

The Margery Allingham Short Mystery Competition
Every year since 2014, the CWA and the Margery Allingham Society have jointly held an international competition for a short story of up to 3,500 words.
Our mission is to find the best unpublished short mystery, and not only that, but one which fits into Golden Age crime writer Margery Allingham’s definition of what makes a great mystery story.
The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.Margery Allingham
2025 longlist
Title | Author |
---|---|
The Human Imperative | Michael Bird |
Desmond Astonishes | Stacy Brown |
Best Served Cold | Ajay Chowdury |
The Treasure Hunter | Jane Corry |
Only Forward | Hayley Dunning |
You Think You Know Someone | Leigh Gorelik |
Unsupervised Dead Women | Helen Gray |
Dinosaur | Emma Johnson |
Tinkerbell Is Dead | Linda Mather |
Your Time’s Up | Laila Murphy |
An Ideal Murder | Emma O’Driscoll |
A Woman of No Consequence | Laure Van Rensberg |
Dates for your diary
- 12 April – 2025 longlist announced at the CWA Northern Symposium
- Early May – 2025 shortlist announced online
- 31 May – 2025 winner announced at the public NCRM 2025 Launch at Bodies in the Bookshop, Cambridge
- Autumn 2025 – 2026 entries open

Read winning stories
- 2024 winning story
- 2023 winning story
- 2022 winning story
- 2021 winning story
- 2020 winning story
- 2020 highly commended story
- 2020 highly commended story
- 2019 winning story
- 2019 shortlisted story
- 2019 shortlisted story
- 2019 runner up
- 2018 winning story
- 2017 winning story
- 2016 winning story
- 2016 shortlisted story
- 2015 winning story

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