The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  That’s when I came up with my boys here. And their plan to steal a mule. I decided to make them like some old boys I’d known while growing up. Not exactly nuclear scientists. Not exactly sanitation engineers, either. More like crash test dummies.

  Guys who wanted quick money, and though not exactly evil, not exactly a boon to the universe either. This welded to other things I had read, experienced, heard about. This story resulted.

  Keep your mules locked up.

  ~ * ~

  Edgar and Emmy-winning novelist Michael Malone, critically acclaimed as one of the country’s finest novelists, has also written books of fiction and nonfiction, essays, reviews, short stories, and television screenplays. Often compared to Dickens for his comic vision and the breadth of his fictional landscape, over the past quarter-century he has introduced readers to a gallery of memorable Southern characters in such novels as Handling Sin, Dingley Falls, and Foolscap, as well as in the internationally praised mystery trilogy Uncivil Seasons, Times Witness, and First Lady, narrated by wisecracking Southern police chief Cuddy R. Mangum and his aristocratic homicide detective Justin Savile V.

  Educated at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard, Malone has taught at Yale, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at Swarthmore. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy.

  After a long (perhaps too long) exile in television, he has returned to the novel and to his native South. He now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, chair of the English department at Duke University.

  ■ “Maniac Loose” first appeared in the anthology Confederacy of Crime. Its sardonic heroine, Lucy, who could give even the most ruthless a lesson in how to get away with murder, is one of the twelve Southern women of my new short story collection, Red Clay, Blue Cadillac.

  ~ * ~

  Fred Melton lives in Wenatchee, Washington, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two sons, Matthew and Andrew. He is a full-time dentist whose writing has been published in Talking River Review, California Quarterly, Black Canyon Quarterly, as well as other publications, and is to appear in the forthcoming anthology Scent of Cedar. His story “Counting” has also earned a 2001 Pushcart Prize nomination. Melton’s poetry and prose have been honored in the following contests: Pacific Northwest Writers Association (short stories 1996, 1997, and 1998), Seattle Writers Association Writers in Performance (1998-2001), and Washington Poets Association (2000).

  Melton has lived in Spain, taken a fling at American bull riding, is fluent in Spanish, and holds a second-degree black belt in karate. He also holds a fly rod in his hand as much as possible.

  ■ One October day, I took our younger son, Andrew, deer hunting in eastern Washington. While walking the windswept bluffs overlooking the Palouse River, we met a middle-aged wheat farmer with a stocky build and dust-caked hair. Although initially irritated by our presence, he eventually granted us permission to hunt on his property — provided we stayed clear of his grain silos. When I later learned of this farmer’s lifelong bachelorhood, he became the seed for “Counting.”

  As I wrote about Uncle Keven, I began to see a man for whom justice and revenge were convictions connected at a gut level. I also discovered a man to whom fate refused to deal a fair hand; yet, he remained fiercely loyal to the thing that mattered most to him — family.

  ~ * ~

  Born in New York, raised on a chicken farm in New Jersey, Annette Meyers came running back to Manhattan as soon as she could. Using her long history on both Broadway and Wall Street, she wrote The Big Killing, the first of seven mysteries featuring Wall Street headhunters Xenia Smith and former dancer Leslie Wetzon. The eighth is near completion. Her novel Free Love, set in Greenwich Village in 1920, introduced poet Olivia Brown and her bohemian friends. Murder Me Now followed in 2001.

  With her husband, Martin Meyers, using the pseudonym Maan Meyers, she has written six historical mysteries in the Dutchman series, set in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century New York. In February 2001, Meyers and her husband were the subjects of a feature on their life and work for CBS-TV’s Sunday Morning.

  She is a past president of Sisters in Crime and current secretary of the International Association of Crime Writers, North America.

  ■ Although I keep a file of short story ideas, I often plunder from my life experience. The character of Olivia Brown first appeared in a short story, “The House on Bedford Street,” and came from my youthful determination to be a writer and my admiration for Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  I wrote “You Don’t Know Me” in response to an invitation to submit an erotic noir story for the anthology Flesh and Blood. Fuhgeddaboudit. Erotic noir is not my style. But wait, wasn’t I a writer, and shouldn’t the writer continue to surprise the writer?

  “You Don’t Know Me” came from my file of ideas. It had been on the edge of my consciousness for years and came surging out as if it were waiting to be told. This was the first time I’d written from a male point of view. It had to be that way, because it was his story.

