Tag Archives: issue

August 31, 2016 · 3:29 pm

Trouble in Heels (October 2016)

History is being made this fall with the first major-party female candidate for president of the United States, and in keeping with this moment of girl power, several of the stories in our October issue highlight women exhibiting their strength of character in a variety of ways. Strong, resourceful women strut their stuff in Susan Oleksiw’s “Variable Winds,” Janice Law’s “Votes for Women,” and Gilbert M. Stack’s “Pandora’s Bluff.” Women challenged by circumstances, bad choices, or malevolent men feature in “Breakfast with Strange” by Martin Limón, “The Book of Judges” by Kevin Egan, “Close Scrutiny” by Elaine Menge, and “Stella by Starlight” by Con Lehane.

In addition, two master storytellers, Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg, collaborate this month on “The Crack of Doom,” while William Burton McCormick chronicles “The Last Walk of Filips Finks.”

Whether damsels in distress or femme fatales or smart cookies, women of mystery always make for reading pleasure!

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June 8, 2016 · 2:18 pm

A Legacy of Crime (July/August 2016)

Over the past sixty years, it has regularly been our pleasure to welcome new voices, writers either new to our pages or making their publishing debut. This double issue continues that legacy. Congratulations, then, to two authors appearing in print for the first time: Jason Half with “The Widow Cleans House,” and Mark Thielman with his Black Orchid Novella Award–winning “A Meter of Murder.” And welcome to three authors new to AHMM: Alan Orloff, author of “The Last Loose End;” Andrea Smith, who introduces to our readers her intrepid beauty salon proprietor Vera Ames in “Beauty Shop of Horror;” and James Nolan, who brings us a tale set in Mexico in “Shortcut to Gringo Hill.”

As it happens, the notion of legacy plays an important role in several of this issue’s tales. Our cover story, Eve Fisher’s “Great Expectations,” examines a family’s handling of a small inheritance. Attorney David Crockett, in Evan Lewis’s “Mr. Crockett and the Indians,” carries with him a rather uncomfortable legacy—the crotchety voice of his ancestor Davy. Kevin Egan’s “The Heist,” set in the New York State Supreme Court building in Manhattan, involves the cultural legacy of a Hungarian émigré. And a legacy of Mob violence drives the latest installment of Janice Law’s series featuring Madame Selina and her young helper Nip.

Regular appearances by favorite writers and characters are another aspect of the AHMM legacy, and this issue features other strong installments in familiar series. John H. Dirckx, a recidivist for nearly forty years, teams Lieutenant Cyrus Auburn and Detective Sergeant Fritz Dollinger in “Can’t Undo.” R. T. Lawton, whose four different series display an impressive range of tone, setting, and eras, this time brings us “The Great Aul,” a new tale of the Armenian and his young Nogai helper. And Terence Faherty, who first appeared in our pages in 2007, offers “Margo and the Milk Trap,” his latest entry in a WWII–era series featuring radio producer Margo Banning.

Great crime fiction is a legacy our readers need not feud over.

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March 30, 2016 · 3:37 pm

What Could Go Wrong? (May 2016)

Bad ideas often make for good stories. Advising your friend on her love life? Messing about with volatile chemicals? Sharing details of a wealthy client’s will? What could go wrong?

So many, many things, as the stories in our annual humor issue demonstrate. Before you issue a magical challenge to your longtime romantic rival, or abruptly cancel your Hawaiian vacation for a part in a troubled theater production, or seek to engage in collective bargaining when your profession is burglary, ask yourself, what could go wrong?

Or don’t, because the results will be that much more entertaining for the rest of us.

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January 19, 2016 · 8:16 pm

It’s a Trap!

Many of our stories this month pick up on the theme of entrapment in its various forms.

David Tallerman’s “Step Light,” our cover story, features a trap so subtle that its victim barely recognizes his predicament. On the other hand, street-wise tough Skig Skorzeny may be old and infirm, but he can spot a trap when he sees one in Jas. R. Petrin’s “The Devil You Know.” Madame Selina uses her gift as a medium to snare the imaginations of her clients in “The Spiritualist” by Janice Law. And theft and homicide cases converge at a spa detox center for the wealthy in John H. Dirckx’s “Trap and Release.”

Meanwhile, David Edgerley Gates offers a perplexing procedural as Montana Deputy Hector Moody returns in “Crow Moon” to solve a case involving a drunken Vietnam Vet with a broken neck. A copy editor in Julie Tollefson’s “Abundance of Patience” revisits her career and the newspaper industry in light of massive layoffs. And finally, John Gregory Betancourt brings a “new” Mystery Classic to our attention: James Holding’s “The Norwegian Apple Mystery” featuring sleuth Leroy King.

