Sunday, March 31, 2013

current crime fiction magazines in English, dead tree division, updated:

It looks like we might be down to six of them, currently, with the hardy but infrequent little Hardboiled perhaps cracked by editor/publisher Gary Lovisi's losses in the NYC-area flooding...with a few that have crime fiction as a secondary or partial focus, such as Cemetery Dance or Witness...and one other which is devoted to hybrid sf/crime fiction...

A new issue is promised soon. Witness's next issue will be "Ghosts," too.

A new issue is promised soon.

This one might or might not have an issue out soon...











































































































Current issue...a little sf/cf hybrid.

Curent issue. More than any other recent cf magazine, The Strand makes
nearly every issue look too much like every other issue, at least in terms of covers.










































The current, annual humor, issue.





























The current isssue. I don't know why their covers are so bland of late.












Unclear if HB is still in business...





































And, it fact, Hardboiled is in business...

Sandra Seamans noted I'd been overlooking their print edition...








































































B.V. Lawson notes in comments that the following little magazines, emphasizing horror like Cemetery Dance, have enough suspense and other cf content to be worth mentioning in this context:
Shock Totem
Bete Noire
Shroud
and the folding Pear Noir!

 While Sandra Seamans also draws our attention to the eclectic little Big Pulp (with a more colorful, but possibly NSFW, page here).

 ...and, among the eclectic littles, the next most cf-laden that come to my mind are
Boulevard 
and Manoa (multiple Best American Mystery Stories citation source) (across campus from the magazine I briefly edited, Hawaii Review).
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2 comments:

  1. BV LawsonMarch 31, 2013 at 10:17 AM

    I think you just about have it. I would add to the hybrid zines Bete Noire, Shock Totem, Shroud and Pear Noir!, although the latter just announced they are ceasing publication of the magazine. The encroaching death of print zines is sad, but not surprising, considering the state of mainstream magazines (Newsweek, et al.) and newspapers.

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  2. Todd MasonMarch 31, 2013 at 10:34 AM

    Thanks! Though the dynamic for little magazines has always been at least as precarious as anything mass-market magazines face now...about the only fiction magazine that can remotely be called mass-market these days is PENTHOUSE LETTERS, and even that one is probably circulating at levels that EQMM would've laughed at in 1980, much less 1960. Without someone willing to lose money on them or break even, usually, little magazines have never been likely to flourish...happily, there are usually at least a few obsessives, indulgent sorts and/or institutions which/who see the value in the effort...and sometimes even the result...

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