  ~ * ~

  Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of suspense and psychological horror, including most recently the novella Beasts and, under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, the novels The Barrens, Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon, and Double Delight. Her suspense and crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. She lives in New Jersey and is professor of humanities at Princeton.

  ■ “The High School Sweetheart” was inspired by my uneasy sense that those of us who write, and perhaps even those of us who read, crime fiction are in some ambiguous way moral accomplices to evil. To celebrate the master crime writer is to celebrate the artful appropriation of violence that, in “reality,” would appall and terrify us. Yet, such actions are redeemed through “art.” (Or are they?)

  ~ * ~

  Robert B. Parker lives in Cambridge with his wife, Joan. They have two sons, David, a choreographer, and Daniel, an actor. Parker is the author of more than forty novels and two short stories, the second of which is “Harlem Nocturne.” A novel based on “Harlem Nocturne” should appear in perhaps 2004.

  ■ When I was a small boy living in western Massachusetts, Sunday baseball was not broadcast from Boston, so my father listened to the Dodger games on WHN, which came to us straight up the Connecticut Valley. That is why I was a near terminal Dodger fan when Jackie Robinson came to the Dodgers in April 1947. I never saw it, but I remember it as if I did. The dark skin and the white uniform. The bright green grass, and Red Barber’s marvelous Southern voice remarking carefully that Jackie was “very definitely brunette.” I thought then that Jackie Robinson was one of the great men of the twentieth century. I have not changed my mind.

  “Harlem Nocturne” is based on no actual event that I know of. It came about because Otto Penzler asked me for a short story for his baseball anthology, and I couldn’t think of one, so I asked Joan and she said, “You know so much about old-time baseball. Why don’t you write about that?” So I did.

  ~ * ~

  Southern Californian F. X. Toole wrote for forty years before being published at age sixty-nine in ZYZZYVA, the San Francisco literary magazine. Having that first short story accepted, Toole considered himself a success, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel.

  Since then, his book of short stories, Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner was published — first in England, then in the United States. Translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese, Rope Burns received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction in 2000 and was also chosen by the New York Times as one of its Twenty Memorable Books of that year. “Midnight Emissions” is Toole’s first venture into the world of whodunits.

  ■ Though I wrote “Midnight Emissions” in the first person, I considered it a dry run for a third-person novel I wanted to set in the boxing world of Los Angeles and San Antonio, Pound for Pound. I say “dry run
” because I felt that if I could get my Texans right in “Midnight Emissions,” then I might also have a good shot at getting them right in the novel. Pound for Pound is at 120 K at this point, only now I’m stuck with Texans and prune-pickers who won’t shut the fuck up.

  ~ * ~

  A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Daniel Waterman is a writer and editor who now resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This is his first published story.

  ■ Skeet’s tale, his condition, recuperation, and evolution into the brute he becomes erupted from me over the span of a few weeks I spent alone in a four-bedroom ranch house, barren of furniture, in Alabama, knowing not a soul, waiting for a new chapter in my life to begin. Skeet’s history and path seemed clear to me but meant nothing in themselves until I painted him with some redemptive features and paired him with a family, or at least a few individuals capable of loving him. And then it became their story ever so much as Skeet’s.

  I’ve found it interesting that although many friends, family, and colleagues have read the story, only one has ever asked, “What, exactly, happens to Skeet?” It’s a fair question — I’m the first to admit that what actually happens to Skeet in the end is ambiguous — but one with an annoying and unsatisfactory answer. All I can really say is that I leave Skeet’s fate to the reader’s imagination. Though I have a fairly clear idea myself, I’m not sure the answer is all that important. Skeet is a golem of sorts — not without heart or thought — yet stands for a part of us that becomes leaden. And though a multitude of mysteries surround Skeet — how he becomes the man he does, what accounts for his obsessive need to collect such an improbable fauna, what it signifies that he must destroy life to hold onto it — the principal mystery seems to me to be the fate of the narrator: In molting from one life to another, what has he lost or gained, how will he resolve any feelings of guilt or betrayal, and how will he contend with an unanchored sense of self that might abide for a lifetime unresolved?

  ~ * ~

  Scott Wolven is a graduate student at Columbia University, where he’s finishing an MFA in creative writing. He is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories and lives in New York City with his wife. His stories have appeared in HandHeldCrime, Plots with Guns, Crossconnect, the Mississippi Review on-line, Permafrost, and Thrilling Detective.

