#1489: Following in the Footsteps of Giants – ‘Chapter 17: Perroquet Explains’ (2026) by Jamie Probin

Back in 2020, as part of my occasional Adventures in Self-Publishing undertaking, I read two stories by Jamie Probin — the novel The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) and the much shorter ‘The Adventure of the Nine Monets’ (2020) — and followed this up a few years later with two of Probin’s further short stories, The Heir Affair’ (2022) and Body of Matter’ (2022).

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#1465: Send in the Clowns – ‘The Dashing Joker’ (2001) by Ashibe Taku [trans. Yuko Shimada & John Pugmire 2020]

Certain so-called friends of mine have made a point of telling me that back issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine are available at their local library. My library, while cool, is not quite that cool, and so it’s taken me a while to track down some stories published therein, including this one from the September/October 2020 edition.

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#1101: Little Fictions – The Uncollected Paul Halter: ‘The Celestial Thief’ (2021) and ‘The Wendigo’s Spell’ (2023) [trans. John Pugmire 2021/2023]

I’m slowly working my way up to the newly-translated Paul Halter novel The Siren’s Call (1998, tr. 2023), but there’s the small matter of these two short stories to deal with first, translated by John Pugmire and drawn here from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

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#1050: Teacher Knows Best in A Gun is a Nervous Thing, a.k.a. Ride with the Executioner (1955) by Charlotte Armstrong

Quite some time ago, I was made a very generous gift of a random selection of old Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines and anthologies and, aside from the odd story, they’ve sat largely unread on my shelves since. Well, no more. From today, they will (probably) make regular appearances on The Invisible Event where longer or notable entries are concerned.

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