Say Good Night to Midnight

Today brings sad news from crime-fiction publisher Midnight Ink. Acquisitions editor Terri Bischoff posted the following short message this morning on her Facebook page:

As some of you may have heard, Midnight Ink will be shutting its doors after the Spring/Summer 2019 season. That means a few of us, notably [editors] Nicole [Nugent], Sandy [Sullivan], and myself, will be looking for new employment.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all my authors and agents for their hard work over the last nine years. I count so many of you as my friends and I sincerely hope this isn’t the end of my publishing career in crime fiction. You are my extended family and I appreciate all the connections and friendships over the last nine years.

I’m still in a little bit of shock. I didn’t know this was coming. I’m sure there will be much activity and a lot of questions in the near future. I will answer as best I can.

Although Bischoff—who’d previously owned a mystery bookstore—joined Midnight Ink during the fall of 2009, the company had been launched four years earlier, in February 2005, as the first fiction imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide, a New Age publisher headquartered in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. Over the course of the last 13 years, it has released both “medium-boiled” and “soft-boiled” mysteries, police procedurals, private-eye tales, historical cozies, works of suspense, and assorted other works. Among its myriad authors are Jess Lourey, Brendan DuBois, G.M. Malliet, Steve Hockensmith, Catriona McPherson, E.J. Copperman and Jeff Cohen, Sue Ann Jaffarian, Kellye Garrett, Keith Raffel, J.D. Allen, Gwen Florio, Leonard Goldberg, Patricia Smiley, and Bill Cameron. A catalogue of Midnight Ink’s forthcoming—and final—titles can be found here.