Because the reach of the detective story is so long, and its field so wide, there is I think a natural tendency to want to categorize it, to make some order out of this protean disorder. Critics speak of police procedurals and private eyes and so on, though acknowledging that all these cousins live inside the same large tent (to borrow, only this once, an image from the political world). In this anthology, we look beyond the typical organization of stories by subgenre and delve into a variety of recurring plot devices. This unique and innovative arrangement shows how various writers throughout the ages have shaped the basic story structures. But in doing so we have also demonstrated the impossibility of doing so, because the detective story just doesn’t fit into neat pigeonholes.
Take the very first category in this volume, The Locked Room. The four stories collected under that heading could not be more unalike, while they certainly all fit the category, to demonstrate how even an apparently simple and constricting discipline can permit great latitude. But then move on, and the very first story in the section entitled Only One Among You, “The Secret Garden,” while it certainly belongs in that category, is also a locked room mystery! And very different from the preceding four.
But that isn’t all. In The Caper, the third category, “The Impossible Theft” is both a caper and a locked room story. In the next section, The Armchair Detective, “The Blue Geranium” is certainly an armchair detective story, but it is also—no surprise—a locked room story.
The variants flow into one another, feed one another, feed the underlying concept of story. But in this process, when we first sort the stories into category, and then see how they are not fully confined by those neat labels, we come to an understanding of the entire field of the detective story in a way we could not have done if we’d merely left it all an unexamined jumble.
When we see the relationships between the stories, and between the categories, when we see how the best writers have made personal use of the traditional schemes and the limitless variations, and when we see at the same time how free this field of the detective story leaves its practitioners to explore their own imaginative concerns, we can understand why the detective story has not only attracted so many readers for so long but has also been such a magnet to the best writers. Beginning from that basic triumvirate, society and the individual and a crime, writers of every stamp, attracted to different categories within the field, have been exploring the schemes and variations, measuring the possibilities, expanding the territory of the detective story, since . . .
Well, there’s some dispute about that. There are those who will tell you the story of Cain and Abel is the first murder mystery, and we can only nod and agree, while saying that doesn’t help us much. The modern detective story essentially began with Edgar Allan Poe, who invented most of it, including the first consulting detective, C. Auguste Dupin, out of whom was bred Sherlock Holmes and then, by eccentric fits and starts, various progeny leading at last to today’s private eye.
Poe started others of our plots spinning as well. Tales told by brooding murderers (today mostly of the bran-enriched serial kind) come slouching out of Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse,” and Indiana Jones is a direct descendent of William LeGrand in “The Gold Bug.” The Poe story in this volume, “ ‘Thou Art the Man,’ ” introduces both the amateur detective and the unjustly accused innocent who must struggle to clear himself.
Since Poe, the detective story has, like a tree, grown tall and fruitful, with many branches sprouting from those original roots, but with all of them holding to the original recipe: a heightened mixture of intellect and emotion, wedded to the triumvirate of society/individual/crime. Some of Poe’s offspring he himself might have trouble recognizing, but the lineage is clear.
In the century and a half since Poe started it all, the detective story has gone through greater and lesser phases of semi-respectability (never full respectability, thank God), and has attracted writers gifted with every degree of talent and art from the idiosyncratic genius of a Damon Runyon or a Chester Himes (both represented in these pages) to cookie-cutter hacks who couldn’t rise above formula with the aid of a hydraulic lift (none of them represented herein).
The hacks have always outnumbered the geniuses, but that’s true everywhere, and the entire community of writers, from the most brilliantly original to the most ploddingly imitative, do all feed the genre, help to keep it alive, to reassure the reader that, whenever there’s unwinding to be done, there will always be another new detective story, unread, unsavored, unsolved, very near to hand.
And these readers, after all, are still intelligent and discriminating, even when all they want is “just” a detective story. As they read, they can tell the good from the better, and the better from the best. Then, as time, the great winnower, moves on, the also-rans fall away and the geniuses remain, to segue into literary history, and become objects of study and interpretation.
But a dangerous trend has become evident within the last two decades. The scholars have grown less patient, less content to wait for a detective story writer to be safely tucked away on the inactive shelf before they turn their serious eyes on him. This very volume might be considered a part of this trend: if so, I apologize to my fellow entertainers. The last thing we want is for our readers to think of us as more than “just” detective story writers. If they thought there was any meat in that stew, they’d flee at once. They don’t want to be harassed. They want to unwind.
On the other hand, where would they flee? If driven from the detective story by perceived seriousness, where could the unwinders go? Not to eco-politics-riddled science fiction. Not to biography, which reverses the satisfying pattern of the detective story; where the detective story begins (often) with a death, a biography by its very nature ends with one. Hardly bedside reading, that.
Even the movies aren’t safely frivolous any more.
No, I’m sorry, we’re still, if not the only, the best game in town. For the intelligent, educated reader who, despite his or her best efforts to remain serious and responsible twenty-four hours a day, nevertheless inadvertently reads fiction for the right reason (because it’s fun), the detective story still is, as Goldilocks said about Baby Bear’s porridge, “just right.”
