John Copenhaver

When my co-editor Salem West and I began work on Crime Ink: Iconic, we knew we wanted to do more than compile a strong anthology of crime fiction—we wanted to make a statement. In 2023, Jeffrey Marks’ study of thirty major crime anthologies revealed that out of 517 stories, fewer than one percent were written by LGBTQ+ authors. That sobering statistic underscored how few opportunities queer crime writers are given to contribute to the genre, and how urgently we need to correct that imbalance.

A traditional mystery or whodunit offers a recognizable milieu with social and physical limitations, whether it’s a small village or a city apartment building. The inciting incident is a crime, often a murder, that ruptures its peaceful status quo. To restore order, the transgressor must be discovered and brought to justice. The world as it appears, which has been taken for granted, must be exposed as fraudulent by the detective.