The Mystery Short Story Transcript

Leandra: In March of 1927, The Strand Magazine introduced a competition for its readers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would select his twelve favourite Sherlock Holmes short stories, and the fan who guessed the author’s list “most nearly” would win £100 and an autographed copy of his book, Memories and Adventures. It was a promotional scheme for the forthcoming The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, the final volume of stories about his infamous detective. When announcing this competition, Conan Doyle wrote: “It is as a little test of the opinion of the public that I inaugurate the small competition announced here. I have drawn up a list of the twelve short stories contained in the four published volumes which I consider to be the best, and I should like to know to what extent my choice agrees with that of Strand readers. I have left my list in a sealed envelope with the Editor of the Strand.”

In June of 1927, the Editor opened that envelope.

The character Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887 with A Study in Scarlet. Yet his popularity didn’t become widespread until the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine, beginning with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in 1891. By 1927, Conan Doyle had written only four novel-length works featuring the great detective, compared to 56 short stories. Notable characters like Irene Adler and Professor James Moriarty only exist thanks to the short story format, and have had an outsize impact on popular culture ever since.

Arthur Conan Doyle was far from the only detective fiction writer to dabble in both short- and long-form works. Agatha Christie did introduce Hercule Poirot in a novel-length mystery, but many of her other sleuthing characters debuted in short fiction. Miss Marple's first appearance was in the short story “The Tuesday Night Club”, while Parker Pyne and Harley Quin never existed beyond the short story form. Dorothy L. Sayers featured Lord Peter Wimsey in both novels and short stories, but she also created another detective, Montague Egg, who only ever appeared in short stories. It is rare to come across a writer of golden age detective fiction who hadn’t at least dabbled in the mystery short story. But why do some short stories achieve greatness and lasting renown, while others vanish without a trace? Today, we’re going to find out. 

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Leandra Griffith, Caroline’s production assistant. And I’m going to be your guide today as Caroline and I explore the highs and lows of the mystery short story. 

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Hello, Caroline. Welcome once again to your own podcast. How does it feel to be a guest?

Caroline: It feels great. I love giving up control to you on these episodes. I'm excited to see where it goes.

Leandra: Perfect. Well, today, as I mentioned, we will be discussing the mystery short story. And this episode was actually inspired by an anthology of essays and advice from mystery writers. It's called How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America. This is edited by Lee Child with Laurie R. King. And no, we will not be discussing every single essay in this book. I have decided to narrow it down to one in particular, and this essay comes from author Art Taylor.

The story, or essay I should say, itself is "The Short Mystery." So we know exactly what we're getting into with this essay and the author himself is obviously someone who knows what he's talking about when it comes to short stories because he is an Edgar Award-winning author of two short story collections alone.

So where we're going to start today is actually the first sentence of this essay.

Caroline: So he begins, "What ingredients add up to excellence in short fiction within the mystery genre?" This is the big question we're here to consider today. I think from my point of view, there are broadly three things. One is a very compact and compelling plot.

I want a lot of things to happen in a short story, and I want them all to have happened by the time we get to the end of it. The next is some really engaging characters that can be sketched very quickly. So you don't need a lot of information to feel like you get these people and understand what they're about.

And then the third thing for me is a writing style that doesn't need many, many pages to develop. These are obviously all very dictated by the constraints of it being a short story that you've only got maybe a dozen pages or less, even in some really short, short fiction. So yeah, I think those are the things for me.

Leandra: I fully agree. And I'm glad that you mentioned the constraint that comes with short stories because really every single sentence needs to count. Every character you introduce needs to count. And what's really interesting is I think short stories that are in the mystery genre, it's perfect while also having some of its own obstacles.

Mysteries, I would argue, are often plot driven versus other genres that may be character driven or may have a lot of world building involved. So details need to be allocated to those areas, whereas with the mystery, we're very lucky that a lot of times we just want to know what the crime is. What is the injustice?

Let's get to the meat of the plot. I can't imagine trying to write a mystery in such a short, small, tiny box, because you need to include details that actually lead you in the right direction. But of course, a great mystery has to have red herrings, meaning that you by definition need to include superfluous details.

So it's kind of crazy to me to wrap my head around the mystery short story.

Caroline: Absolutely. I agree. Not all mystery short stories have to have a big twist in them, but I think they all need to have some form of revelation. You need to start in one place and move to a different place and the journey between the two needs to be surprising.

