It was a grand time to be a kid. Minor league baseball players were celebrities and the Canadian men who set up street-corner yo-yo competitions all over town seemed possessed of magic. Even the gangsters with whom “Nick” and I associated the word criminal had a Hollywood aura about them. I think the innocence of the boys in the story is a reflection of the mindset of the times. On V-J Day we knew with absolute conviction that our nation was on the right side of things and that the evil that had threatened our tiny microcosm on that dead-end street had been purged from the earth forever. Perhaps one could say that our national perspective was one of illusion, but I believe otherwise. I believe my generation will be the last one to remember what is called traditional America. We believed in ourselves. We were a united people. Each day was like waking to music and sunshine and the smell of flowers. Anyway, I’m proud of this story and the others I wrote about “Nick” and me. I hope you enjoy it.
~ * ~
Jeffery Deaver is a former journalist, folksinger, and attorney. The creator of the Lincoln Rhyme series of thrillers, he’s the author of twenty-two novels, has been awarded the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year, and is a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. He’s been nominated for six Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony Award, and a Gumshoe Award. His book The Bone Collectors was made into a feature release from Universal pictures starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. His most recent books are The Cold Moon, The Twelfth Card, and Twisted: Collected Stories. And, yes, the rumors are true, he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As The World Turns.
■ “Born Bad” is typical of my short stories. They don’t come from real-life experiences and are meant to be pure entertainment; I simply sit down and came up with a scenario that I think will make a fun story. Like my novels, the short stories are carefully plotted and move along quickly to an unexpected ending. The difference, though, is that in a novel I strive to create an emotional roller coaster for my readers. Accordingly, I have to keep in mind the connection that readers have with the book’s characters and never disillusion them. In short stories, that’s not the case, since it’s hard to form more than a marginal connection with the characters over the course of twenty pages or so; the payoff of a story is a gut-wrenching surprise. To stay with the amusement park metaphor: if novels are roller coasters, then short stories are like the parachute drop ride — when the parachute doesn’t open.
~ * ~
Jane Haddam is the pseudonym of Orania Papazoglou, whose first language was not Greek and whose parents were both born in Danbury, Connecticut. She is the author of twenty-two Gregor Demarkian novels and, under her own name, of a short series about romance writer Patience Campbell McKenna as well as two psychological thrillers. She was married for thirteen years to the three-time Edgar Award-winner William L. DeAndrea, who died in 1996. She lives with her two sons in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
■ I don’t think I would have written a story about a cat if the cat had been any other cat but Edelweiss. I’m not a cat-detective sort of person — all the cutesy half-humanness of detecting pets tends to make me climb the walls. So when Ed Gorman first asked me to do a story for a volume of cat-related mysteries, I was torn between my first reaction (“oh, for goodness sake”) and the desire to have a chance to do a short story at all. I don’t get asked to do them often, and I love the form. In the end, I opted for a story that wasn’t anything like cutesy and that couldn’t be mistaken for cozy in a million years. In the process, I gave Edelweiss — who was adopted after having been neglected and abused, and who had the most thoroughgoing case of shyness ever visited on a mammal — the sort of nonchalant self-confidence all cats are supposed to possess by birthright. She’s a good cat, Edelweiss, even if you’ll never get to meet her. If you visit, she’ll hide under the couch or behind the recycling bin until she can be sure you’re safely gone.
~ * ~
William Harrison is the author of eight novels — five set in Africa — as well as three volumes of short stories, essays, and travel pieces. He taught at the University of Arkansas for a number of years and still lives in Fayetteville.
■ I usually begin with a character when a story comes to me, but sometimes a place — or even a single image — starts the process. I was driving down toward Dripping Springs, Texas, out of Austin when I saw this forlorn little real estate company in a squat building out there among the scrub oak and mesquite trees. My wife had once worked as a real estate agent and told me how women agents always traveled in pairs when dealing with male clients — especially in isolated rural situations — and my imagination just turned over. “Texas Heat” was the result.
~ * ~
Alan Heathcock has published stories in a number of journals. His story “Peacekeeper,” first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, won the 2006 National Magazine Award in fiction. He is a native of Chicago and teaches at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.
■ Some friends of mine live in a lovely small town in Minnesota. I visited the town not long after a horrible crime — not unlike the crime in “Peacekeeper” — had been discovered. The town had palpably changed; everything felt different, somehow tarnished. I remember wondering if anything could be done to restore the town’s peace and decided nothing short of having the crime erased from the town’s collective memory would suffice. That, in turn, got me thinking on the nature of peace itself and how disrupted peace will always show itself, will be felt, will be ingested like fouled air, even if not seen by the community; peace, or the lack of peace, is a force of nature, is the very air we breathe. Around the same time I was working on a story about the Great Midwestern Flood of 1993, and it made sense that the two stories reside in the same Active space. I owe a structural debt to the Christopher Nolan film Following for the disjointed manner in which Nolan unfurled his story, juxtaposing related but out-of-sequence scenes to enable a consistent tension — building multiple lines to a proper crescendo, was, for me, a key to unlocking this particular story’s potency.
