he global focus of EQMM has been succinctly summarized in
an article by Janet Hutchings, current editor of the magazine:

 In 1941, when Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee were deciding how to orient their new magazine, there could not have been any question that its outlook would be global. Both men had cosmopolitan tastes and a knowledge of world literature. It has become part of EQMM lore that Dannay, who soon took over the editing of the magazine, aimed to prove, in its pages, that every great writer in history had written at least one story that could be considered a mystery. In its first years, EQMM contained mostly reprints by the great names of fiction of many different countries (from within the genre and without).

As EQMM began more actively to solicit new work, it continued to look not only to the varied locales within America's borders but beyond. For the short story contests run yearly between 1946 and 1957, and again in 1962, Dannay says in the introduction to his first volume of winners: "We sent publicity announcements all over the world." And submissions were received for the contests from countries as far-flung as Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa.

Despite the fact that translations were not actively commissioned by Dannay or EQMM's second editor, Eleanor Sullivan, 88 translations appeared in EQMM from 1941 to the middle of 2003, when the "Passport to Crime Department" was instituted—its purpose to find and translate, each month, a story from another language. The most notable translation of all of those to appear in EQMM in its early decades was the renowned Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths" (August 1948), the first published work in English of a writer who went on to become the first winner of the International Publishers' Prize (which he shared that year with Samuel Beckett) and one of the most important writers in the movement called "magical realism." Borges's translator was Anthony Boucher, one of the greatest critics, writers, and translators the mystery field has ever known. According to longtime EQMM translator Donald A. Yates, Boucher sent his Borges translations to Fred [Dannay] without being asked. Tony became interested in Spanish American crime fiction in the mid forties and in 1947 published his evaluation of that subject in an article in Publishers Weekly titled "It's Murder, Amigos." Boucher still reigns as EQMM's most prolific translator (with Donald Yates not far behind him).

Important as they are, translations comprise only a tiny portion of the stories EQMM publishes from abroad. Close to thirty percent of EQMM's content over the past couple of decades has come from the United Kingdom, and the magazine has always had contributors in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other English-speaking countries. One of EQMM's British writers spoke to us of growing up in Baghdad in the forties and being able to buy EQMM, in English, on the newsstands there. With the kind of global distribution that was possible at the time of EQMMs inception, it is not surprising that so many writers abroad—many of them probably readers of EQMM before becoming writers—began to send their stories to Fred Dannay. EQMM's distribution in those days was truly worldwide, a fact that can be partly, but only partly, attributed to the large shipments made to armed forces during the war.

While English editions of the magazine were making their way to every corner of the earth, there were also many licensed foreign-language editions—and even some apparently unlicensed ones—coming into print. As translator Donald A. Yates recalls: "I went to Mexico in 1958 to survey Mexican detective fiction for an article I was writing and enthusiastically commented to Fred [Dannay] on an edition of EQMM I found in Spanish in Mexico City. Turns out it was news to him. Shortly afterward, it ceased publication. Some enterprising fellow in Mexico City must have thought that imitation was flattery."

Part of the EQMM lore handed down to this editor, which unfortunately cannot be verified due to the loss of files and records, is that EQMM was, for many years, the third most translated of all American magazines, behind only Readers Digest and Popular Mechanics. It is certainly possible to say with authority that EQMM had one of the longest-running of all foreign-language editions in the twenty-year Japanese version of the magazine that ran throughout the eighties and nineties. More recent foreign editions (to 2010) have been put out by Serbian and Chinese publishers.

The new era of electronic publishing that we've entered over the past few years is beginning to open doors to global publication that may (and we fervently hope will!) eventually eclipse even the great reach EQMM had when its foreign editions were at their peak. As we work to build that brave new world of distribution, we intend to continue to extend our boundaries in global content, including authors from as many new countries as possible in "Passport to Crime" and keeping current with the British and Commonwealth crime scenes.

"A Global Focus" Janet Hutchings