And yes, I think it is a great creative feat to, in such a short amount of time, create what feels like a fully realized world and then rip it away and show a different one underneath, all in such an incredibly short space of time. Yes, the more actually I think about it, the more miraculous it seems, really.

Leandra: Truly, and you see that so many authors have got their start with the mystery short story, I suppose it makes sense, right? That short stories in themselves are kind of experiments. They're a great place to practice, to learn the craft, but also to test your boundaries. I think that when we're experimenting with an entire novel length work, the author is really asking themselves to take a lot of time for it to see if an experiment actually works out, to see if this reveal actually works out after taking hours upon hours, days, years trying to write this novel potentially. Whereas with a short story, I think that it allows for a bit more exploration for the author, and I think the reader is potentially more forgiving, now that I think about it.

Maybe because we're not spending as much time on the reading of the work, but I feel as though I read a lot of short stories where you find out the killer is actually the narrator. Or the person we thought was going to be the victim was actually the villain the entire time. Or I've seen a lot of short stories where it really is you're playing with a how done it or a why done it.

Or will they succeed? Where you already know you're in the mind of the killer, and you know who their victim is, and you're just wondering, are they going to pull it off? And I don't see too many novels doing those types of experimentations at the same volume. I think short stories allow authors to be a bit more playful.

Caroline: Yes, exactly. I think they feel lower stakes for everybody, not just authors. I think they feel like that for publishers as well. And publishing contexts have changed a lot in the last century or so, and now actually very few short stories get published originally. But once upon a time, barely a newspaper or magazine left a publisher's without at least some form of short fiction, and often short crime fiction, and they just needed a lot of it to fill those pages.

And therefore, there were a lot of commissions going around. You could try out different writers without the commitment of publishing a whole book by them. So yes, as a lot of people have already in the last few years, I really do lament the decline of the short story as a widespread literary form, because it discouraged risk averseness in publishers.

It gave writers more of a chance in a lower stakes setting.

Leandra: Oh, for sure. And speaking of constraints, the art form that is the short story and how challenging it may be, I thought we could switch gears and hear from Art Taylor again, but also maybe an author that all of us know and appreciate and a lot of us can thank for where the mystery genre went today.

Caroline: So, Art Taylor says, "Poe believed that the short story was the pinnacle of prose compositions, the one that should best fulfil the demands of high genius, in part directly related to the form's brevity. Short stories, according to Poe, should be capable of being read in a single sitting, with unity of effect being both a goal and a challenge."

And now this is what Poe has to say on the subject: "If the author's very initial sentence tend not to be the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre established design.

And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction." I can't do an Edgar Allan Poe voice, by the way, I wish I could.

Leandra: I wish you could as well. I would have enjoyed seeing you try to do that.

But I think that Poe brings up some interesting points. I mean, one, this idea of having read the story in a single sitting. Do you agree with that idea? Or do you think that that is almost too constrained? That provides too much of a restriction on the writer who may want to make it a little bit longer?

Because we've also covered authors who do have the longer short story. I mean, you ended up having that...was it H. C. Bailey is known for having longer short stories?

Caroline: Yes! And I have to say, until I started reading the Mr. Fortune stories, I think I would have been completely in agreement with Poe and said, yes, I think a short story should be short.

It should be readable in one sitting. It should be like a delicious snack that you can just enjoy in between your full novel meals, to stretch that a bit too far. But now that I have started reading and really enjoying the Mr Fortune stories, I'm not so convinced of that necessarily. H. C. Bailey has shown me that this longer short story form that he was very keen on, in which, in a book length work, he'll have maybe six stories, those can be incredibly satisfying.

And although I think I do mostly read them in a single sitting, just because I want to know what happens, you wouldn't necessarily have to, because they do have changes of scene and sometimes they even have subplots and all that kind of thing, which you don't necessarily get in a truly short short mystery.

I don't know, I feel like my view there has been complicated by a very good example of how you can do it differently. Maybe Poe just hadn't come across a really good long short story yet.

Leandra: Yes, maybe Poe is at fault for not reading as widely as he could have. But I agree that it's also just subjective, this idea of single sitting.

So are you saying sitting for an hour, sitting for two hours? How much time are we dedicating? I'm the type of reader who will stop whenever I need to. I am happy to stop at the end of a paragraph that is very much not a section break. I don't feel those constraints. So I think that to restrict oneself to this idea of a single sitting, again, we're trying to almost place authors in boxes.

Caroline: I think Poe clearly likes a very specific type of short story, what I would consider like a one-shot story. If it's a film, the camera isn't moving to a second location in his story. And I think that is definitely an art all of its own, but I think there's room for, as you were saying, other kinds of things within this thing.

