Mystery Weekly Magazine: October 2016

📖 The Scoop

The best in Short Mystery Fiction Mystery Weekly is a monthly mystery magazine that presents crime and mystery short stories by some of the world's best established and emerging mystery writers. The original stories selected for each issue include noir, cozy, hardboiled, locked room, comic, and historical mysteries--plus occasional genre-busting stories that lean toward speculative or literary fiction. However you classify them, all of our stories feature strong writing and unsurpassed entertainment value. In this issue...Our October issue has a Sherlock Holmes theme, but you'll find some non-Sherlock mysteries and a few non-fiction pieces too, including a great introduction by Sherlock expert Vincent W. Wright.

The story featured on our cover is "The Adventure Of The Missing Princess," by Michael Mallory. It begins when a colleague of Watson's visits him at his surgery with a story about a missing princess and the Elephant Man. Holmes makes his appearance in typical dramatic fashion, and quickly connects the dots, leaving the reader wondering how they'd missed the obvious clues. This story is followed by "The Case of the Masticated Hand," by Jaap Boekestein and Roelof Goudriaan, a supernatural mystery involving the hand of a mummy that's delivered to Holmes in a parcel. Then, in "The Mystery of the Bee's Egg," by Eric Cline, Sherlock investigates how a man's death is connected to the construction of a foredoomed mile-long bridge. Not only is this story filled with fascinating details, but it's masterfully written and has an entertaining plot. This issue also contains a nice mix of non-Sherlockian mysteries. Martin Hill Ortiz returns with "The Pit Of Hell", another story featuring a retired illusionist who is called upon to solve baffling crimes. This is a locked-room mystery, but the question is how an escape artist vanished from a full body cast in his hospital bed. "Your Turn" is a gritty crime story about a couple who work their cons out of a cheap motel, and author Dan DeVoto sweeps us into the dustbin right along with them through vivid writing and characterization. And Karl Lykken gives us a story of actuaries who keep a dead pool, called "Unacceptable Risk." Finally, there is "Acid Test", from Allen Lang, a heart-pounding story about an amateur scientist who tries to create ghosts in his basement laboratory. Mystery Weekly Magazine published the best in short crime fiction every month!

Genre: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Collections & Anthologies (fancy, right?)