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Joyce Carol Oates, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978, is the author most recently of the novel Black Girl/White Girl (Ecco/HarperCollins) and the noir story collection The Female of the Species (Otto Penzler Books, Harcourt). She is the 2003 recipient of the Common Wealth Award for Achievement in Literature and the 2005 Prix Femina for her novel The Falls. She lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey.
■ Like most of my fiction, “So Help Me God” was evoked by some mysterious conjunction of place, time, and character. The setting is upstate New York in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, where young men like Luke Pittman, prone to violence, yet “attractive” as charismatic personalities, may be as likely to go into local law enforcement as into a life of sporadic crime. The attraction of such men to women, including even young women from “good” families, is part of the subject here, like the gradual awakening, in such a marriage, that the wife may have to emulate her violence-prone husband in order to save her own life. We’ve all had experiences with mysterious, unidentified telephone calls, especially women; the story’s opening was suggested by an episode of some years ago in my life, which remained unexplained.
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Sue Pike is the editor of Locked Up, an anthology of short mystery stories marking the 175th anniversary of the construction of the Rideau Canal, a navigable system of lakes and rivers joining Lake Ontario to Canada’s capital in Ottawa. The canal was built as a defense against American invasion but now welcomes hundreds of boaters from the country each year.
Sue has stories in all six of the Ladies’ Killing Circle anthologies and is editor of Fit to Die, Bone Dance, and When Boomers Go Bad. Her work has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Storyteller and Cold Blood V, as well as Murder in Vegas. She won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story of 1997.
■ I wrote this sitting on the dock at our cottage on Lake Opinicon in Eastern Ontario, feeling about as far away from Las Vegas as it’s possible to be. I had a recalcitrant temporary crown at the time and began to wonder if DNA might lurk in its porous plastic. My dentist wouldn’t commit on the subject but I notice he’s been a little wary of me ever since.
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Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship.
■ I was surprised to learn that “Smile” was selected for this anthology because I didn’t conceive it as a mystery story. My father, who is from the region depicted in “Smile,” describes it as a horror story. I think of it more as a love story because it depicts my romance with the Cajun language. Who knows? Maybe it’s all three. I’ve been thinking about the “mystery” designation, though. The thing that isn’t said, the thing that’s strategically withheld, is usually the thing that makes a reader want to turn the page. In a way, a lot of successful fiction could be referred to as mystery. Writing for me, like life, is also a mysterious process. I don’t know how it’s going to end and it’s only through the blind act of doing it that meaning occurs.
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R. T. Smith lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and edits Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review. His stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and his new collection, Uke Rivers Delivers, published by LSU Press in 2006. He is also the author of several collections of poetry, including The Hollow Log Lounge and Brightwood. Smith is currently working on a novel about Sheriff Blaine Sherburne.
■ When I read in The Rockbridge Advocate the reprint of a newspaper account of a crime outside Lexington at the beginning of the twentieth century, I began wondering about the gaps in the record and the feel of a suppressed subtext rippling through the testimony. Because jigsawing accounts, especially in criminal matters, often bring Rashomon to my mind, I decided to write a story that was distinctly Appalachian but that addressed questions of both motive and memory similar to those that interested Kurosawa. One of the Ryunosuke Akutagawa short stories that the film works from is titled, in Kojima’s translation, “In a Grove.” I joined the first three letters to get the victim’s name and began looking at the evidence, as I imagined it, from disparate perspectives, in different voices. At one time or another in the process, every one of these unreliable narrators seemed to have some credibility and to arouse at least a little sympathy. Sherburne’s name, by the way, is borrowed from the Lynching Bee section of Huck Finn’s narrative.
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Jeff Somers writes all of his stories on cocktail napkins while sitting groggily at local saloons, using felt-tip pens that produce blurry, indecipherable scrawls. He dreams of a society that does not consider pants required public attire, and swears someday he will wake up some time before noon, remain sober for the better part of the day, and compose a persuasive tract on the subject that will change society forever. He began publishing The Inner Swine, a personal zine, in 1995 and now has at least eleven loyal readers who actually pay him for each issue, assuming promissory notes and occasional alcoholic beverages count as subscription fees. His first novel, Lifers, was reviewed favorably by the New York Times Book Review in 2001. His second novel, The Electric Church, is forthcoming from Warner Aspect in 2007. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the ratio of bars to bookstores is roughly 344 to 1.
