"The Adventure of the Red Circles"

My first Puzzle Club pastiche, "A Study in Scarlett!," appeared in the May/June 2019 issue of EQMM. Eight months later, "The Adventure of the Red Circles" -- with a title punning on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Red Circle" -- became the second story in what will ultimately be a series of five.

This is probably the most Queenian of my pastiches, with a solution that couldn't possibly be figured out by those who don't know the early EQ novels. (If you do know them, it's a very fair-play mystery, and probably pretty easy to solve.)

I also had a translation in this issue, Chinese author Fei Wu's "Beijingle All the Way". This is the third time I've had both a story and a translation in the same issue of EQMM: the first time was in the January 1985 issue, and the second time was only four months before this time, in the September/October 2019 issue

My first-ever published story, "E.Q. Griffen Earns His Name," was in the December 1968 EQMM, so this one marks the seventh consecutive decade in which I've placed new fiction in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only person who's ever done this. Kind of cool! If I'm still around in another ten years -- and if the magazine is -- I'm pretty much guaranteed to be the first person to hit EQMM in eight consecutive decades!

Return to Bibliography.