About NEFARIOUS - Tales Of Mystery

By Robert K. Foster

NEFARIOUS - Tales of Mystery was created in the spirit of classic mystery stories where the plot, the puzzle, the mystery itself was the key ingredient of the tale. Our online zine included Short Stories, Flash Fiction, 55 Word Fiction, Film Photos and Movie Trailers, occasional Reviews, an Image Gallery, Events Listing, Discussion Forums, Crime News, an E-Book page, and a Book Store. We were also available on cell phones and other portable devices through a mobile formatted interface at the nefarious.mobi URL.

Some History

NEFARIOUS - Tales of Mystery began life in 1999 as an online “ezine”, as they were called in those days. Created during the heyday of the “Mystery” series on PBS television in the United States it was intended to extend the mystery genre in short story magazine form onto the Internet. Despite the many shortcomings of web site software, and our web design skills, at the time we managed to get a good number of issues out on the web.

In those early days we also had the benefit of being listed on the Excite Web Portal (remember them?) through our RSS feed. Excite was one of the first portals to make use of RSS (which stood for Rich Site Summary when in its infancy). Much of our initial popularity could probably be attributed to the traffic from the Excite portal. Excite was good for us and gave us the proverbial big break. It was a disappointment to hear that they would be shutting down but, by that time, RSS had become more widely used on the Net so there was potential for other syndication.

The tag line we used in those days was “A mystery fiction webzine for Readers who love a good mystery and Writers who love to tell one.” We did have a good mix of mostly mystery and crime fiction with the occasional horror story.

In September 2002 a new web domain was setup for the Nefarious - Tales of Mystery webzine at www.nefarious-tales.com. March 2002, Volume 3 Number 2 “The Tough Guys and Gals Make Good” Issue was the last issue published on the old web space at www.thewindjammer.com/nefarious . There was a multi-year “hiatus” from 2002 until the Autumn of 2006 in which we discontinued publication of new issues of the webzine. We also discontinued publication after the June 2007 issue.

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