The tales in this book are all detective stories, just detective stories, some of the best work by some of the best writers in the field. Welcome aboard. Enjoy. It is, after all, better to be read than dead.
INTRODUCTION TO THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES, 2000
This essay served as Westlake’s introduction to that year’s installment of the annual series edited by his friend, poker buddy, and sometime publisher Otto Penzler.—Ed.
The durability of the short story is astonishing, all in all. It does not these days make any reputations, nor are the financial rewards particularly lush. Today’s slick magazines pay for a short story exactly what the slick magazines of the twenties paid for a short story; not adjusted dollars, real dollars. F. Scott Fitzgerald got the same pay from the magazines as today’s writers in similar venues, but in his day that was enough to keep him in Paris, whereas today the same income is enough to keep you on the farm.
Today’s digest-size magazines also pay just what their uncles, the pulps, used to pay. Up and down the market, this is the one and only example in the entire American economy of a durable and successful resistance to inflation.
Then why does the short story continue to endure? Given the way our world works, the modest financial return very strongly implies a modest readership; if the millions were clamoring for short stories as though they were Barbie dolls, the price would go up.
Still, there they are. The slicks do still publish short stories, though nowhere near as many as they used to. The digest-size magazines toddle along, far fewer than the pulps of yesteryear but still alive and in good health. University publications produce a hefty number of short stories every year, but that’s probably because their content providers are in the main academicians, and it’
s a given that the writer of short stories will be keeping his day job.
So it must be love that keeps the form alive, the writer’s love for the work. It has been said that jazz and the short story are the two American contributions to the world of art, and they do seem to have at least this one thing in common: both are engaged in by the practitioner primarily for the love of doing it.
There’s another link as well between the short story and jazz. Both are exemplified by the extended riff on a clean and simple motif. What the novel is to the symphony, the short story is to jazz. Like the best jazz solos, what the best short stories have to offer is a sense of vibrant imagination at work within a tightly controlled setting. That’s what turns the writers on, and that’s what maintains for the form a strong and knowledgeable readership. There is a joy in watching economy of gesture when performed by a real pro, whatever the art.
The short story evolved from several sources. The medieval conte, the tale meant to amuse the idlers at court (and the wanna-be idlers), and which more often than not involved a young wife and her lover putting one over on her much older husband, is one source. The traveler’s tale, such as those in Chaucer and Boccaccio, twists of fate and reversals of fortune, morality lessons in which the irony is mostly delivered by the hand of God, is another. The joke, particularly the shaggy dog story, of ancient lineage, is a third.
All of these sources came into the American psyche through the campfire yarns, the tall tales and frontier reports by which the early settlers tried to describe to themselves this new world they were blundering through. When these rowdy chronicles became tamed for print, by Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce and many others, the American short story had begun.
What the short story shares with its forebears, and what it does not share with novels or movies or television plays (except in the early days of live television from New York), is a singularity of focus, of character and effect. Though a story might cover years, as does Barbara D’Amato’s lovely “Motel 66” in this volume, or hundreds of miles, as does David Edgerly Gates’s somberly beautiful “Compass Rose,” its movement is nevertheless within the confines of the Aristotelian dictum that a drama consists of the playing out of one action. The short story is not a place for digression.
Which leads me to a second vein of short story writing that’s been popular now for some forty years or more, but which needn’t hold our attention for long, because you’ll find none of them in here (though some of them are very good indeed). This kind of story establishes a mood or an attitude or a situation and stops when the establishing is done. These stories are more closely allied to painting than to narrative and can be very strong, emotionally, though a certain limpness is always a danger.
These other stories are frequently called slices of life, and from a narrative point of view they don’t have endings, which is why I could find none of them to include here. A story in the mystery or crime or detective genre (I’ve never known an inclusive enough term for this particular corner of the literary world) by definition has to have an ending. One way or another, the story of the type you’ll find in this volume begins with a problem and cannot end until that problem has been dealt with, though not necessarily solved. These stories slice life too, but lengthwise. While it is true that one cross-section of a river, shore to shore, will imply everything upstream and everything downstream, it is also true that as a general rule the river itself is more interesting.
Given the constrictions of length and subject matter—there must, after all, be a crime somewhere in the story—it’s still astonishing to me just how broad a range the mystery short story can cover. For instance, the American South has always been fruitful ground for stories of every length and kind, and here we have Thomas H. McNeely’s harrowing “Sheep,” Dennis Lehane’s gothic “Running Out of Dog,” Tom Franklin’s gritty “Grit,” and Shel Silverstein’s rollicking “The Guilty Party.” All are clearly and evocatively set in that part of America, all are steeped in the flavor of the region, but could any four stories be more unalike?
