Ellery Queen - Sep/Oct '23

About the title:

Award-winning stories from the lauded periodical described by Stephen King as, “The best mystery magazine in the world, bar none.”

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine came on the scene in the fall of 1941 under the ownership of Lawrence E. Spivak of The Mercury Press. It was heralded as the brainchild of Ellery Queen himself, really the two-cousin writing team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Dannay sent the magazine into the world with this message to readers: “This first issue is frankly experimental. Our belief that a large public exists which impatiently awaits such publication can only be confirmed by that public.” The first issue sold over 90,000 copies. EQMM quickly established a place as the leading periodical in the genre — a place it has retained for more than three-quarters of a century.

Dannay explained his manifesto for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine as being to “raise the sights of mystery writers generally to a genuine literary form,” to “encourage good writing among our colleagues by offering a practical market not otherwise available,” and to “develop new writers seeking expression in the genre.” To raise mystery writing to a respected literary form, he set about finding and publishing stories with elements of crime or mystery by great literary figures past and present. The result was the inclusion of more than forty Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners in EQMM — Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Alice Walker among them; from Christie, to Hammett, to Faulkner. The tradition of literary excellence continues today with writers such as National Book Award winner, Joyce Carol Oates. What you find in EQMM is an expansive range of content of literary merit, for which, as Dannay said in EQMM’s first issue, "the sole editorial criterion is quality."

• Softcover
• Pulp Fiction
• 5.75 x 8.25 Inches
• Published in the U.S.