The Encluesiast

As some of you may know, I’ve started publishing a series of mystery stories in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine starring police medical examiner Hank Lau. The first one, “Murder under Sedation,” came out in the March/April 2024 issue and was nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The second one, “Murder on Pins and Needles,” came out in the most recent issue of EQMM (July/August 2026). The third one has been accepted and will appear sometime next year. If any of you reading this blog want to find out what I’m like as a mystery author rather than just as a mystery analyst, I encourage you to hunt down copies of these issues.

Although EQMM and its sister Alfred Hitchock’s Mystery Magazine are the premier mystery magazines in America, they publish almost no fair-play mysteries (I’m not sure if anything they’ve published in the 2+ years between my first one and my second one would count), and this is surely not because they have any prejudice against the genre. (Janet Hutchings and Jackie Sherbow—the two editors of EQMM that I have worked with—were completely receptive and encouraging.) I suspect this is because very few working authors have an interest in writing this subgenre in short fiction form. So, consider my Hank Lau stories an attempt to help keep this style alive.

I mention the publication of my story in this blog post because it comes with the privilege of publishing a post on EQMM’s blog Something Is Going to Happen. I have a post up now that’s on a trope that I’m calling “Chesterton’s Forest.” I analyze it in G.K. Chesterton’s story “The Sign of the Broken Sword” from The Innocence of Father Brown. I’m going to publish a follow-up post tomorrow in which I discuss variations of this principle and Chesterton’s general approach to camouflage in five further stories from The Innocence of Father Brown: “The Queer Feet,” “The Wrong Shape,” “The Secret Garden,” “The Invisible Man,” and “The Sins of Prince Saradine.” Next week, I’ll trace the same principle of in four episodes of the TV series Monk. Stay tuned for those.