The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  An RV lifestyle catalogue dated February 2004 was in the box of his belongings I’d gotten. My father had circled a cabinet set, something he planned to buy for the RV he was living in if and when he got the money together. That made me cry. In February he’d had plans for the future—​he was going to buy some new cabinets for his RV—​but in March he was dead. I wondered if he’d saved some of the money.

  My youngest daughter, Francine, likes to go hiking with me. We drive out to the woods and spend hours surrounded by trees, walking in relative silence. Sometimes we see a family of deer. Francine and I both freeze in those moments, and the deer freeze, and we all look at each other with dumb blank eyes, and in that instant—​in that second before a distant twig snaps, breaking the spell—​the world is absolutely perfect and beautiful. Take a picture and keep it forever. I’m not the most self-reflective person on earth, so I can’t tell you why, but “All This Distant Beauty” is about the mental and emotional juxtaposition of those two things: my father’s suicide sixteen years ago and an afternoon hike with my six-year-old daughter. Make of it what you will.

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  Sheila Kohler is the author of eleven novels, three volumes of short fiction, a memoir, and many essays. Her most recent novel is Dreaming for Freud, based on the Dora case, and Open Secrets will be published in July 2020. Her memoir, Once We Were Sisters, was published in 2017 in the United States, England, and Spain. She has won numerous prizes, including an O. Henry Award. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories and published in thirteen countries. She has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Princeton. Her novel Cracks was made into a film directed by Jordan Scott, with Eva Green playing Miss G. You can find her blog at Psychology Today under “Dreaming for Freud.”

  • When Joyce Carol Oates, with her habitual generosity, asked me for a story for the anthology Cutting Edge, I sat down to write one for her, and “Miss Martin” appeared quite fast on the page, though I had to go back and revise somewhat, of course.

  As so often with stories, there are some details from life: a house on Long Island with a loft above the dining room, which we built for grandchildren in the summer. Even the fall occurred to my poor husband, who went up the ladder that a workman had propped up carelessly against the wall and punctured a lung. I wanted to change the usual triangle here, with the “wicked stepmother” turning out in the end to be of help to my young protagonist. Here too, I have been a stepmother in life, and of course I do come from South Africa. I asked my husband, a psychiatrist, what a father could do that might merit punishment, and his response came fast: “Incest,” he said.

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  Jake Lithua was forever corrupted at the age of five, when he discovered his father’s Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. Ever since, he has been interested in telling stories of heroism and courage, fantastical or real-world. His short story “The Most Powerful Weapon” was first published in The Odds Are Against Us; his novella “Trust” is included in Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, published in 2018. He lives far too close to Washington, D.C., for anyone’s good.

  • Ariya, or a character like her, has been bouncing around in my head for a long time. She began her conceptual life as a teenage American mercenary, a cold-blooded, traumatized survivor of war crimes who sticks out like a sore thumb among the relatively ordinary students at her boarding school. Then ISIS exploded onto the world scene in 2013 and 2014; with the savagery of their crimes, and especially their treatment of the Yazidis, it made sense to have the character who would become Ariya be a Yazidi herself, an enslaved child bride.

  I don’t remember why I chose the name Tristan for the American Green Beret. Maybe I had James Herriot’s books floating around in the back of my head. But I like the idea of introducing Tristan, making it seem like he would be the white knight, and then pulling the rug out. Still, he plays an important role: he teaches Ariya that she is not just a victim, that she too can act. It is a lesson that we all can learn a little better, I think.

  The anger that Tristan expresses at the Americans leaving is mine as well; in a sense, the story was motivated by my fury that we had abandoned people who had risked so much to ally with us and allowed ISIS to run rampant for over a year. Beating an ISIS mujahid to death in fiction doesn’t accomplish much in the real world, but it certainly felt good.

  After twenty-five years in federal law enforcement, Rick McMahan retired as a senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 2017. Currently he is a law enforcement instructor for Kentucky’s Department of Criminal Justice Training. Rick’s short stories have appeared in various publications, including twice having the privilege of being published in Mystery Writers of America anthologies (Death Do Us Partand Vengeance). “Baddest Outlaws” appeared in After Midnight, an anthology by the Writers’ Police Academy.

  • The idea for “Baddest Outlaws” came from a real-life cop story told to me by my former coworker and friend Shawn Morman. Before becoming an ATF agent, Shawn was a Kentucky state trooper. Now, in Kentucky, Kentucky State Police is known as a no-nonsense agency enforcing the law in many remote counties. In some parts of the state officers are working where their nearest backup (if any) is a half hour away. KSP instills a distinct confidence and attitude, along with the sharply creased uniforms and polite conversation (No, ma’am, Yes, sir).