  ■ “The Copper Kings” is one of several stories I’ve written about these characters, and I’m sure I’ll keep them together for a few more. I lived in Idaho for a while, and it’s a beautiful and hard-boiled setting for all types of things. I like big dogs and sometimes put them in my stories. The phrase “copper kings” originated as a reference to the 1880s businessmen who owned the huge copper mines in Anaconda and Butte, Montana. More recently, Butte had a minor league baseball team named the Copper Kings. I really liked it as a title.

  It also allowed me to run a loose, obscure thread through the story. One of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories is “The Copper Beeches,” where Holmes and Watson take a short trip through the English countryside by train. When Watson says he likes the country, Holmes replies that it terrifies him, much as Greg admits that farms scare him on the drive toward Ryan’s. Holmes describes potential crimes in the country as “deeds of hellish cruelty,” and I thought about that as I wrote the story.

  Very special thanks to Alan Ziegler, Leslie Woodard, Colin Harrison, Sloan Harris, Victoria Esposito-Shea, Neil Smith (go Crimedogs!), Elise Lyons, and best brother Will.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2001

  ABBOTT, JEFF

  Salt on the Rim. And the Dying Is Easy, ed. Joseph Pittman and Annette

  Riffle (Signet)

  BARNES, JIM

  Pulpwood. New Letters, vol. 67, number 2

  BENEDICT, LAURA PHILPOT

  The Hollow Woman. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May

  BISHOP, PAUL

  Celtic Noir. Murder Most Celtic, ed. Martin H. Greenberg (Cumberland

  House)

  BLOCK, LAWRENCE

  Keller’s Designated Hitter. Murderers’ Row, ed. Otto Penzler (New

  Millennium)

  CAPLAN, THEA

  Recoil. The New Quarterly, Fall-Winter 2000-2001

  COLLINS, MICHAEL

  The Horrible Senseless Murder of Two Elderly Women. Fedora, ed.

  Michael Bracken (Wildside)

  CONNOLLY, LAWRENCE C.

  The Break-In Artist. HandHeldCrime, October

  GATES, DAVID EDGERLEY

  If I Die Before I Wake. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July-

  August

  DOCTOROW, E. L.

  A House on the Plains. The New Yorker, June 18 and 25

  GISCHLER, VICTOR

  Orange Harvest. Blue Murder

  GORDON, ALAN

  www.Heistgame.com. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December

  HOPKINS, BRIAN A.

  The Tumbleweed Rustlers Snack and Save. Crime Spree, ed. Sandy

  DeLuca and Trey R. Barker (December Girl Press)

  HOWARD, CLARK

  The Trial Horse. Murder on the Ropes, ed. Otto Penzler (New

  Millennium)

  LAWTON, R. T.

  Once, Twice, Dead. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September

  LEONARD, ELMORE

  Chicasaw Charlie Hoke. Murderers’ Row, ed. Otto Penzler (New

  Millennium)

  LEWIN, MICHAEL Z.

  If the Glove Fits. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/October

  LOCHTE, DICK

  In the City of Angels. Flesh and Blood, ed. Max Allan Collins and Jeff

  Gelb (Mysterious Press)

  MAFFINI, MARY JANE

  Blind Alley. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November

  MARON, MARGARET

  Virgo in Sapphires. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December

  NAYLER, RAY

  Man in the Dark. HandHeldCrime, January

  OATES, JOYCE CAROL

  The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza. Murder on the Ropes, ed. Otto

  Penzler (New Millennium)

  REEVE, PAUL G.

  Chinese Puzzle. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March

  ROZAN, S. J.

  Double-Crossing Delancey. Mystery Street, ed. Robert J. Randisi (Signet)

  SHANNON, JOHN

  The Problem of Leon. Murder on the Ropes, ed. Otto Penzler (New

  Millennium)

  SIGEL, EFRAM

  A Cozy Spot in the Berkshires. Pangolin Papers, Spring

  SMITH, ANTHONY

  Neil Kills Bugs Dead. HandHeldCrime, November

  SOOS, TROY

  Pick-Off Play. Murderers’ Row, ed. Otto Penzler (New Millennium)

  TAYLOR, ANDREW S.

  The Assassin’s List. Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine, March

  TERREOIRE, DAVID

  Just Like Jesus. Blue Murder, December-January id

  TROY, MARK

  Teed Off. Fedora, ed. Michael Bracken (Wildside)

  <>

  ~ * ~