EQMM

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Nicholas Solovioff painted this cover for a 1955 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The popularity of the Ellery Queen radio and TV series increased interest in the magazine.
Categories	detective fiction, mystery fiction
Frequency	Monthly
Year founded	1941
Company	Dell Magazines
Country	United States
Language	English
Website	http://www.themysteryplace.com/eqmm/
ISSN	0013-6328
OCLC number	1567799

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is an American monthly digest size fiction magazine specializing in crime fiction, particularly detective fiction, and mystery fiction. Launched in fall 1941 by Mercury Press, EQMM is named after the fictitious author Ellery Queen, who wrote novels and short stories about a fictional detective named Ellery Queen.

Ellery Queen was the pseudonym of the team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who had been writing under the name since 1929. EQMM was created to provide a market for mystery fiction above the common run of pulp crime magazines of the day. Dannay served as the magazine's editor-in-chief (although still under the name Ellery Queen) from its creation until his death in 1982, when managing editor Eleanor Sullivan succeeded to the post. Following her death in 1991, Janet Hutchings became editor of EQMM.

In Bloody Murder, Julian Symons offered this description of the publication:

It is... a compendium of every possible kind of crime story. Some of the kinds are more important than others, not all of the stories are masterpieces, and some will madden anybody who has a fixed idea of what the crime short story should be like. Yet the value of the magazine far transcends any criticisms that may be made of it. No doubt short stories would have been written if EQMM had never existed, but they would have been much less various in style and interest, and almost certainly much poorer in quality.

Because of its high editorial standards, EQMM was one of a relative handful of fiction magazines to survive the decline in short-fiction publications from the 1950s to the 1970s. It is now the longest-running mystery fiction magazine in existence. Throughout its history it has actively encouraged new writers, and today, when most major publications will only accept submissions through literary agents, EQMM still accepts submissions over the transom (that is, unsolicited submissions through the mail). Unsolicited online submissions are now also accepted through an online submission manager as long as they follow the writers' guidelines. The magazine's "Department of First Stories" has introduced hundreds of new writers, many of whom became regular contributors.