Hitchcock and Sherlock

  

Like many of our readers here at SleuthSayers, I love short stories. I love reading them and writing them, and I've been doing both for a long time. Writing shorts, for me, started thirty years ago--I submitted my first stories in late 1993--and even then I leaned toward mystery/crime stories. I also wrote some westerns, science fiction, etc.--and still do--but I especially like mysteries. 

I won't get into a lot of things about markets and marketing, but I will mention that two of my stories have appeared in the past few weeks in two of my favorite mystery publications: Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. AHMM, as most of you know, has been around since the 1950s and publishes once every two months, and SHMM started out maybe a dozen years ago and publishes irregularly--but both have been good to me and both have editors I like and admire. 

My story in AHMM (Nov/Dec 2023 issue) is "The Zeller Files," and is different in a couple of ways from what I usually write. This story is a mix of two genres--crime and science fiction. It's about a guy named Eddie Zeller, who once survived an alien abduction and was told by his captors that they would return for him someday. When he and his wife Lisa discover that another couple supposedly kidnapped in the past by these same otherworldly beings have recently moved to the town where the Zellers live, Eddie fears that these alien forces might be gathering all the onetime abductees together so they can again be taken, in one swoop--and maybe this time for more than just observation and release. There is also a crime involved, and there's a fair amount of the chasing and zapping and paranoia that you usually find in an X-Files kind of story.

The second difference about this particular tale is that it's one of only a few stories I've sold that were set during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the characters wearing masks and avoiding crowds and dealing with a whole different kind of paranoia. I think both these oddities made the story more fun to write, and--who knows?--might've been what appealed to the editor. At any rate, I was grateful but surprised when AHMM bought it.

The other story is "The Three Little Biggs," in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine (Issue #32). Its a little different also, from my usual, but it's on the other end of the spectrum from the AHMM story. "The Zeller Files" is longish (5600 words), it's more SF than mystery, it's sort of intense, it's set in the (recent) past, it has only a few characters, and it's a standalone story. "Biggs" is short (900 words), it's a whodunit, it's lighthearted, it's present-day, it has a lot of characters, and it's a series story. In fact it's the umpteenth installment of what I long ago started calling my "Law and Daughter" mysteries, featuring small-town sheriff Lucy Valentine and her bossy mother Frances. 

In this story, Lucy and Fran investigate the strange death of wealthy rancher Elijah Biggs, whose three weird offspring have gathered at the ranch to celebrate his birthday and found his dead body instead. There's a lot of inheritance-squabbling between the siblings in this story (I told a friend last week that it's a bad-heir-day mystery), and if you read it I hope you'll find that the solution fits Aristotle's famous description of endings that are "both unexpected and inevitable."

Quick questions. Everyone reading this probably knows about AHMM, but are all of you familiar with Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine? (It's a publication of Wildside Press and the editor is Carla Coupe.) Have any of you submitted stories to them, or been published there? If so, have you found them easy to work with? Please let me know in the comments. I really like the magazine, I've had a number of stories published there over the years, and I hope it'll be around for many more.

How could anyone resist two magazines with those names in their titles?

Coming attraction: In two weeks my friend Josh Pachter will be here to tell you about his--and several of our--experiences with a new short-fiction market called Storia.

See you then.