by Ed Gorman
Between
the Dark and
the Daylight
AND 27 MORE OF THE BEST
CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES
OF THE YEAR
EDITED BY
Ed Gorman and
Martin H. Greenberg
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Janet Hutchings and Linda Landrigan
for their invaluable assistance.
And a special thanks to John Helfers
for his considerable help with this volume.
In memory of Donald E. Westlake.
Contents
The Year in Mystery: 2008 Jon L. Breen
Father’s Day Michael Connelly
Walking the Dog Peter Robinson
Lucky Charlaine Harris
A Sleep Not Unlike Death Sean Chercover
The First Husband Joyce Carol Oates
Between the Dark and the Daylight Tom Piccirilli
Cheer Megan Abbott
Babs Scott Phillips
Ms. Grimshanks Regrets Nancy Pickard
Skinhead Central T. Jefferson Parker
The Bookbinder’s Apprentice Martin Edwards
I/M Print: A Tess Cassidy Mystery Jeremiah Healy
The Devil’s Acre Steve Hockensmith
The Instrument of Their Desire Patricia Abbott
Crossroads Bill Crider
The Kim Novak Effect Gary Phillips
The Opposite of O Martin Limón
Patriotic Gestures Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Quick Brown Fox Robert S. Levinson
What Happened to Mary? Bill Pronzini
Jonas and the Frail Charles Ardai
The Pig Party Doug Allyn
Perfect Gentleman Brett Battles
Road Dogs Norman Partridge
Rust N.J. Ayres
Skin and Bones David Edgerly Gates
La Vie En Rose Dominique Mainard
Sack O’ Woe John Harvey
By Hook or By Crook
Also Available
The Year in Mystery: 2008
BY JON L. BREEN
While no year goes by in any field without the sadness of loss, the mystery world was especially hard hit in 2008, which must be dubbed the Year of Lost Masters. No fewer than five winners of the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award died during the year.
Short story wizard Edward D. Hoch, age 77, died suddenly on January 17. Phyllis A. Whitney, arguably the foremost American writer of romantic suspense, died on February 8 at the remarkable age of 104. Tony Hillerman, whose novels about the Navajo Tribal Police presaged a whole subgenre of detective stories about Native Americans, died at 83 on October 26. Police procedural pioneer Hillary Waugh, 88, died on December 8. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, Donald E. Westlake, master of crime fiction both grim and comical, died at 75. Where Whitney and Waugh had published their last books more than a decade ago, and Hillerman was known to have had numerous health problems in recent years, Westlake and Hoch were cut down while at the height of their powers. One of Westlake’s novels as by Richard Stark, Dirty Money, appeared in 2008, with a new title as Westlake announced for 2009, and Hoch’s 35-year record of appearing in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine continued through the end of the year and beyond.
Also mourned in 2008 were Julius Fast, winner of the first Edgar Award for his novel Watchful at Night (1945); perennial bestseller Michael Crichton, whose Edgar winner A Case of Need (1968) pioneered the contemporary medical thriller; Gregory Mcdonald, whose first and most famous comic mystery was Fletch (1974); James Crumley, who took the private-eye genre in new directions, beginning with The Wrong Case (1975); Stephen Marlowe, who went from private eye Chester Drum of ‘50s paperbacks to hardcover thrillers and historicals in later decades; George Chesbro, creator of the memorable dwarf private eye Mongo Frederickson; and Janwillem van de Wetering, Dutch — born writer who wrote in English about the Amsterdam police team of Grijpstra and De Gier.
The centenary of Ian Fleming was observed by a trade paper reprinting of the whole James Bond saga, including all the short stories in one volume for the first time in Quantum of Solace (Penguin); several secondary sources, including Philip Gardiner’s The Bond Code: The Dark World of Ian Fleming and James Bond (New Page) and updated editions of James Chapman’s excellent License to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (Tauris) and Alastair Dougall’s James Bond: The Secret World of 007 (DK Adult); a new faux Bond novel, Devil May Care (Penguin), by Sebastian Faulk; and Daniel Craig’s second film outing as 007, Quantum of Solace. I’m sure there’s more — after all these years, the Bond industry remains nearly as hard to keep up with as the Sherlock Holmes industry.
