Hot Shots: Celebrating Thirty Years of the Short Mystery Fiction Society

edited by Josh Pachter

The Short Mystery Fiction Society was founded in 1996 and has been giving out its annual Derringer Awards since 1998. I didn't become aware of the group until around 2017 or so, but when I did hear about it, I joined, and I've been a reasonably active member ever since.

Sometime in 2024, I realized that the Society's thirtieth anniversary was on the horizon, suggested that there ought to be an anthology to celebrate the occasion, and volunteered to edit it. Both the suggestion and my volunteerage met with approval, and I decided that an appropriate approach would be to put together a book containing one Derringer-winning story from each year the awards were presented, from their inception in '98 through 2025. The result, published by Level Best Books on April 7, 2026, was Hot Shots.

Picking the stories to include was like puttng together a particularly challenging jigsaw puzzle. I wanted to include a diverse mix of male and female authors and a mix of story lengths, subgenres, and contributors both familiar and unfamiliar to a contemporary readership. This wasn't always possible. Since I needed to include a total of twenty-eight stories, for example, I knew I was going to wind up with a pretty lengthy book, and to keep it at a reasonable price point I decided early on that it wouldn't work to include any of the winners in the annual Best Novelette category. With an eye to diversity — which is always important to me as I put together slates of contributors to my anthologies — I really wanted to include writers of color and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, but to the best of my knowledge the only Derringer winner to date who fits into either of those categories has been Melissa Yi (and, yes, her 2023 Best Short Story winner is in the book).

In some cases, getting permission to include stories I wanted to use proved difficult, since their authors were difficult to track down ... or dead. And when I couldn't locate the authors, it was usually also difficult to locate their winning stories. To find the text of the late, great Henry Slesar's 2001 winner "The Cabin Killer," for example — which received a Derringer for Best Puzzle Story, a category that appeared that one year and never again! — and to get permission to reprint it, I had to track down both his nearest relative in Vermont and his literary executor in Switzerland!

I'm a two-time Derringer winner myself, and given the amount of time I put into the project without pay, I felt it'd be ok to reward myself by including one of my own winning stories. As it happens, I won in the Best Short Story category in 2025, so my EQMM story "The Wind Phone" winds up being the twenty-eighth and last story in Hot Shots.

In addition to suggesting an anniversary SMFS anthology, I was also the person who proposed adding a special Derringer award for the best anthology of the year, an award which was first given in 2025. Ironically, Hot Shots will not be eligible to receive the award in 2027, since the membership voted that only books containing at least 75% previously unpublished material would qualify for it ... and by its very nature, Hot Shots is a collection comprised entirely of reprints.

Return to Bibliography.