The other part of what Poe and Art Taylor are saying there that I think is really interesting is this idea that there should be no word written that isn't towards the end of the short story, and this is something I feel a lot more inclined to just agree wholeheartedly with, because I do think that even if you're working in a longer short story, there isn't really much place for divergence or side quests that I think if you're going to achieve that clever revelation that makes a short story feel so satisfying, a mystery short story we should say, then I think everything you write has to be to that purpose.

So yes, I think I'm more inclined to back Poe totally on that sentiment.

Leandra: Yes, because there's no time for any slice of life content or scenes. And we'll get that in a novel of a mystery where you get a reprieve. Maybe we have a moment between the sleuth and their Watson character or there might be a romantic subplot happening.

I think that we're asking a lot of the mystery short story if you're throwing in all of these other elements. So I completely agree with that, but I'm also glad that you brought up this idea of a one-shot mystery. So this is all happening in one moment, one night, one party. A lot of times a party is a great place for a crime to happen for a mystery short story.

I don't know why, but that's my favourite.

Caroline: I really enjoy those as well. I actually also really enjoy novels and plays that do that as well, that obey the traditional Greek unities of time and place. That's not to say that I don't think there are good stories that don't do that, but, yes, it is always a characteristic I really enjoy.

Because it just adds another constraint within the writer's working, that when they then pull it off really well, you feel all the more satisfied by it.

Leandra: Completely agree. There is a bit of a Q& A session. That Art Taylor kindly gives us, and I figured that Caroline, you could read them off and see if any of these questions are ones that you would want to answer or that we would want to expand upon.

Caroline: He says, "How many characters can you have in a short story? How quickly should the story get into the action? Can short stories have subplots? How important is a surprise ending and how do you write one?" So, I think my answer to most of these questions is unsatisfying. It depends, because I don't think I would want to be prescriptive and say you can only have two characters in a short story or it has to be action packed from the first line because I can immediately think of examples of stories I like that disobey those things.

The one thing I am a bit more inclined to answer properly is the last question. How important is a surprise ending? I think it's very important. For a crime fiction short story, I think there needs to be, if not a surprise, then, as I said, a revelation. I have come across, for instance, short stories that are doing more of a slice of life type thing, where maybe it's a first-person recollection by a detective remembering a case.

But even within that, I feel like we need to know something new. By the end that we didn't know before, or maybe in the first couple of pages, we thought their life was lived this particular way, and then it turns out that it's not. So I think even when you aren't doing a surprising, locked room, plot driven, clever short story of that type, we still need some kind of surprising information.

It just feels inherent to the form to me.

Leandra: Yeah, there needs to be a payoff, and it doesn't have to be a trick.

Caroline: No.

Leandra: Right? We don't have to be tricked as readers, where a lot of times there's this idea where it needs to be a twist, where suddenly the detective has us looking in the direction of this one person, and then the rug is pulled out from under us and no, aha.

It's actually the brother! And you know, we're supposed to be shocked. It doesn't necessarily have to be something like that, but you're right, there needs to be a revelation, maybe an additional clue. I love when it looks as though the detective has pulled everything out of thin air and then suddenly maybe their companion or the inspector on site says like, how, how do you do it?

And they're like, well, you know, the murder weapon was peeking outside of their coat pocket. So it was actually kind of easy. And you know those kind of moments. It can be, it can be funny. It can be even a darker revelation. But I agree that there needs to be something at the end that shows it was worth the journey.

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Moving on, I think that what we should probably focus on next is the short stories that you and I came prepared with.

Caroline: Okay, so the short story I have selected as my favourite for the purposes of this discussion is by Agatha Christie, which will not be that much of a surprise, I think, to anyone who really loves this form.

She wrote a lot of short stories, really enjoyed doing it and did it very well. The story I've picked is "Traitor's Hands." It was first published in January 1925 in Flynn's, a New York weekly pulp magazine, and then it appeared for the first time under a title that many of you will know: "The Witness for the Prosecution" in a collection titled The Hound of Death in 1933.

This is indeed the short story that inspired the play and then the film, also by Agatha Christie, called Witness for the Prosecution. Numerous films, TV adaptations, it's one of her most enduring works, second only to The Mousetrap in terms of theatrical success. So before I get into saying why I picked this one, I am going to spoil this, I am going to say its plot and ending in detail, so if you need to, pause here, go away and read it, it's not very long, and come back when you have.

