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Submissions wanted (speculative, detective stories) | $300 per piece
🕑 Added 2025-10-29 02:18:01 +0000 UTCCOMPANY/PUBLICATION: THE SPECULATIVE DETECTIVE AGENCY
Deadline: 31 October 2025
Call for Stories
Co-Editors: Matthew David Goodwin and Richie Narvaez
We are seeking original and unpublished short stories for The Speculative Detective Agency (SDA), an interconnected anthology in which each story is a case completed by one of the agency’s detectives (who are created by you, the authors). Stories should be 4,000 to 5,000 words (max!). The submission deadline is October 31, 2025. Payments will be single author payments of $300, and the book will be published by Diversion Books in Fall 2026.
The premise of the anthology is that the SDA is one of the members of the International Association of Speculative Detectives (IASD), and we are now completing the membership renewal. As part of the renewal application, each detective agency must submit a sample of their best cases from the past five years (2020–2025). The application will be presented at the next convening of speculative agencies at the Hotel Provincial in New Orleans on December 13, 2026. The original nine speculative detectives who founded the IASD, “The Nine,” will be present and will offer free (mandatory) workshops on a variety of topics, such as the use of speculative methods in investigation and the ephemeral nature of
clues.
The shared world of the anthology is essentially our world, except that there exist speculative investigation agencies. The Speculative Detective Agency is the most prominent, with two main offices, one in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the other in New York City, and with agents spread across the country and world (wherever you are!). The SDA was founded in 1949 in response to the Manhattan Project and to the incident in Roswell. In the 1960s, the agency embraced the era’s protest ideals, shifting from authority-led solutions to client empowerment. In more recent years, the agency has embraced the reach and connectivity of the digital age.
The speculative part of your story can involve any of the speculative genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural, and so on. In addition, both the mystery itself and the means of solving the case can be of a speculative nature. Three elements we expect to see in the stories: 1) either explicitly or implicitly dealing with the methods of the detectives who must face strange and mysterious cases; 2) illuminating the depths and complexities of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, or sexuality; 3) though speculative, these are human stories and should have emotional resonance. In other words, authors have freedom to write their stories in their own manner and style, but the stories shouldn’t be written just as
case reports.
With a shared world and a shared detective agency, we are envisioning a degree of collaboration among authors. To this end, each author whose story is accepted will be asked to create a brief character sketch for their detective that will be available in a shared Google folder so that the other authors may reference the other detectives as they see fit. More substantial collaborations are acceptable, as are no
collaborations at all.
We currently have a website of our actual speculative detective agency (though the agency is not very active). That we have a real-life speculative detective agency that inspired this fictional construct is a central part of the aesthetics of this project and puts the anthology in a funky liminal space.
Place your name, contact information, and word count at the top of the document. Send submissions to the editors as a Word file: speculativedetectiveagency@gmail.com.
Stories written in part or whole by AI are not acceptable.
We will be doing a Kickstarter to raise the funds to pay the authors.
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CONTACT INFORMATION (please do not share the email address publicly):
Questions/submissions: speculativedetectiveagency@gmail.com
Website: https://speculativedetectiveagency.com/
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