■ Like many of my stories, Ringing the Changes grew from the title. I can’t recall where I first heard it, but it evoked the opening scene of the story for me, the boring conversation endured for its cloaking purposes, the sly, steady grift that requires more patience and work than an honest job. From there, all it took was a bottle of bourbon and a few late nights, and Poppy was born, exhausted and unhappy. Every story requires a bottle of bourbon, so every story is slowly killing me. I think it is worth it.
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Scott Wolven is the author of Controlled Burn, a collection of short stories. For five years in a row, Wolven’s stories have been selected for the Best American Mystery Stories. In 2006, Wolven’s stories will also appear in two other anthologies: Murder at the Racetrack, edited by Otto Penzler, and Fuck Noir, edited by Jennifer Jordan.
■ “Vigilance” is influenced by the hard, beautiful geography of Idaho and Montana and Washington, where the story takes place. The great Western cowboy artist and writer Charles M. Russell titled one of his paintings When Guns Speak, Death Settles Disputes, and that is certainly true here. Jack Cooley sums it up when he talks about the snakes, and in the end my nameless narrator gets to live another day as a ghost dog. It’s always night, in this story.
It’s a serious honor to have my story appear here. Very special appreciation goes out to M, the great team at WSBW. Big thanks out to Crimespree magazine. Anthony Neil Smith and Charlie Stella and Victor Gischler— three aces in the writer’s deck. For the art, inspiration, and support, Skylight Books and K, and nobody ever beats DMC Des Allemands and best brother Will.
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Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2005
ANDERSON, KENT
Elvis Hitler, Pilots with Guns, ed. Anthony Neil Smith (Dennis McMillan)
BAER, WILL CHRISTOPHER
Deception of the Thrush, San Francisco Noir, ed. Peter Marvelis (Akashic)
BETANCOURT, JOHN GREGORY
The Pit and the Pendulum, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, July/August
BURGIN, RICHARD
The Urn, Antioch Review, Summer
CARCATERRA, LORENZO
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, Dangerous Women, ed. Otto Penzler
(Mysterious Press)
CHILD, LEE
Ten Keys, The Cocaine Chronicles, ed. Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon
(Akashic)
CONNELLY, MICHAEL
Cielo Azul, Dangerous Women, ed. Otto Penzler (Mysterious Press)
DAUGHARTY, JANICE
Going to Jackson, The Ontario Review, Fall/Winter
DEMPSEY, TIMOTHY F.
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Visit to a Chat Room, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April
DENOUX, O’NEIL
A Good Shooting, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January/February
DICKINSON, STEPHANIE
Slave Quarters, Story Quarterly, Fall
EDWARDS, SAM
The Long Count, Thuglit, #1
FAHEY, GEORGE
View from the Pines, Glimmer Train, Spring
FRANCISCO, RUTH
Society Blues, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April
GLATT, LISA
What Milton Heard, Small Spiral Notebook, January
HOCH, EDWARD D.
The Theft of the Rumpled Road Map, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, August
LIMON, MARTIN
A Crust of Rice, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January/February
MEREDITH, DON
The Greatcoat, Texas Review, Spring/Summer
MOODY, BILL
Camaro Blue, The Cocaine Chronicles, ed. Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon (Akashic)
MEYERS, MAAN
The Dutchman and the Wrongful Heir, The Mammoth Book of New Historical Whodunits, ed. Mike Ashley (Carroll & Graf)
NISBET, JIM
Brian’s Story, Plots with Guns, ed. Anthony Neil Smith (Dennis McMillan)
POLLACK, NEAL
Pretty Good Vacation, Mississippi Review, January
PRUZAN, TODD
No Fear, The Insomniac Reader, ed. Kevin Sampsell (Manic D Press)
RAMOS, MANUEL
Sentimental Value, The Cocaine Chronicles, ed. Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon (Akashic)
RICHMOND, BRIAN
Edwin the Confessor, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January/February
STANSBERRY, DOMENIC
The Prison, San Francisco Noir, ed. Peter Marvelis (Akashic)
VIDAL, GORE
Clouds and Eclipses, Harvard Review, #29
WARD, ROBERT
Chemistry, The Cocaine Chronicles, ed. Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon (Akashic)
WATERMAN, FREDERICK
Love or Money, Hemispheres, August
ZURUS, RICHARD LEE
Runaway, Story Quarterly, Fall
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The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 46
