"Be Still, Your Heart"

The publication of "Be Still, Your Heart" in the November/December issue makes me the only person to have three stories in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 2026. (The two earlier ones were "GOMAAKOD" and "Farewell to Baytown," my posthumous collaboration with William Bankier — and that's not counting my translations of Tapani Bagge's "The Yellow Dog" in the January/February issue and Herbert De Paepe's "The Defixio Murders" in the May/June issue, which means that, altogether, my work appeared in five of the year's six issues!)

Unlike my last few contributions to EQMM, "Be Still, Your Heart" is a one-off, not a series story. Although the first-person narrator is a woman with an extraordinarily annoying husband, her situation — in need of a knee replacement but confronted on the day of the surgery with an unanticipated delay due to the discovery that she's in atrial fibrillation — is a pretty exact reproduction of what I went through on the day I was scheduled for my own third knee replacement in 2024. ("Third" is not a typo. I had my left knee replaced in Northern Virginia around 2013, and that surgery and recovery went fine and were life changing in the best possible way. When I had my right knee replaced in Richmond in early 2023, though, the procedure wound up being unsuccessful, and I had to have it redone about eighteen months later. So: two knees, but three replacements....)

I submitted the story on December 10, 2024 ... and just a few week later Janet Hutchings announced her retirement, after a thirty-four-year run as the magazine's editor. She was succeeded by Jackie Sherbow, who'd served as her second-in-command for around a decade, and Jackie accepted "Be Still, Your Heart" on March 10, 2025. I got a contract for it on January 12, 2026, and its appearance in the November/December 2026 issue means it took roughly two years from submnission to publication. This is more or less typical, these days. (My translations tend to be accepted, contracted, and published significantly faster, since apparently they're harder to come by.)

Return to Bibliography.