Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine has announced the winners of their annual Readers Awards. The SMFS list members on the list this year that reported their success are:
#1 David Dean for
"Mrs. Hyde" in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine: March/April 2023.
#2 Richard
Helms for “Spear Carriers” in the Ellery
Queen Mystery Magazine: November/December 2023
issue.
#3 Paul Ryan
O’Connor for “Teddy’s Favorite Thing” in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine:
September/October 2023 issue.
SMFS list member Richard Helms’ short story, Everybody
Loves a Hero, is published in Black Cat Weekly #131. Published by Wildside
Press, the issue is available here
in digital format.
Website Description:
This issue, we have a pair of original
tales—Aeryn Rudel’s “The Past, History” (which served double-duty as both
science fiction and a crime story, courtesy of Acquiring Editor Michael
Bracken) and Janet Law’s urban fantasy, “The Fountain of Youth.” We also have a
pair of stories that fall squarely in the Weird Tales vein,
one by fantasy master Seabury Quinn and one by Malcolm Jameson, best known for
his military SF tales—this time, he serves up sci-fi horror in South America,
complete with monsters! A Jerome Bixby / Joe E. Dean collaboration and a novel
of a future in which the United States has cut itself off from the world with
an atomic curtain of power (a variation of the “iron curtain” theme…) by Nick
Boddie Williams round out the science fiction & fantasy part of the
magazine.
On the mystery side,
Acquiring Editor Barb Goffman serves up a tale of a potential high school
shooter and his best friend in “Everybody Loves a Hero,” by Richard Helms, plus
we have a classic short story by Murray Leinster and a powerful anti-racism
mystery novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. And, of course, one of Hal Charles’s
“solve-it-yourself” puzzlers.
A warning to the
culturally sensitive: Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel, published in 1963,
contains language which will be offensive to some. It is used to highlight the
racism of villains in the story and was a powerful anti-racism tool of the time
in a skilled author’s hands.
Here’s the complete
lineup—
Mysteries / Suspense / Adventure:
Science Fiction & Fantasy:
Michael Bracken and Sandra Murphy. "Sit. Stay. Die."
Richard Helms. "Zoodunit."
William Burton McCormick. "Myrna Loy versus the Third Reich."
The Private Eye Writers of America have announced the Shamus Award nominees. Congratulations to these members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society.
Best PI Paperback
Andrew Welsh-Huggins. An Empty Grave.
Best PI Short Story
Michael Bracken. "Disposable Women."
Richard Helms. "Sweeps Week."
Smita Harish Jain. "The Fraud of Dionysus."
Richard Helms. "Sweeps Week."
G. M. Malliet. "The White Star."
Gigi Pandian. "The Locked Room Library."
Joseph S. Walker. "The Last Man in LaFarge."
SMFS list member Richard Helm’s latest book, Brittle Karma: An Eamon Gold Novel is now out. Published by Barbadoes Hall Communications, the read is available in eBook and print formats at Amazon.
Synopsis:
Richard Helms' Derringer Award-winning and Shamus
Award-nominated San Francisco private eye Eamon Gold returns in BRITTLE KARMA,
a classic tale cast in the molds forged by Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald,
and Robert B. Parker. Eamon Gold turns away a potential client named Abner
Carlisle, a recently paroled armored car robber, who is looking for a man named
Eddie Rice. Rice was the wheelman for the robbery a quarter century earlier,
and ran off with the take of almost twenty million dollars--and Carlisle's
daughter. Gold believes Carlisle intends to murder Rice, and refuses the case.
After Carlisle is murdered in his hotel room, Gold becomes intrigued when he
discovers the insurance company will pay ten percent of whatever fraction of
the robbery take he can recover. Gold is temporarily bucks-up, but has no
paying client on the horizon, so he dives in on spec, trying to make a little
quick bank on the coldest of cold cases. Along the way, he encounters crooked
cops, an aging porn star, an ex-Army Ranger turned gangland muscle, the boozy
estranged wife of a City Supervisor, dangerous mobsters, and a surprise player
he never saw coming.