~ * ~
Emory Holmes II is a Los Angeles-based novelist, playwright, poet, children’s storywriter, and journalist. His news stories on American crime, schools, and the arts have appeared on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the New York Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Magazine, Essence, CODE, the R&B Report, Written By magazine, and other publications.
■ When my crime-writer buddy Gary Phillips called in the summer of 2004 and asked if I would contribute a story to The Cocaine Chronicles — an anthology of new writing he and novelist Jervey Tervalon were putting together addressing the effects of cocaine on American society — I jumped at the chance. I was eager to pen a twenty-first-century blues. I unearthed a motley gallery of killers I’d banked in an archive of traffickers and thugs, collected during my thirty years as a reporter and writer. Some of the characters and settings in “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” got plucked from the novel I am writing about a meth epidemic (and murder) in 1980s Honolulu. I had done a page one story on this epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle back in August 1989 and, a few weeks after that, Vanity Fair sent me back to Hawaii to do the story for them. Working on assignment for Vanity Fair is a writer’s dream come true, and the experience was all that and more for me, but my Hawaii narrative never got published in Vanity Fair. It was, however, during this time that I first uncovered the remarkable crimes and characters that have become “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella.”
I changed the settings from inner-city Honolulu to the outskirts of Los Angeles. My cycle of events takes place within the span of a few heartbeats, in a police interrogation room, a few miles from the urban hick town of La Caja, California (a fictional hometown I intend to revisit). To celebrate the invention of La Caja, I birthed an ambitious killer, Cut Pemberton, w
hose presence is a mere specter in this story. Nevertheless, he is my narratives’ inscrutable engine. He is a quicksilver force and, I may as well add, a predator and a scoundrel and a merciless miscreant too who, for the moment, exists primarily as a mordent spook in the opulent, backtracking imagination of his gargantuan road-dog, his thoroughly guilty, yet somehow blissfully blameless — and hungry and thirsty and wronged! wronged! — pale-ass pussy of a sidekick, the roundly chastened and proportioned Fat Tommy O’Rourke.
“A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” is an inquiry into the mind of this man, Tommy O’Rourke. My story, frankly, suspects Moises is complicit in a monstrous crime. While negotiating the streams of Tommy’s thoughts, I tried to make note of the reeling fluidity and momentum of subjective time as it whipped Tommy round and around in its rapids on that interminable day and night, while around him the grave machinery of fate ticked on. I looked for fun as well as art in this sad stuff. At a decisive point in Tommy’s interrogation, DEA Special Agent Roland Braddock nails him with a slur, “Pale-ass pussy.” Here’s how Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), critiqued the Moises Rockafellas of his day: “An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it; but he could not bear its image after it was done. Now he always saw himself as the doer of one deed. Madness I call this: the exception now became the essence for him. A chalk streak stops a hen; the stroke that he himself struck stopped his poor reason: madness after the deed I call this.”
My story is about exactly this: the madness after the deed. There’s nothing funny about murder. True that. But, I won’t get mad if readers think of this narrative as a comedy, even a slapstick comedy, and laugh out loud. That said, at the bottom of all this funny business, “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” is a blues; a pale-ass, lowdown blues.
~ * ~
Wendy Hornsby is the author of seven novels and a collection of short stories, Nine Sons, that includes her Edgar Award-winning short story of the same tide. She lives in Southern California, where she is chair of her college history department. Currently she is finishing the sixth Maggie MacGowen mystery
■ One early summer evening, just before sunset, I sat on our front deck gazing out across Malibu Canyon, glass of good red wine in hand, thinking about a story for Murder in Vegas, the anthology edited by Michael Connelly. In front of me, a pair of magnificent red-tail hawks rose up out of the depths of the canyon, found thermals to ride, like kites, so they could shop the chaparral below for their dinner. Beautiful. I’m not a big fan of Vegas and whatever goes on there, but I do love the Red Rock Canyon area that rises from the desert floor just a few miles past the artifice and faux gilt of the Strip. Like the rugged canyons of the Santa Monica mountains where we live, that can be a very treacherous area for the unprepared. The elements of “Dust Up” began to emerge out of that place where stories lurk. By the time the last of the sun was gone, and with some help from my well-used copy of Sibley’s Guide to Birds, the story was formed: bad guys, an excellent body drop, endangered wildlife, and Pansy Reynard, a character I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know. “Dust Up” was fun to write. I think Pansy Reynard and I may have some further adventures to explore.
~ * ~
Andrew Klavan is the author of True Crime, which was filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say a Word, which was filmed starring Michael Douglas. He has just completed Damnation Street, the sequel to the Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop novels Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other places.