  The way Shawn told the story was that when he started policing, several of the more experienced troopers warned him not to go on any call having to do with a certain family without several more officers (not just one!) as backup. Like a line from my story goes, when Kentucky state troopers leave their academy, they think they’re ten feet tall and bulletproof. I wondered what kind of dangerous criminals would make them be so cautious. He said that the family, every last one of them, was combative with law enforcement. Then Morman told me that the family known for fighting police were all “little people.” At that point I knew I had just found the nugget of a story that I needed to write.

  I guess it’s because Kentucky has had some memorable and colorful crime groups that I wanted to make the criminal family more than just a family of ne’er-do-wells. Marion County’s Cornbread Mafia was a group of marijuana growers who instilled respect and fear among their own and other criminals. In fact, Johnny Boone ran the Cornbread Mafia with a very strict code of silence. During his first stint in prison, Boone had omerta, the Italian Mafia’s word for its code of silence, tattooed across his back. Over fifty members of the Cornbread Mafia were prosecuted in federal court, and not a single one agreed to cooperate with the government and turn state’s witness. Boone himself fled before trial and for several decades eluded police.

  Another unique crime group was Drew Thornton’s cocaine-smuggling crew, made up of ex-military members and ex-cops, all criminals, as chronicled in the book The Bluegrass Conspiracy. They flew cocaine from South America into the southeast United States. They claimed to be working for the CIA. Of course that was never proven and denied by the government, but they sure had a ton of weapons they moved around. They had connections to politicians in Kentucky, some rumored to be as high as the governor’s office. As the crew became more brazen, law enforcement took notice and began investigating the group. As criminal investigations grew, the crew began to unravel. Several members went to prison, for everything from stealing classified government equipment to drug trafficking as well as murdering a Florida judge. However, Drew Thornton’s end wasn’t in a courtroom; rather, his demise played out like a scene from a bad spy movie. While flying back with a load of cocaine, his plane was being targeted by Customs aircraft, which he couldn’t lose. In an attempt to get away, Drew put on a parachute and jumped. However, he had strapped several duffel bags of cocaine along with a silenced pistol to his body, overloading the chute. He plummeted to his death, and was discovered when a homeowner walked out to his driveway to get his morning paper. Before jumping from the plane, Thornton and his copilot had shuffled more duffel bags out
along their route. One of those floating parachutes full of cocaine landed in the Smoky Mountains National Forest. A curious black bear got into the duffel bag, and before his heart exploded, the bear consumed several pounds of Colombian powder. The Cocaine Bear is stuffed and on display in a museum in Kentucky.

  With such colorful (and, never forget, dangerous) criminal organizations in Kentucky’s history, I wanted the Creeches to be just as unique. In deciding where to set the story, I used the imaginary Clement County, a place invented by my writing mentors Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet. Many of their own mysteries, published under their pen name (Hal Charles), are set in Clement County, so I decided it would be as good a place as any for the Baddest Outlaws of Kentucky to call home.

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  Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, the author of nonfiction books, and an award-winning prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is the author of four novels and 150 short stories, a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and a world-class Halloween expert. Her most recent books include Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers 1852–1923 (coedited with Leslie S. Klinger) and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances. Lisa lives in the San Fernando Valley and online at www​.lisamorton​.com.

  • My grandfather loved to shoot anything with his 16mm movie camera (remember when we had cameras instead of phones?), and I inherited a box of these tiny reels of film that could have anything on them. I suspect most of them are probably pretty dull vacation footage with people I won’t even recognize, so I’ve never paid to transfer them to DVD, but whenever I glance at that box, I always wonder, What if . . . ? What if there’s something on there that he filmed by accident, or meant to destroy after he had the film developed? He was a lifelong resident of Indiana, so it’s thoroughly unlikely that he photographed any Veronica Lake–ish movie stars (like the title character in my story). I think I prefer to let the movies remain unknown and instead imagine that they hold tantalizing mysteries.

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  John Sandford (pen name for John Camp) has written more than fifty thriller novels, all of which have appeared, in one form or another, on the New York Times bestseller list, including many that debuted at number one. A former newspaper reporter, Sandford won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1986 for stories about a farm family experiencing small farming’s economic and financial crisis of the mid-1980s. In addition he has written nonfiction books on art (The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle) and plastic surgery (The Kindest Cut). He lives in Santa Fe with his wife, the screenwriter Michele Cook, and their Belgian malinois, Willa.

  • I don’t write much short fiction, but when Lawrence Block approached me about doing a short story based on a famous painting, the idea greatly appealed to me. I’m an art history buff, the way some people are Civil War buffs, and have a special affection for American paintings of the first half of the twentieth century. I also play guitar, strictly as a hobby, and once considered writing a thriller based around L.A. pop music culture. My prospective title for the novel was “Girl with an Ax.” Maybe I still will do that, but she showed up first in this short story. And there was another thing going on. Way back when, working as a reporter, I was also trying to write novels, without much initial success, Larry Block was well known for his how-to books on writing as well as his fiction. I was looking through one of them when I encountered something to the effect of “Throw away your first chapter.” That was the only thing I ever got out of a how-to book, but it sort of changed my life. He was saying, in effect, don’t go through a bunch of tedious scene-setting and character introductions—​go with the story. I threw away my first chapter and was on my way as a fiction writer. I’ve always felt indebted to him for that, so when he asked . . .