It was something of a landmark year for serious consideration of non-fictional crime writing, with a major historical selection, True Crime: An American Anthology, edited by Harold Schechter (Library of America), and a highly praised critical study, Jean Murley’s The Rise of True Crime: 20th-Century Murder and American Popular Culture (Greenwood). While Schechter’s compilation was denied an Edgar nomination in the true-crime category, Murley’s work received an unprecedented nod in the biographical/critical category, usually devoted to studies of fictional subjects. In both these categories, edited collections of whatever excellence have been at a disadvantage.
The year’s major non-literary world news event, the financial meltdown, will inevitably have its impact on publishing, as on every other sort of commerce, in ways yet to be fully realized.
Best Novels of the Year 2008
Before unveiling the fifteen best new books I read and reviewed during the year, here’s the boilerplate disclaimer: I don’t pretend to cover the whole field — no single reviewer does — but if you have a better list of fifteen, I’d love to see it.
Benjamin Black: The Lemur (Picador). Booker Prize winner John Banville’s pseudonymous novel is notable for its style, characterization, brevity, and respect for mystery conventions.
Andrea Camilleri: The Paper Moon, translated from the Italian by Steven Sartarelli (Penguin). Sicily’s Inspector Montalbano is one of the great characters in European police procedurals.
Megan Chance: The Spiritualist (Three Rivers). This unpredictable and beautifully written historical gothic is set in the claustrophobic world of 19th-century Manhattan society associated with Edith Wharton.
Michael Connelly: The Brass Verdict (Little, Brown). The second novel about L.A. defense attorney Mickey Haller is nearly as good as his debut in The Lincoln Lawyer.
Patrick Culhane: Red Sky in Morning (Morrow). Writing under a pseudonym, Max Allan Collins tells a World-War-II sea story that is one of his finest novels.
Christa Faust: Money Shot (Hard Case Crime). Set in the pornographic film and “adult modeling” industries, this woman-on-the-run story combines sex, violence, humor, style, and humanity in an irresistible combination.
Arnaldur Indridason: The Draining Lake, translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder (St. Martin’s Minotaur/Dunne). A masterful police procedural, with an old skeleton to be identified and Cold War flashbacks, is second only to Oates’s novel (see below) as this reader’s book of the year.
Asa Larsson: The Black Path, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy (Delta). Cold weather and Nordic gloom often make for great detective fiction. Among Scandinavian practitioners, Larsson strikes me as vastly superior to the more highly publicized Henning Mankell.
Steve Martini: Shadow of Power (Morrow). California lawyer Paul Madriani is back in court, courtesy of one of the very best legal thriller writers.
Joyce Carol Oates: My Sister, My Lov
e (Ecco). This account of a child ice skater’s murder is my book of the year, an extraordinary semi-satirical novel of contemporary America and a genuine mystery, with solution.
Leonardo Padura: Havana Gold, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush (Bitter Lemon). The brilliant Cuban writer never puts a foot wrong in his Mario Conde novels — but his translator needs to work on getting the baseball lingo right.
Justin Peacock: A Cure for Night (Doubleday). The best first novel I read in 2008 gives a realistic view of the public defender’s work.
Bill Pronzini: Fever (Forge). San Francisco’s venerable Nameless Detective continues in top form. Pronzini could as easily have been represented on this list by the non-series The Other Side of Silence (Walker).
Ruth Rendell: Not in the Flesh (Crown). Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, who debuted in 1964, has been around even longer than Nameless. His creator is still one of the best.
Fred Vargas: This Night’s Foul Work, translated from the French by Siân Reynolds (Penguin). Going gloriously over the top in plot and personnel, Vargas works her magic.
Sub-Genres
Private eyes. Among the sleuths for hire in commendable action were Laura Lippman’s Baltimorean Tess Monaghan in Another Thing to Fall (Morrow), Betty Webb’s Lena Jones in Desert Cut (Poisoned Pen), Ken Bruen’s Galway-based Jack Taylor in Cross (St. Martin’s Minotaur), and Domenic Stansberry’s San Franciscan Dante Mancuso in The Ancient Rain (St. Martin’s Minotaur).