■ When I first finished “Her Lord and Master,” my agent at the time told me not to try to publish it. He said its graphically sexual and politically incorrect subject matter would hurt my career. After a couple of venues turned the story down, I brought it to my friend Otto Penzler. I trust Otto, and I figured if he told me to ditch the thing, I would. Instead, he called me and said, “I’ll get this into print if I have to build an entire anthology around it.” It took him four years but he was, as always, as good as his word. The story first came out in Otto’s anthology Dangerous Women. Then it got nominated for an Edgar Award. Now it’s been included here. The moral of the story: when in doubt, call Otto.
~ * ~
Elmore Leonard is one of the most honored and beloved writers in America, a regular on the best-seller lists for two decades, and the winner of the Grand Master Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America for lifetime achievement. Among the motion pictures made from his books are Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, The Tall T, Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, and Stick.
■ Elmore Leonard has said that if he didn’t have a good time writing novels and short stories he wouldn’t have kept doing it for fifty-five years. According to Leonard, his ultimate pleasure is developing characters, giving them attitudes, and getting them to talk in scenes that he makes up as he goes along, without much of an idea how the book or story will end.
He was already working on his novel The Hot Kid when Otto Penzler called and asked if he had time to write a story for Otto’s forthcoming anthology of suspense stories Dangerous Women. Elmore said, “You bet” and pulled Louly Brown out of the novel he was writing, but doesn’t remember why he changed her name to Louly Ring. He also introduced Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster, who later appeared in a fourteen-part serial called Comfort to the Enemy that ran in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and will be featured again in the book Elmore is currently writing.
“My characters,” Elmore said, “are always on call, never knowing where they might have to show up again.”
~ * ~
Laura Lippman has won virtually all the major U.S. mystery-writing awards for her Tess Monaghan novels. She also has published two critically acclaimed stand-alones, Every Secret Thing and To the Power of Three. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Murderers Row, Tart Noir, Murder and All that Jazz, Dangerous Women, and Baltimore Noir, which she also edited. A former newspaper reporter, she lives in Baltimore.
■ Much to my disgust, I have a bit of a “nice girl” rep in the mystery world and short stories have given me a chance to shake that up. I was particularly flattered when Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon asked if I would write a story for The Cocaine Chronicles. “What do you know about cocaine?” asked my parents, already mildly discombobulated by the recent revelation that I once wrote erotica. “More than I know about golf!” I said, referencing another story. But I also had a secret agenda. The cocaine trade in cities such as Baltimore would be much less lucrative if suburbanites weren’t part of the customer base. I wanted to show an African-American drug dealer helpless in the face of true evil — two white girls on a diet.
~ * ~
Ed McBain, whose novels of the 87th Precinct, Matthew Hope, and other characters sold nearly 100 million copies worldwide, died on July 6, 2005. He had been battling throat cancer for three years. While he did not quite invent the police procedural novel, he refined it and popularized it, becoming a household name and winner of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Under his own name, Evan Hunter, he wrote such memorable novels as The Blackboard Jungle and Strangers When We Meet, both of which also were successful films. Among his screenplays was the Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Birds. Improvisation was his last short story.
~ * ~
Mike MacLean is a faculty member of Harrison Middleton University and the author of numerous published stories. Born and raised in Arizona, he lives in Tempe with his wife, Bobbie, and their three dogs. Along with his love of writing, Mike has a passion for the martial arts and holds a black belt in Ja-Shin-Do.
Mike’s short fiction can be found in the pages of Thug Lit, Thrilling Detective, Demolition Magazine, and Plots with Guns. His first novel, The Silent, is currently under consideration by major publishing houses.
■ There is a mundane suspense that comes with getting a package. “McHenry’s Gift” was an attempt to take that everyday experience and i
nfuse it with tension. While many of my stories are quick and brutal, writing this one presented a different kind of challenge. I wanted to dangle the threat in front of the reader without resorting to overt scenes of violence. I wanted to make the reader sweat it out.
~ * ~
Walter Mosley is the author of twenty-four critically acclaimed books, and his work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Some of his characters have become iconic: from the reluctant detective Easy Rawlins to the ex-con philosopher Socrates Fortlow. His books encompass a wide range of genres: from his popular mysteries to literary fiction, nonfiction, young adult fiction, and science fiction. He has won numerous awards including the Anisfield Wolf Award; a Grammy Award for his linear notes accompanying Richard Pryor . . . And It’s Deep Too!: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968-1992); an O’Henry Award in 1996 (for a Socrates Fortlow story); the Sundance Institute Risktaker Award; and a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in New York City.
■ I am so happy to have this story recognized in the crime fiction field. I was deeply satisfied with the world that Leonid McGill represents. I wanted to start writing about New York and about the toll working with crime has on both sides of the law. This story is the beginning of a long and convoluted literary relationship.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 45