So the reason why I really like this story is actually because of what Agatha Christie did in it that didn't survive into the major adaptations of it for the stage and for the screen. The basic scenario of this story is that a young man called Leonard Vole befriends an elderly lady. She then takes a shine to him, invites him back to tea a few times. In his account, she becomes fond of him.

She asks him to, you know, do some business chores for her. And then, one night, she is found brutally murdered. And his only alibi is his wife, Romaine, who can swear that he was at home at the requisite time. This story is all told from the point of view of the lawyer, Mr. Mayhew, who is going to be defending Leonard Vole because he has obviously been arrested for the murder of this old woman, especially after it's been discovered that he is now the sole beneficiary of her will, recently changed.

Mr. Mayhew is anxious about using Leonard Vole's wife as his sole witness, and indeed when he meets with her, she spews out a lot of bile and vitriol about her husband, making it clear that she's going to be a witness for the prosecution rather than a witness for the defence. It then shifts into a courtroom scene. Romaine appears on the stand for the prosecution.

Mr. Mayhew, though, meanwhile, has been investigating her story. More closely, he's had a peculiar encounter with a woman with a deformed face who has given him a letter proving that Romaine has a lover, where she was actually out at the cinema at the time that this crime took place, so she can't actually say what Leonard was doing or not doing.

And her testimony completely collapses in light of this revelation. The jury finds Leonard not guilty. And then the final punch to the face that Christie delivers to the reader, is that this was the design all along. Romaine says, well, I knew that nobody was going to believe me if I was just the loving wife who said he was at home with me all the time, so instead I set this all up.

I was the woman in disguise with the deformed face who gave you the letter I fabricated, all of that evidence, all of it was designed to do exactly what it did. It was to pull the rug out from under the jury and have them acquit him. And then at the very end she says, you see, I knew he was guilty.

Christie then changes this ending for the subsequent adaptations. She adds an extra twist, which I won't say now in case you go and see the play. She adds more detail. Two reasons. One, I think she came to feel that it was too abrupt because that's literally the last line of the story. Just Romaine saying, well, I knew he was guilty. The end.

So I think she felt that was a bit blunt. And then the other reason was that this is one of Christie's very few pieces of fiction where the murderer actually successfully gets away with it. A bad plot is hatched by bad people, they execute it successfully, and they fool everybody and get away with it.

That almost never happens in Christie, or indeed in much crime fiction of the interwar golden age type at all. And I think Christie both felt that this was not a good moral message to put out given how popular her works were and also just that she didn't like it, she wasn't satisfied with it.

I however think it's brilliant and really, really like this about it and I think It's only doable in a short story. I agree with her. It wouldn't have worked on stage or on film, where you have the time and the space to develop a more nuanced psychology of the characters. But it's incredibly effective in the short story form, and I think it's some of the best work she ever did.

Leandra: It was actually my first experience reading this short story. So I was very excited. I also agree with you. I loved the ending, specifically when we're talking about reveals. So there was the reveal that, ah! Romaine was the woman all along! She was the person who was being the puppeteer with our lawyer figure, but the additional reveal.

So I feel as though when it comes to a two fold reveal the first time, we suddenly then have this tension relieved, thinking, okay, well, there it is. That was satisfying. Let's get to the end of the story. And then, with your guard being down, there's the reveal again that he actually was guilty.

Especially because I loved in the beginning of this short story when we are meeting Leonard, and he does seem like a genuinely nice person. There's just a lot of coincidence. And he's also kind of bumbling, thinking, you're right, that does seem suspicious. I don't know what to tell you. And, you know, he's just like the human version of a shrug, saying, I don't really know what else to do.

So you find him very endearing. And Romaine, obviously, as an actress, too, we end up learning, she immediately turns into this stone cold woman. And we think, ah, poor Leonard again, he just can't catch a break. He has this woman who is evil, apparently, and doesn't appreciate him.

And in reality, she's just a genius and knows how to protect the man she loves basically from himself. I find it very satisfying as well that he was guilty. I think that it's more satisfying that he's guilty than if it just to him being, you know, an innocent man that we are trying to save from the justice system getting it wrong.

Caroline: It hints at a much more nuanced psychology as well, that Romaine knows that he did this thing and yet she is still willing to go to these great lengths for him. Christie doesn't need to really go into that in any great detail. It's just a little hint there at the end that you think oh wow so Romaine really loves him even to the point of destruction.

