking sites to a member's entire address book) should not be posted to Shortmystery. If an invitation is unintentionally sent to the list, the sending member's account will be placed on moderated status to prevent further invitations from reaching the list until the member addresses the problem independently.

Regarding the tone of discussion, the SMFS officers cannot police every phrase that may possibly offend a member. They would be injecting their sensibilities where they may not be correct or welcome. Members bear personal responsibility for the content of their posts. You are encouraged to use individual judgment regarding whom to heed or ignore, to what degree, and when to send a message offlist if at all.

However, if a member's posts devolve from reasoned argument to impulsive reaction, that is cause to be placed on moderated status, whereupon the member's posts must be approved by an SMFS officer before reaching the list. Moderated members will be returned to normal posting status when a sufficient number of their posts show reasoned argument.

If anyone wants an officer's opinion on the tone of posts, feel free to ask offlist.

The privacy of this discussion group is strictly enforced. Any member found to have forwarded or published messages offlist without the author's permission will be banned.

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BSP (Blatant Self-Promotion)

Though it has come to refer to almost any self-announcement, BSP's negative connotation—tacky advertising—is still discouraged on most forums, including Shortmystery. The best way to avoid this tone in your posts is to become genuinely involved in the group.

ACCEPTABLE: "Read my story X in the latest issue of Y Magazine."

UNACCEPTABLE: "BUY MY MINT-CONDITION BASEBALL CARDS!"

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Congratulations and Thanks

As a community of writers, it's natural to want to congratulate each other's successes or send thanks in turn; however, doing so onlist can grow to disrupt or even overwhelm other topics. Consider sending congratulations and thanks offlist for that personal touch.

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The Derringer Awards

The Derringer Awards are presented by the SMFS every May to recognize the best published stories of the previous year.

To be eligible to vote for the Derringers in a given year, you must have joined Shortmystery before February 1st of that year.

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Service Advisories

I will post notices of Yahoo! Groups downtime to the list if possible. If I am unable to use the list to keep members informed, I will post advisories to this blog.

You can also check the official Yahoo! Groups blog.

If the list seems operational but you aren't receiving our messages or are having difficulty with any Yahoo! Groups features, feel free to contact me and I'll look into it.

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