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The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025
Editor: Matt Coyle
Series Editor: Michael Bracken
In the tradition of The Best American Mystery and Suspense and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025 hopes to honour—what else?—the best private eye short stories published in 2024.
Okay, the inaugural edition was late out of the starting gate, only arriving in December 2025, but series editor Michael Bracken (whose brainchild it was) has high hopes that it will become an annual tradition. For that important first edition, he welcomed Matt Coyle as guest editor for the first volume and added “The Private Eye Year in Review,” an essay looking at the year’s significant events in the Shamus Game by some schmuck named Smith as an added bonus.
For the purposes of the project, Bracken used the Private Eye Writers of America’s definition of private eye: “a private citizen (not a member of the military, federal agency, or civic or state police force) who is paid to investigate crimes. A Private Investigator can be a traditional private eye, a TV or newspaper reporter, an insurance investigator, an employee of an investigative service or agency (think Pinkertons), or similar character.”
THE USUAL (AND NOT SO USUAL) SUSPECTS
The twenty selected stories were mostly familiar names (and more than a few were from anthologies edited by Bracken himself), but the periodicals and collections they were chosen from were occasionally well off the beaten track. Cowboy Jamboree: A Case of Kink? Jerry Jazz M Musician? and who — or what? — is Yellow Mama?
There’s also a section called Also Walking the Mean Streets, offering a tip of the fedora to other noteworthy stories that didn’t quite make the top twenty.
THE STORIES
- “Deadhead” by Tom Andes (from Cowboy Jamboree: A Case of Kink)
- “Mexican Radio” by Pete Barnstorm (from Mystery Magazine, February 2024)
- “Restoration Software” Robert J. Binney (from The Killing Rain)
- “Genius in a Bottle” by Alex Cizak (from Starlite Pulp Review, #4, 2024)
- “Alibi on Ice” by Libby Cudmore (from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2024)
- “My-O-My” by O’Neil De Noux (from Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, June 2024)
- “Ill Met by Moonlight: A Benjamin Enoch Mystery” by Luke Deckard (from Midsummer Mysteries Short Story)
- “And All That Jazz” by B.V. Lawson (from Jerry Jazz Musician, November 18, 2024)
- “The Singular Case of the Bandaged Bobby” by Andrew McAleer (from Mystery Magazine, September 2024)
- “Velda and the Murder Muffins” by Ron Miller (from Black Cat Weekly, #139)
- “The Mysterious Woman in the Lifeguard Chair” by Bruce W. Most (Mystery Magazine, May 2024)
- “Scamming the Scammer” by Marcia Muller (from Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers)
- “Aim” by Twist Phelan (from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March/April 2024)
- “The Shandiclere” by Neil S. Plakcy (from Black Cat Weekly, #150)
- “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting” by William Dylan Powell (from Private Dicks and Disco Balls)
- “Drop Dead Gorgeous” by M.E. Proctor (from Janie’s Got a Gun)
- “The Kratz Gambit” by Mark Thielman (from Private Dicks and Disco Balls)
- “Here’s Looking at You” by Vicki Weisfeld (from Yellow Mama)
- “Through Thick and Thin” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2024)
- “Broken English” by Sam Wiebe (from Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Volume 5)
AIDING AND ABETTING
- Michael Bracken
- Matt Coyle
- Kevin Burton Smith
- Level Short, an imprint of Level Best Books
THE BOOK
- The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025 | Buy this book | Kindle it!
