The Doctor Takes the Prize: Tammy Euliano Wins Big at the Derringers

Well, this is exactly the kind of news I love to wake up to. The 2025 Derringer Award winners came out yesterday, and Dr. Tammy Euliano just proved that sometimes the most interesting crime stories come from the most unexpected corners.

Her story “Heart of Darkness” took the Long Story category, and honestly? I’m doing a little victory dance over here. Remember that Waffle House anthology I wrote about a few weeks back? The one that seemed almost too quirky to be real? Yeah, it just won a major award.

The Whole List

Let me run through all the winners because this year’s crop is pretty fantastic:

Mike McHone grabbed Flash Fiction for “Kargin the Necromancer” in Mystery Tribune. A necromancer story winning a mystery award? I mean, why not. Genre boundaries are basically suggestions at this point anyway.

Josh Pachter took Short Story with “The Wind Phone” from Ellery Queen’s. No surprises there—Pachter’s been turning out solid work for years, and EQMM knows what they’re doing.

Euliano got Long Story, obviously, and I’m still grinning about it.

Stacy Woodson claimed Novelette for “The Cadillac Job” from Down & Out Books. And here’s where it gets interesting—that’s the same publisher that put out the Waffle House anthology. Someone over there has serious taste.

The anthology award went to “Murder, Neat” from the SleuthSayers crowd, edited by Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman. If you know anything about mystery writing online, you know those folks have been keeping the community going for years. About time they got recognized for it.

Why This Matters

Look, I could write a whole dissertation on why Euliano’s win makes me happy, but let me break it down simply: this woman is an anesthesiologist. She spends her days keeping people alive during surgery. Then she goes home and writes award-winning crime fiction set in diners.

That’s not your typical writing bio, and that’s exactly why it works.

The medical background is obvious—doctors understand how bodies work, how they break, how close we all are to disaster at any given moment. But choosing to set her winning story in a Waffle House instead of a hospital? That takes real imagination. She could have gone the easy route, written about medical mysteries and drawn on her day job. Instead, she found the darkness in hash browns and late-night coffee.

And it paid off. The Derringer committee saw what I saw when I first heard about this anthology—that crime fiction works anywhere humans gather, especially in those liminal spaces where different worlds collide. Truck drivers, college kids pulling all-nighters, people getting off late shifts, travelers who’ve been driving too long—they all end up in the same fluorescent-lit booth at 2 AM. That’s fertile ground for stories.

What Strikes Me About This Year

Down & Out Books had a hell of a year. Two winners from one publisher doesn’t happen by accident. They’re clearly finding writers who understand that mystery fiction doesn’t have to be about drawing room murders or hard-boiled detectives walking mean streets. Sometimes it’s about finding the extraordinary in the completely ordinary.

The range this year is impressive too. You’ve got fantasy elements with the necromancer story, traditional magazine publishing with Pachter’s EQMM piece, anthology work from both the SleuthSayers collection and the Waffle House book, and serialized fiction with Woodson’s Chop Shop story. The field is healthier and weirder than ever.

Personal Victory

I have to admit, Euliano’s win feels personal. When I first wrote about her nomination, I was drawn to this idea of a doctor writing crime fiction, of someone taking their very serious, life-and-death professional skills and applying them to storytelling. But more than that, I loved the audacity of that anthology concept.

“Scattered, Smothered, Covered & Chunked” could have been a throwaway gimmick. Instead, it produced award-winning fiction. That tells me editors Michael Bracken and the folks at Down & Out Books understood something important: the setting is never the story. The people are the story. The setting just gives them somewhere interesting to reveal themselves.

Euliano got that. She understood that a Waffle House at 3 AM is just as valid a location for exploring human darkness as any Victorian mansion or gritty urban alleyway. Maybe more so, because it’s a place most of us have been, a place that feels familiar until something goes wrong.

Anyway, congratulations to all the winners, but especially to Dr. Euliano. From the OR to the Derringer Award—that’s a career trajectory I never saw coming, and I couldn’t be happier about it.