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  dbschlosser is an award-winning fiction and nonfiction author and an award-winning editor. His fiction has appeared in university literary journals and online magazines. His nonfiction and journalism have run in business and trade publications, academic and scientific journals, and print and online news outlets. As a political, public relations, advertising, marketing, and content strategist, he has delighted and offended people in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as on Hard Copy and Inside Edition. As a teacher, he has engaged high school debaters, university writers and communicators, continuing education mystery fans, and writers and editors at seminars and conferences. Kansan by birth, he turned Texan while earning degrees at Trinity University and the University of Texas. After living and working in nearly a dozen states, he, his lovely wife, Anne, and their dogs consider Seattle home.

  • “Pretzel Logic” was inspired by Steely Dan’s song of the same title. I am grateful to Brian Thornton for his invitation to submit a story to the anthologies of crime fiction inspired by the band’s music, Die Behind the Wheel and A Beast Without a Name, which he curated and edited. The concept of pretzel logic appealed to my sense that no matter how irrational a person’s behavior seems to observers, a rational human acts on motives I can understand if I peel enough layers off the onion. Part of the joy of storytelling is interpreting behavior and motivation through action. Part of the joy of Steely Dan’s music is that it’s open to so many different interpretations. The musicians who crafted the song claimed it’s about time travel. That was not my interpretation. After living in cities challenged by race issues I’d associated with prior generations before encountering them in mine, I also was inspired by the concept of minstrelry in the southland. I’ve been illuminated by more than a few light-bulb moments in which I came to understand as rational what appeared initially to me irrational. I wanted to explore my fellow humans going about routines that seem counterintuitive, counterproductive, or antisocial but on deeper consideration make not just sense but perfect, tragic sense. I also have wanted to work into a story the location of the story’s climax—​one building in two states. That building exists in Kansas City, but I imagine this story’s fictional metro area is more like Charlotte, which sprawls over the line between the Carolinas. I’m optimistic that Bax will enjoy more adventures there, and I hope that you will enjoy reading about them in the future.

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  Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and the author of nine novels, four of which feature professional thief Crissa Stone, whom Kirkus Reviews called “crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.” His previous short story, “Night Run,” was chosen for the 2017 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories. He has also written for Esquire Japan, BBC Radio 4, Reader’s Digest, Salon, Slant, Writer’s Digest, Inside Jersey, and other publications. A lifelong resident of the Jersey shore, he was an editor for thirteen years at the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger.

  • Few books meant as much to me in my formative years as the novels of Lawrence Block. So I was happy to accept his invitation to contribute a short story to his 2019 anthology At Home in the Dark. The brief was simple—​the stories could be in any genre, set anywhere and in any era, as long as they were at the “darker end of the spectrum.” I chose to revisit my series character Crissa Stone, a blue-collar professional thief who’d previously appeared in four novels, the last being 2015’s The Devil’s Share. Fittingly for the anthology, I wanted the story to take place over the course of a single night, with Crissa trying to hold on to $100,000 in stolen drug money while its previous owners hunt her down across a barren New York City nightscape. So I’m grateful to Larry for both the invitation to contribute and the chance to bring Crissa out of retirement, if only briefly.

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  Robin Yocum watched his father come home from a West Virginia steel mill black with fly ash and soot and thought, There’s got to be an easier way to make a living. When he discovered that writing required no heavy lifting and offered virtually zero chance of falling into a ladle of molten steel, he signed up. Yocum is proud of his Ohio River
Valley roots and sets his fiction in eastern Ohio, near his boyhood home of Brilliant. A former award-winning crime reporter with the Columbus Dispatch, he has published two true-crime books and five novels. A Brilliant Death was a finalist for both the 2017 Edgar and the Silver Falchion Award for Best Adult Mystery. Favorite Sons was named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. Yocum is a proud graduate of Bowling Green State University, where he received a degree in journalism that prevented an untimely and fiery death in the steel mill.

  • When I’m asked where I get the ideas for my stories, I offer this honest answer: I have no earthly idea. How does one explain imagination and the creative process? My brain is always pinballing with ideas.

  With that said, I was no stranger to the presence of the mob while growing up in the Ohio River Valley. The Youngstown mob controlled the prostitution and gambling in Steubenville. It was the worst-kept secret ever. The whorehouses lined Water Street, and gambling was everywhere. Literally everywhere. I could get football spot sheets at my high school. I’m not even sure I knew they were illegal.