Background
Ellery Queen was the pseudonym of the team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who had been writing under the name since 1929. EQMM was created to provide a market for mystery fiction above the common run of pulp crime magazines of the day. Dannay served as the magazine's editor-in-chief (although still under the name Ellery Queen) from its creation until his death in 1982, when managing editor Eleanor Sullivan succeeded to the post. Following her death in 1991, Janet Hutchings became editor of EQMM.
In Bloody Murder, Julian Symons offered this description of the publication:
It is... a compendium of every possible kind of crime story. Some of the kinds are more important than others, not all of the stories are masterpieces, and some will madden anybody who has a fixed idea of what the crime short story should be like. Yet the value of the magazine far transcends any criticisms that may be made of it. No doubt short stories would have been written if EQMM had never existed, but they would have been much less various in style and interest, and almost certainly much poorer in quality.
Read more about this topic: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
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