Audio Recordings: 81 Stories from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

EQMM Podcasts, listed by author and linked. Updated with recent podcasts, January 2016. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, 74 years and counting, is the premium American venue for short mystery fiction. They maintain a podcast with a Murderer's Row of murder-minded authors, now up to 77 episodes and...

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Audio Recordings: 31 Stories from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

Listening to the audio version of a story returns me to an infantile state to back when I was warm and safe and tucked under covers while my father or mother read to me in a melodious voice, filling me with thrills and transporting me to a realm of imagination. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine has a podcast with well-narrated recent and classic mystery and thriller stories. Below is a list, in...

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Around the World in Mystery: The Best Crime Locations

Part One.  Part Two. Many of the best mystery writers use geography not just as a backdrop but as a vital character in their stories.Today, I have three lists regarding which mystery books are the best at doing justice to locations. C.J. Box: Top 10 US Crime Novelists Who 'Own' Their TerritoryBox writes thrilling mysteries set in the still-untamed West. He provided this list of crime novelists...

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Around the World in Mystery, Part Two. And A Contest.

A Drawing for My New Novel.  I will mail out a hard-cover copy of my new mystery, Never Kill A Friend, to two persons randomly chosen from chosen from among those who drop me an email. The book will be signed and stamped with my "bloody" thumbprint (red ink) - you can't get a better proof of authenticity...

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Around the World in Mystery, Part One.

Although American and British authors dominate the (usually) American and British lists of the best crime writing, mystery has an international history with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (Russian), Simenon's Maigret (Belgian), Leroux's Phantom of the Opera (French), and Rampo's Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Japanese), and Borges complex mysteries/anti-mysteries (Argentinian) being chief among...

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True Crime and Historical Crime Fiction. Top 10 Lists from McCreet, Graeber and Peace.

Today, some forays into historical and true crime writing courtesy The Guardian. By following the links you can read extended descriptions of their books advocating for its place on the list. For copyright reasons, I shortened these to thumbnails. James McCreet: Victorian Crime  McCreet writes well-researched historical mystery fiction set in the Victorian era. How can you ask for anything...

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And Now For Some Fun: Mystery Games on the Web

Below are links to some mystery games, many quizzes, some of them trivia. The quality of these can vary. Sometimes the answers require an unfair exactness or mind-reading, e.g., Sherlock Holmes sidekick: Dr. John H. Watson. (Not John Watson or Doctor Watson. Other times the trivia quiz creator was more generous in allowing alternate answers. I've tried to present the best up front and for those desperate...

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John Dufresne, Tana French, S. J. Rozan and Sandra Brown Choose Their Favorites.

John DufresneDufresne, author of the neo-noir, No Regrets, Coyote, and whose all-time favorite books made up a previous list, has provided me with an exclusive list of his favorite mysteries. Miami Blues by Charles WillifordSmilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg True Confessions by John Gregory DunneThe Secret Agent by Joseph ConradA Study in Scarlet by A. Conan Doyle Tana FrenchFrench hit the ground...

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James Lee Burke, Carl Hiaasen and Scott Turow: More mystery writers choose their favorite books.

Today's lists are from J. Peder Zane's The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. James Lee Burke Burke's 1989 Black Cherry Blues won him an Edgar for best mystery novel and appears on a number of all-time best mystery lists. He has also won an Edgar for Cimmaron Rose (1997) and an MWA Grand Master Award recognizing his career. 1. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929). 2. Dubliners...

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Champion by Ring Lardner

In order to fill out the available short stories collected in The Golden Argosy, I present Champion by Ring Lardner. Published in October, 1916, Metropolitan magazine, this is a cynical tale of a sports hero who has virtually no redeeming values. It is told in Lardner's slangy and streetwise voice. Champion Midge...

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