(It’s a sad reminder also that, Shel Silverstein having died last year, long before his time, this is probably the last effusion we’re likely to see from that wonderfully fertile and varied mind, but at least he certainly did go out on a roisterous high note.)
I am encouraged also when I see that the field is in no way stuck in yesteryear, though the traditions of fairness, cleverness, and excellence remain intact. Within those traditions, we find much that couldn’t be more new. Here we have a story told to a video camera, a story that makes bizarre use of the latest telephone equipment, and a new way of seeing—look out for it—in the ICU.
The venues where these stories first appeared remain, as always, as broad a spectrum of American periodical publishing as you’re likely to find anywhere. Here we have the major mainstream magazines Playboy and the Atlantic Monthly, and here we also have the more specialized Oxford American and Chattahoochie Review. Plus we have selections from three fine anthologies. And of course we have the faithfuls, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, principally the latter.
For nearly sixty years, Ellery Queen has been the polestar of the mystery short story, finding and publishing the newest writers, the latest expansions of the genre, everything that keeps the field exciting and fresh. Ellery Queen’s Department of First Stories, the first published work by a brand-new writer, has been a staple of the magazine forever, and an amazing number of those stories have made it onto best-of-the-year lists. I’m happy to say we have one this year, “Jumping with Jim,” by Geary Danihy, that I think is one of the best debuts ever, told with such assurance and skill that I had to keep looking back at the first page; yes, this is the Department of First Stories. Long may it continue.
It’s been a long time since the mystery story was no more than a puzzle acted out by marionettes for the amusement of the cloistered Victorian mind. In the stories of this volume there are surprises galore, but they are surprises of character, of motivation, of story, not merely surprises of mechanical puzzle-playing. Although it is certainly possible for some writer somewhere to come up with a new and richer variant on, say, the locked-room story, there’s no tired smoke-and-mirrors exercise of that former sort to be found here. Every one of our writers has more serious fish to fry.
And many show their awareness that they are writing at the end of the millennium, that, in a way, everything that was published in 1999, in any genre, served as a kind of summing-up. Even our Department of First Stories entry begins by contrasting past with present, the current narrator with Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. At the other extreme, Robert Girardi’s “The Defenestration of Aba Sid” and half a dozen other stories all draw a picture, clear and concise, of just where America found itself at the end of the twentieth century.
I suppose that must inevitably lead me into a discussion of the future of the mystery short story. Our genre began with the publication, in April 1841, of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe, so it is now entering its third century and its 159th year, so wouldn’t I like to say where I expect it will travel next? “Whither,” and all that?
Well, no. I’m terrible at predictions, always have been. I don’t even know what I’m going to do next, so I’m not likely to be a particularly reliable oracle when it comes to the fate of an entire genre of popular fiction. Come to think of it, it’s probably my inability to guess what’s going to happen next that makes me such a fan of the mystery short story in the first place.
More a fan than a practitioner, I’m afraid. I’ve done a few short stories myself, enough to inform my admiration when I see the thing done well, but I admit I find it hard. In the novel I feel more at home, I can stretch and wander and take my time. In the short story, I can’t be self-indulgent, I can’t explain at length, I can’t distract the reader with subplots or amusing but ultimately irrelevant characters and settings.
All of which, of course, is the point. A good s
hort story is a jewel in miniature, as concise and carefully wrought as a fine watch, but at the same time alive. Like the stories herein.
DON’T CALL US, WE’LL CALL YOU
In 1960, Westlake submitted an essay to Xero, a science fiction fanzine edited by Pat and Dick Lupoff . It was one of the most spectacular acts of bridge burning in the history of publishing. Additions in brackets are my own.—Ed.
About a year ago, Henry Morrison asked Randy Garrett and me to speak at an ESFA [Eastern Science Fiction Association] meeting over in Jersey. The last echoes of the science fiction boom had faded away, the alarming dimensions of the resulting crater were becoming increasingly noticeable, and the people at ESFA thought it would be interesting to know what a couple of writers in the field intended to do next. Garrett was there as the old pro; I, as the recent entry into professional science fiction writing. Despite the disparity of our standings in the field, we both wound up by giving precisely the same answer: “I am a professional writer. My entire income comes from writing. If science fiction can’t support me, I’ll write in some other field.”
That was a year ago. Today, I am a full-time mystery writer, working on my fifth mystery novel. (The first had already been published at the time of the ESFA meeting). And the last time I saw Randy Garrett (a week ago) he was working on a biography for decent money.
Isaac Asimov is writing good science fact these days. Lester del Rey is writing bad science fact. [Ray] Bradbury and all the little Bradburys ([Richard] Matheson, [Charles] Beaumont, et al.) are writing bad big-time fantasy for television and Playboy. Arthur C. Clarke is writing popular science fact. [Robert] Sheckley is writing paperback mysteries. Judith Merrill is anthologizing. [Lyon Sprague] De Camp and a lot of others aren’t doing much of anything. God knows what [Algis] Budrys is doing. The list of living ex–science fiction writers approaches infinity.
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