In a moral sense, that's so interesting. And then also another very cleverly hinted at but not over explained element is the fact that Romaine is Austrian. That's part of the lawyer's hesitation about having her as a witness, is that her quote foreignness is going to prejudice the jury against her husband.

So even before he knows that she's really going to be better suited to be a witness to the prosecution, he is concerned that even the testimony of the most loving wife is not really going to convince any juries when it comes from someone who is different in their eyes. And again, Christie doesn't go into huge amounts of detail about that.

It's just there in the background. I think it's almost a shame, actually, that Christie didn't see its greatness for what it was. I think she was quite right to change it for the other adaptations. I don't disagree with that. Just, I think, in her writing and her talking about it, I don't think she fully acknowledged how good it was in its original form as well.

And what short story did you choose to talk about today? We should say, we're going to spoil that one too.

Leandra: The short story that I've selected is actually Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers." So, this is a pre-Christie, pre-Golden Age short story. It was first published in 1917 in Every Week magazine, and Susan Glaspell is an American author, so that's also important to keep in mind.

What I love about it is that it was loosely based on the 1900 murder of John Hossack and subsequent trial, which Glaspell had covered as a journalist, and then it ended up inspiring this short story, which ends up following the murder of a farmer, Mr. Wright, and all the fingers are pointing at his wife, Minnie Wright.

It seems quite obvious, her husband ended up being murdered in his sleep. And there were no signs of an intruder, Minnie Wright was in the bed with him, so the question is how did she not wake up to this horrific crime? And so, we end up having this group of people come to the farmhouse. They include the farmer, who ended up finding the dead body.

We also have the sheriff, and we have a lawyer coming in to investigate, gather clues, and figure out specifically the motivation. Why would Minnie Wright kill her husband? According to these men, this is the one thing stopping them from obviously hanging her. Meanwhile, these men don't come alone. They have their wives to join them.

The farmer's wife, Martha, comes, as does the sheriff's wife, Mrs. Peters, and while the men are doing their investigating, the two women are left in the kitchen to gather items, to bring to Minnie, to bring her comfort while she's waiting for her trial. And the women begin to realize that this home was not a happy home.

That Minnie was very much so being constrained and being oppressed by her husband, being abused both emotionally, mentally, and we can probably predict physically as well. The one light that Minnie had in her life was a bird. And one thing that the women reflect on is that Minnie was known for singing.

That she was a happy young girl before her marriage, and she was a lively person. She was outgoing, she loved to wear bright colors, and yet now the Minnie that they know as a married woman is completely different. And it seems as though the only shining light that she had in her life was this songbird.

And so as the women are in this destitute kitchen and feeling how unhappy of a life Minnie must have had, they end up realizing and discovering that in this box is the dead bird and they begin to wonder how could this have happened and then they realize that the bird has had a wrung neck. So clearly this bird ended up finding a violent end. You can put two and two together and discover that it was Minnie's husband.

We aren't sure the events that led to him killing this bird, but because it was the one thing that Minnie had in her life that kept her happy and that brought her any type of joy, obviously this was the last straw for her, and she ends up killing her husband in a bit of a similar way.

Caroline: She strangles him with a rope, I think, and that's one of the things that the men are confused by, is how could a woman have done this kind of thing.

They question whether she would physically have been able to do it as well.

Leandra: Oh yes, especially because she's this very timid woman too, and so of course this is a mirror image. She ends up doing to him what he has done to her bird, and this is the damning evidence. This box where the bird lays is clearly the evidence that these men are looking for.

And as they're searching the house, of course, they pop into the kitchen, periodically belittling the women and their housework. And these women end up having this moral discussion, trying to figure out what they do next. They have this clue. They have this evidence as to why Minnie did what she did. And they need to decide where their moral stance should be.

Should they protect Minnie, or should they abide by the law? Seek justice for Mr. Wright, even though he was a horrible man. He was, in essence, murdered. And the women end up deciding, as a jury of her peers, as a fellow woman, seeing the life that Minnie led, they decide to protect this woman to the best of their ability, and they hide the bird.

And the men go off on their way, never having found the real reason as to why Minnie did what she did, and there isn't certainty at the end of the story whether Minnie will get away with her crime or not, but I don't think that was the point of it, to be completely honest. It was more so the decision of these women to protect a fellow woman to the best of their ability.

Even if she does end up getting hanged, it won't be because of these two women. I really love all the details. So speaking of details, speaking of a short story, there are so many nods to the bird, to the cage, this idea of this woman being in essence in a cage in her marriage. And I just, I really appreciated how beautifully Susan Glaspell writes this short story and how thoughtful it can still be in 2025 as we're reading this, because I still find it extremely powerful today.

