The future of short crime fiction
is a bit of a mystery at the moment. Writers continue to create terrific stories,
but finding a home for them keeps getting harder. Several mystery magazines
have shuttered, as have some of the publishers that produced story anthologies.
My recent travels, however, have
given me some reassurance about my writing future. For instance, in a
recreation of a 1950’s family apartment at the Norsk Folkesmuseum, Norway’s
museum of cultural history, I spied an Agatha Christie novel on the shelf. Den
Fjerde Rytter, or The Fourth Horseman, was originally published in
English as The Pale Horse.
While waiting to board the boat for
my fjord tour in Flåm, I explored the local railway museum. It included a copy
of Detectiv Magasinet, a long-running pulp fiction magazine from the
first half of the twentieth century. The issue on display featured a story by Sverre
Vegenor, the pen name of Sverre Nicolaisen, who published hundreds of stories
across multiple genres, most of them detective fiction.
Closer to home, the Mustard Museum in Madison, Wisconsin displayed a copy of Murder cuts the Mustard, a cozy mystery published in 2019. And as the author of humorous mysteries, I particularly appreciated a local garden shop shelving its pesticides in a section called the murder department. It reassured me that there is still an audience out there for my style of storytelling.
Luckily, several of my own orphaned
upcoming anthologies found new homes after their original publishing house
folded. One sadly didn’t, but given the enduring interest in mystery fiction I spotted
in the wild across continents, languages, and decades, I feel confident that the
story I wrote for it will be published someday. There’s a whole world of
opportunity still out there, you just need to know where to look.
Have you spotted mystery fiction in
unexpected places?
