It was brought to my attention that how I will be judging was a little unclear, so I wanted to clarify. This will be added to the original contest post.

Judging Criteria

I will be judging your stories on a number of factors. The major ones are:

• The quality and cleverness of the mystery presented (this is a mystery writing contest, after all!)
• Creativity
• Use of the prompt
• Technical qualities, such as spelling and grammar
• Pizzazz!

...And a hundred other ephemeral things that can't be easily quantified.

Hope that helps!