The Adventure, Espionage and War Fiction Magazine Index
Miller and Cook, Philip Stephensen-Payne and Bill Contento

This project is underway, and the user can seek up-to-date information by accessing

the website of Philip Stephensen-Payne by clicking on this line

Crime, Mystery & Gangster Fiction Magazine Index

The Crime, Mystery & Gangster Fiction Magazine Index (or Crime Fiction Index in short) is an attempt to provide an index to crime fiction magazines in the same style as the classic Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Magazine Index compiled by Stephen T. Miller and William G. Contento. It will be available both in CD-ROM format from Locus Press and as a series of luxury hardback volumes from the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

The index is based (with permission) on the two classic indexes in this field (both now long out of print):

1. Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction: A Checklist of Fiction in U.S. Pulp Magazines, 1915-1974 compiled by Michael L. Cook and Stephen T. Miller
2. Monthly Murders: A Checklist and Chronological Listing Of Fiction In The Digest-Size Mystery Magazines In The United States And England compiled by Michael L. Cook

• The magazines indexed in William G. Contento's Mystery Short Fiction index;
• Contents for many of the issues that were not located for the above indexes (as well as some issues the previous compilers were unaware of);
• Coverage of many English-language magazines published outside the US that were excluded from the previous indexes;
• Coverage of many magazines that have been published since the previous indexes were published;
• Coverage of a small number of magazines that the previous compilers overlooked;
• Where available, more detailed information on the contents of certain magazines (including story lengths and details of non-fiction contents).

As can be imagined with a project of this magnitude (comprising over 12,000 issues from over 550 different magazines), the compilers would welcome any offers of assistance from anyone who has access to some of these magazines and is prepared to help out.

In particular:

1. The core of the index has been compiled from OCR scans of the two original indexes, rather than from the magazines themselves, and as such inevitably reproduce some of the mistakes inherent in those indexes (as well as undoubtedly introducing some new ones). We would love to hear from anyone who has a collection (whether large or small) of crime fiction magazines and would be prepared to compare the relevant sections of the index against their collections.
2. There are still a number of small gaps in earlier magazines (see here for a full list), but we would particularly love to hear from anyone who has any copies of a handful of US magazines for which there are significant gaps:
   • Cabaret Stories
   • Giant Manhunt
   • Midnight/Midnight Mystery Stories/Midnight Mysteries
   • Over My Dead Body!
   • Real Detective Tales (and Mystery Stories)
   • Red Herring Mystery Magazine
   • Scientific Detective (Annual) (not the same as Scientific Detective Monthly)
   • The Underworld (Magazine)
3. Although the index contains many hundred issues of magazines published outside the US, the coverage of these is still woefully incomplete and we would love to hear from anybody who has crime magazines published in the UK (particularly reprint editions of US pulps), Australia, Canada, South Africa or New Zealand (or, indeed, any other country publishing crime magazines in the English language).