Amateur sleuths. Non-professionals in good form included Bill Moody’s jazz pianist Evan Horne in Shades of Blue (Poisoned Pen), Parnell Hall’s faux Puzzle Lady Cora Felton in The Sudoku Puzzle Murders (St. Martin’s Minotaur/Dunne), Katherine Hall Page’s caterer Faith Fairchild in The Body in the Gallery (Morrow), Aaron Elkins’s bone detective Gideon Oliver in Uneasy Relations (Berkley), Kate Charles’s Anglican curate Callie Anson in Deep Waters (Poisoned Pen), JoAnna Carl’s chocolate shop proprietor Lee McKinney in The Chocolate Snowman Murders (Obsidian), and Barbara Allan’s (i.e., Barbara and Max Allan Collins’s) mother and daughter antique dealers in Antiques Flee Market (Kensington). Loren Estleman’s vintage film hunter Valentino made his novel-length debut in Frames (Forge); Carolyn Hart introduced heavenly emissary Bailey Ruth Raeburn in Ghost at Work (Morrow); and Toni L.P. Kelner’s Without Mercy (Five Star) unveilled a promising new character in entertainment journalist Tilda Harper.
Police. John Harvey featured a new male-female police team, Will Grayson and Helen Walker, in Gone to Ground (Harcourt). Reginald Hill’s Yorkshire sleuths Dalziel and Pascoe were involved in a completion of Jane Austen’s Sanditon in The Price of Butcher’s Meat (Harper), published in Britain as A Cure for All Diseases. Tennessee sheriff John Turner returned in James Sallis’s contemplative Salt River (Walker), while Bill Crider’s laid back smalltown Texas sheriff Dan Rhodes appeared in Of All Sad Words (St. Martin’s Minotaur). Also in action were Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens in H.R.F. Keating’s Rules, Regs and Rotten Eggs (St. Martin’s Minotaur), Peter Lovesey’s Inspector Hen Mallin in The Headhunters (Soho), Baantjer’s long-running Amsterdam sleuth in DeKok and Murder on Blood Mountain, translated from the Dutch by H.G. Smittenaar (Speck), Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May in The Victoria Vanishes (Bantam), Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Russian Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov in People Walk in Darkness (Forge), Ben Rehder’s Texas game warden John Marlin in Holy Moly (St. Martin’s Minotaur), and Linda Berry’s small town Georgia policewoman Trudy Roundtree in Death and the Crossed Wires, (Five Star).
Lawyers. In addition to the characters of Connelly, Martini, and Peacock in our top fifteen, counselors in jurisprudential trim included Martin Edwards’s Harry Devlin in Waterloo Sunset (Poisoned Pen), Paul Goldstein’s Michael Seeley in A Patent Lie (Doubleday), Sheldon Siegel’s Mike Daley in Judgment Day (MacAdam/Cage), Lisa Scottoline’s Mary DiNunzio in Lady Killer (Harper), and Michael A. Bowen’s Rep Pennyworth in Shoot the Lawyer Twice (Poisoned Pen).
Historicals. Anne Perry’s best recent case for Victorian cop Thomas Pitt was Buckingham Palace Gardens (Ballantine). Steven Saylor’s Roman Gordianus the Finder made a welcome reappearance in Caesar’s Triumph (St. Martin’s Minotaur). Jeanne M. Dams’s former servant Hilda Johansson has moved up in the world in Indigo Christmas (Perseverance). Sam Stall’s dosier-format Dracula’s Heir (Quirk) was set partly in the present, partly in the world of Bram Stoker’s classic novel. Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder (Touchstone) featured many real people apart from the titular sleuth in a mystery of 1892 London. Steve Hockensmith’s Old Red and Big Red again practiced Sherlockian detection in the 1890s Old West in The Black Dove (St. Martin’s Minotaur). C.S. Harris’s Sebastian St. Cyr was in action in 1812 London in Where Serpents Sleep (Obsidian). Looking at times more recently gone by were David Fulmer’s The Blue Door (Harcourt), about the Philadelphia popular music scene circa 1962; Max Allan Collins’s Strip for Murder, illustrated by Terry Beatty (Berkley), set in the Broadway world of the 1950s; David Ossman’s The Ronald Reagan Murder Case (BearManor), set in 1945 Hollywood; and Carlo Lucarelli’s Via Delle Oche, translated from the Italian by Michael Reynolds (Europa).