There’s no escaping the great fiction in our March issue: Once you start reading, you’ll be hooked.

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October 28, 2015 · 2:23 pm

Past, Present, Future Crime: December 2015 issue

Reviewing our annual index (on pages 108–109 of the current issue) puts 2015 in perspective. We published 79 short stories that represented all subgenres of mystery fiction and ranged in tone from humorous to ironic to tragic. Our authors came from the four corners of the earth with stories just as far-ranging in their settings. Which is not surprising: Crime is part of the human condition, and crime fiction captures the universal struggle of human beings under extraordinary conditions.

Many of the stories in our December issue also take a retrospective turn. Long submerged memories surface for a retiree in Theresa E. Lehr’s cover story “Lake People.” Turn-of-the-century bounty hunter Placido Geist discovers the last surviving participant in a botched bank robbery ten years on in “The Sleep of Death” by David Edgerley Gates. Suspicious coincidences put a teen in the CIA’s scope for fifty years in “Larry’s Story” by David Braly. And Marianne Wilski Strong sets her tale “Warsaw” in the heady days before the fall of the Soviet Union. More contemporary issues surface in Catherine Dilts’s “Industrial Gray” and Neil Schofield’s “The Purslow Particle,” both of which touch upon work-a-day maladies.

In this issue we offer up great stories now, just as we’ve been doing since AHMM first came on the scene in 1956—and there’s plenty more great fiction to come in the future!

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August 11, 2015 · 6:12 pm

All in the Family

Disfunctional family dynamics provide rich ground for crime stories, as three of September’s stories demonstrate. A well-off London woman hears unsettling news about her fourth husband in Neil Schofield’s “Middleman.” Two vacationing sisters skirt dangerous emotional territory in “Ross Macdonald’s Grave” by Terence Faherty. And a would-be burglar provokes unsettling memories in Bob Tippee’s “A Pushover Kind of Place.”

We’re delighted to make two introductions this month. Kathy Lynn Emerson’s new series character Mother Malyn makes her AHMM debut in “The Cunning Woman.” And we welcome Christopher Latragna, whose AHMM debut “Well-Heeled Shooters” is set on a St. Louis riverboat casino.

Also this month, R. T. Lawton continues his series featuring a Chinese youth thrust into his father’s drug trade and surviving by his wits in the jungle in “On the Edge.” C. B. Forrest returns with “The Runaway Girl from Portland, Oregon,” set in a San Francisco alley during the “Summer of Love.” And Lieutenant Cyrus Auburn and Sergeant Dollinger look into the murder of a traveling salesman in “Solo for Shoehorn” by John H. Dirckx.

Finally, we are saddened to note the passing of Maynard Allington, who died before we could publish his espionage story this month, “The Rostov Error.”

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October 14, 2014 · 2:36 pm

In Extremis

Mystery stories are often driven by people in dire straits—such as an accountant standing on a skyscraper ledge, waving a pistol. That’s the crisis facing Loren D. Estleman’s resourceful Four Horsemen police squad in “Tin Cop.” Meanwhile, broken ex-Wall Streeter Pit Geller finds himself holed up in Las Vegas with a family torn apart by a dead guy in John Gregory Betancourt’s “Pit and the Princess.” Jay Carey imagines policing a future Sarasota, Florida ravaged by global warming, destructive storms, and crumbling infrastructure in “We Are Not Insured Against Murder.” A literary publisher finds himself at the end of a rope—specifically, a noose—in John C. Boland’s “The Man Who Stole Trocchi.” A curious “curator” roaming Europe is unaware of the wolves at his heels in Stephen Ross’s “Gallery of the Dead.” And B. K. Stevens closes out her long-running series featuring Lieutenant Walt Johnson and Sergeant Gordon Bolt this month in “True Enough: Bolt’s Last Case.” To mark this transition, watch this blog space for the author’s reflections on her decision to say goodbye to one series and start another.

Plus we bring you a bit of espionage when radio producer Margo Banning visits a munitions factory in “Margo and the Locked Room” by Terence Faherty. John H. Dirckx, well known to AHMM readers for his Cyrus Auburn procedurals, translates and introduces this month’s Mystery Classic, “Justice by the Book” by Pedro de Alarcón. Finally, Robert C. Hahn introduces us to a new crop of bibliomysteries in his Booked & Printed column.

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