Caroline: And this is a story that does obey that sort of unity of concept because it does all happen in this one visit to the farmhouse. It's also mostly dialogue, which is very different to the Christie story that I chose, which I think is a nod to the fact that I think this was a play first. I think she wrote this as a play and then adapted it into a short story, which maybe explains why it's mostly dialogue.

Also, I just think it's a very good format for that jury discussion, which is essentially what the short story is. It's the bit where the jury retires in the court case and discusses among themselves what the verdict is going to be, and that's what these women are doing. So yes, I think it is a really clever example of how you can use those characteristics of the short story to do something very interesting and surprising.

The surprise revelation here being that you think these women are kind of upstanding matrons of the community who are going to automatically side with their husbands and with the law and then they do the opposite because they decide that there's more than one kind of crime and this is not that kind of crime that has been committed here.

The real crime was what Mr. Wright did to Minnie before she killed him. I think it's interesting that we both chose stories that are sort of morally dubious. In the strictest sense, don't you?

Leandra: Yes, and you know what's really funny is we were discussing how we chose two very different stories. And they are very different.

There are a lot of differences between them as far as what these two women writers have decided to do with the mystery short story. I did find it interesting that we've got two men who are guilty. Actually, right? One is guilty of abusing his wife and bringing her to the brink of a precipice and finally she snaps.

Whereas the other one kills an elderly woman in order to gain her fortune. And then we have two very different reactions from these wives. One protecting the husband and one choosing to do the same type of justice onto him. And also just considering the time. So this was published in 1917. So thinking about what the jury would look like at that time.

I am not fresh on my history when it comes to law reform or what a jury really should have looked like at that time, but I'm imagining it was all men. And so when it comes to this idea of Minnie Wright and who she would be facing in that trial, it would be a jury of all men. And so I love that we have this jury of her peers, her peers being fellow women, and them being able to see the perspective through her eyes and understand what she was going through. It's really fascinating and it also shows the spectrum of how a short story, especially in the mystery genre, can be light but it also can be dark. It can be quite dark as far as what an author decides to cover.

Both of these stories are really enjoyable and interestingly surrounding the law. Both of them are surrounding a trial which I think is very fun.

Caroline: Yes, so I think having considered both of those, have we come to any conclusions about the short story form?

Leandra: Ah, I think that a conclusion we can have is that there is so much versatility and probably so much to still be discovered when it comes to the mystery short story.

We discussed earlier that this form is dying, or at least lessening as far as our access to it, which is unfortunate, but I would love to see a resurgence and see how much more creative mystery authors can be. Because I feel like the golden age really set us up. There are so many short stories out there and each of us have probably only read a very small fraction of them, but I would love to see the short story forum come back for the mystery genre and just see what kind of a 2025 mystery short story would look like in comparison to this and, yeah, what were your takeaways?

Caroline: I actually wanted to lean on Art Taylor for the final time and read one more little line from him, he says, "Despite a more limited word count generally, short fiction as a form has proven remarkably flexible. The models are myriad, the possibilities are ultimately endless." And that expresses, I think, my thoughts about this very well, which is that, counterintuitively, even though it is a much more constrained and prescriptive form, than the novel, especially when you are writing it to order for a particular space in an anthology or a magazine, it seems infinitely flexible, this form.

There are so many different types of short stories, so many different ways it can be done incredibly well, and more to be discovered as well. I definitely don't feel like the short story form is stale. The newer short stories I have read that have been in either Crime Writers' Association anthologies or Detection Club anthologies all still doing interesting new things, or even I'm thinking of the recent Miss Marple short story collection, where the Christie estate asked, I think, 12 contemporary crime writers to write new short stories featuring the character of Miss Marple.

Some of those are really, really good and really interesting. And I hope that book did well enough that more commissions of that kind will keep happening where contemporary publishers will consider it a good bet. I know it's for a long time been a sort of truism in modern publishing that short stories don't sell, that people don't buy books or short stories in the way that they will buy novels, but I hope that changes because I think there's great things still to come even, what are we now, at least a century into the heyday of the mystery short story.

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This episode of Shedunnit was hosted by Leandra Griffith, with production help from me, Caroline Crampton. If you'd like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries, and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.

You can find more details about the books and stories we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/themysteryshortstory. We publish transcripts of every episode, including this one. Find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts. Shedunnit was created by me, Caroline Crampton. It's edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin. Thanks for listening.