Thrillers. I seem to have read more books that might be categorized as thrillers than in past years, but not everyone will necessarily share my definition (i.e., anything that doesn’t fit the other categories). Charles Ardai’s stunt novel to commemorate a milestone of his publishing line, Fifty-to-One (Hard Case Crime), proved a fine comic crime novel on its own merits. Larry Bein — hart’s Salvation Boulevard (Nation Books) took on political and religious issues. Insider knowledge of how a political campaign is run added to the merits of Ed Gorman’s Sleeping Dogs (St. Martin’s Minotaur/Dunne), while Robert S. Levinson’s In the Key of Death (Five Star) benefited from the author’s music industry background. Joe L. Hensley’s final novel was the remarkable account of the challenges faced by senior citizens, Snowbird’s Blood (St. Martin’s Minotaur). Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are You Now? (Simon and Schuster) was a gem of deceptive plotting and cross-cutting structure. Karin Alvtegen’s Edgar-nominated psychological thriller Missing, translated from the Swedish by Anna Paterson (Felony & Mayhem), featured a homeless protagonist. Asa Nonami’s Now You’re One of Us, translated from the Japanese by Michael Volek and Mitsuko Volek (Vertical), was a gothic horror story of considerable power. Max Allan Collins provided a prequel to the rest of his novels about a killer for hire in The First Quarry (Hard Case). They don’t come much noirer than Ken Bruen’s Once Were Cops (St. Martin’s Minotaur).
Short Stories
Single-author short story collections, rather sparse in 2007, rallied in 2008. Walter Mosley’s The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow (BasicCivitas) was the third collection about the guilt-ridden ex-con who may be Mosley’s greatest character. Others from major imprints included Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid and Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries (New Press) and Laura Lippman’s Hardly Knew Her: Stories (Morrow). Significant imports were Peter Corris’s The Big Score (Allen & Unwin), new cases for Australian private eye Cliff Hardy; The Edogawa Rampo Reader (Kurodahan), gathering eight short stories new to English along with ten essays by an iconic Japanese writer; and Christopher Fowler’s Old Devil Moon (Serpent’s Tail). Anton Chekhov’s A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense (Pegasus) included some early stories by the Russian master not previously translated into English. The extraordinarily prolific Ralph McInerny had a new collection about his famous priest detective in The Wisdom of Father Dowling (Five Star). Mixed collections of interest included F. Paul Wilson’s Aftershock & Others (Forge), Joyce Carol Oates’ Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (Ecco), and MWA Grand Master Stephen King’s Just After Sunset (Scribner).
As usual, small and specialty presses carried most of the load. New from Crippen & Landru were Mignon G. Eberhart’s Dead Yesterday and Other Stories; Peter Lovesey’s Murder on the Sho
rt List; Richard A. Lupoff’s Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix; Hugh Pentecost’s The Battles of Jericho; and Walter Sat-terthwait’s The Mankiller of Poojegai and Other Stories. Book of the year for C&G was actually a collection of stage plays: 13 to the Gallows by John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud.
The extremely active print-on-demand publisher Ramble House offered Bill Pronzini’s Dago Red: Tales of Dark Suspense, James Reasoner’s Old Times’ Sake, Ed Lynskey’s A Clear Path to Cross, 1940s Australian writer Max Afford’s Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn, and Fender Tucker’s Totah Six-Pack, adding three stories to the 2005 collection The Totah Trilogy.
Others from small presses included Michael Mallory’s second Sherlockian collection, The Exploits of the Second Mrs. Watson (Top); Dennis Palumbo’s From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow), inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers; Hal White’s The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (Lighthouse Christian), and John M. Floyd’s Midnight (Dogwood).
There were also notable reprints and regatherings. Two volumes of early stories by Lawrence Block, previously published in limited editions by Crippen & Landru, were brought together in the trade paperback One Night Stands and Lost Weekends (Harper). Volume Six of The Collected Stories of Louis L’Amour (Bantam) was devoted to the prolific pulpster’s crime fiction. Ramble House reprinted Harvey O’Higgins’s 1929 collection Detective Duff Unravels It and, under the new Surinam Turtle imprint edited by Richard A. Lupoff, Gelett Burgess’s 1912 The Master of Mysteries, listed by Ellery Queen in Queen’s Quorum.
It was another good year for anthologies. Joining Akashic’s wide-ranging and seemingly endless original city noir series were Toronto Noir, edited by Janine Armin and Nathaniel G. Moore; Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene and Todd James Pierce; Paris Noir, edited by Aurélien Masson (not to be confused with an earlier non-Akashic anthology of the same title edited by Maxim Jakubowski); Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing But the Truth, a crossover into true crime edited by Tim McLoughlin and Thomas Adcock; Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly; Istanbul Noir, edited by Mustafa Ziyalan and Amy Spangler; and Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason.
