"Farewell to Baytown"

This is a very special story, a postumous collaboration with William Bankier.

Bankier, a Canadian, published 215 short stories between 1959 and 2010, including 160 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (and another six in editions of the Ellery Queen's Anthology series). More than forty of these stories were set in the fictional Baytown, based on his birthplace of Belleville, and many of the others included references to Baytown.

When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2007, Bankier wrote what he intended to be his final story, put it in an envelope with a note to his wife Felice taped to the outside, and tucked it away in a desk drawer. When, after his death in 2014, Felice was cleaning out his office, she found the envelope. The note instructed her to forward it to Janet Hutchings, the editor of EQMM. She did, and when Janet read the enclosed story she unfortunately felt that it wasn't up to Bill's usual standard, made the hard decision not to publish it, tucked it away in her desk drawer, and forgot about it.

Eleven years later, in 2025, Janet came across the story and, knowing that I've done a number of collaborations with EQMM contributors and other writers, asked me if I'd like to take a look at it with an eye to possibly reworking it. I jumped at the chance. She scanned the typescript and sent it to me, and I believed I saw where Bill had gone wrong with the story and how to fix it.

Once I'd revised it to my satisfaction, I tracked down Felice Nelson-Bankier, Bill's widow — which turned out not to be easy! — and got her on the phone. She doesn't do email, but I snail-mailed her my draft of the story out in LA, and she called me and told me she cried when she read it: "It brought my Billy back to me," she said. She gave me her permission to submit it to EQMM with both Bill's and my own names on it, and Jackie Sherbow — who took over the editorship of EQMM after Janet retired at the end of 2024 (after thirty-four years as editor-in-chief!) — accepted it and scheduled it as the lead story for the magazine's 85th-anniversary issue.

The September/October 2026 issue was released on August 8, 2026, and "Farewell to Baytown" was one of the two stories excerpted on the EQMM website. Its publication makes William Bankier only the third person to have new fiction appear in EQMM in seven consecutive decades. (The second was Jon L. Breen. The first was me.) I wrote about the story at the magazine's "Something Is Going to Happen" blog on August 10, and again at Art Taylor's "The First Two Pages" blog the week after that.

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