The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  ROBERT HINDERLITER: Coach O

  SHARON HUNT: The Keepers of All Sins

  REED JOHNSON: Open House

  ARTHUR KLEPCHUKOV: A Damn Fine Town

  HARLEY JANE KOZAK: The Walk-In

  PRESTON LANG: Top Ten Vacation Selfies of YouTube Stars

  JARED LIPOF: Mastermind

  ANNE THERESE MACDONALD: That Donnelly Crowd

  MARK MAYER: The Clown

  REBECCA MCKANNA: Interpreting American Gothic

  JENNIFER MCMAHON: Hannah-Beast

  JOYCE CAROL OATES: The Archivist

  BRIAN PANOWICH: A Box of Hope

  TONYA D. PRICE: Payback

  SUZANNE PROULX: If You Say So

  RON RASH: Neighbors

  AMANDA REA: Faint of Heart

  DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI: Lush

  ROBB T. WHITE: Inside Man

  TED WHITE: Burning Down the House

  Contributors’ Notes

  Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2018

  Read More from the Best American Series

  About the Editors

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Lethem

  All rights reserved

  The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Mystery Stories™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  ISSN 1094-8384 (print) ISSN 2573-3907 (e-book)

  ISBN 978-1-328-63609-6 (print)  ISBN 978-1-328-63611-9 (e-book)

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Cover photograph © Samuel Bradley Photography / Getty Images

  Lethem photograph © Adrian Cook

  v2.0919

  “Coach O” by Robert Hinderliter. First published in New Ohio Review, no. 24. Copyright © 2018 by Robert Hinderliter. Reprinted by permission of Robert Hinderliter.

  “The Keepers of All Sins” by Sharon Hunt. First published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November/December 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Sharon Hunt. Reprinted by permission of Sharon Hunt.

  “Open House” by Reed Johnson. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Reed Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Reed Johnson.

  “A Damn Fine Town” by Arthur Klepchukov. First published in Down & Out: The Magazine, vol. 1, no. 4. Copyright © 2018 by Arthur Klepchukov. Reprinted by permission of Arthur Klepchukov.

  “The Walk-In” by Harley Jane Kozak. First published in For the Sake of the Game. Copyright © 2018 by Harley Jane Kozak. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Top Ten Vacation Selfies of YouTube Stars” by Preston Lang. First published in Deadlines: A Tribute to William E. Wallace. Copyright © 2018 by Preston Lang. Reprinted by permission of Preston Lang.

  “Mastermind” by Jared Lipof. First published in Salamander, no. 45. Copyright © 2018 by Jared Lipof. Reprinted by permission of Jared Lipof.

  “That Donnelly Crowd” by Anne Therese Macdonald. First published in False Faces: Twenty Stories About the Masks We Wear. Copyright © 2018 by Anne Therese Macdonald. Reprinted by permission of Anne Therese Macdonald.

  “The Clown” by Mark Mayer. First published in American Short Fiction, vol. 21, no. 67, Summer 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Mayer. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

  “Interpreting American Gothic” by Rebecca McKanna. First published in Colorado Review, Summer 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca McKanna. Reprinted by permission of Rebecca McKanna.

  “Hannah-Beast” by Jennifer McMahon. First published in Dark Corners/Amazon Original Stories. Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer McMahon. Reprinted by permission of Writers House LLC.

  “The Archivist” by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in Boulevard, nos. 98 & 99. Copyright © 2018 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Box of Hope” by Brian Panowich. First published in One Story, no. 244. Copyright © 2018 by Brian Panowich. Reprinted by permission of Brian Panowich.

  “Payback” by Tonya D. Price. First published in Fiction River: Hard Choices. Copyright © 2018 by Tonya D. Price. Reprinted by permission of Tonya D. Price.

  “If You Say So” by Suzanne Proulx. First published in False Faces: Twenty Stories About the Masks We Wear. Copyright © 2018 by Suzanne Proulx. Reprinted by permission of Suzanne Proulx.

  “Neighbors” by Ron Rash. First published in Epoch, vol. 67, no. 1. Copyright © 2018 by Ron Rash. Reprinted by permission of Ron Rash.

  “Faint of Heart” by Amanda Rea. First published in One Story, no. 237. Copyright © 2018 by Amanda Rea. Reprinted by permission of Amanda Rea.

  “Lush” by Duane Swierczynski. First published in Blood Work: Remembering Gary Shulze Once Upon a Crime, edited by Rick Ollerman. Copyright © 2018 by Duane Swierczynski. Reprinted by permission of Duane Swierczynski.

  “Inside Man” by Robb T. White. First published in Down & Out: The Magazine, vol. 1, no. 4. Copyright © 2018 by Robert T. White. Reprinted by permission of Robert T. White.

  “Burning Down the House” by Ted White. First published in Welcome to Dystopia: 45 Visions of What Lies Ahead. Copyright © 2018 by Ted White. Reprinted by permission of Ted White.

  Foreword

  Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. For The Best American Mystery Stories series, it’s true: the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

  When the series began in 1997, the guest editor was Robert B. Parker. I was the series editor. This year the guest editor is Jonathan Lethem. I’m still the series editor.

  The mission back then was to try to read every mystery story published by an American or Canadian in 1996, and more than five hundred stories were examined in order to find the twenty best. For this edition, the mission remained precisely the same—but more than three thousand stories were examined.

  A primary source for great crime fiction was the specialty magazines (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine), a handful of mystery anthologies, literary journals, and popular consumer magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Today those publications are still a treasure trove of stories suitable for being collected in The Best American Mystery Stories, but other mystery magazines have been created (notably The Strand and the rebirth of Black Mask), the modest number of anthologies has mushroom
ed into scores, mostly from small publishers, and electronic magazines (e-zines), of which I was unaware in 1996, have drawn some highly talented authors to their sites.

  The look of the books in this series remains largely unchanged twenty-three years later, but the hardcover editions have been abandoned to be replaced with electronic editions. Additionally, the original publisher was Houghton Mifflin and, after a merger, it is now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You (and I) would barely notice the difference in the books, because there is none.

  Are these changes good or bad? Both, but mostly good. I lament the passing of the great Dr. Parker, as well as the loss of the next three guest editors: Sue Grafton, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), and Donald E. Westlake. (Thankfully, the others appear to be in good health, still writing their popular and acclaimed books.) Examining literally thousands of stories is a huge challenge for Michele Slung, my invaluable colleague, who did all the preliminary reading then and still does; without her, this series could not exist, as I am such a slow reader that I practically move my lips when I read. The disappointment is that so many e-zines do not produce fully edited stories, some of which have unrealized potential.

  There is, however, lots of good news, not least of which is that the distinguished publishing house of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt continues the series and supports it with outstanding attention to detail (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a typo, to mention one element) and keeps most of the backlist in print.

  The expanding numbers of small independent publishers can only be seen as a good thing. The optimism of starting a new business, particularly in an area that has minuscule profit margins, must be applauded.

  Although the percentage of people in America who read books for pleasure remains below 50, more independent bookshops have opened than closed for six consecutive years, which warms the heart.

  Enough! Time to get down to the reason you purchased this book. As seems to be true on an annual basis, this is a superb collection of original fiction about extremes of human behavior caused by despair, hate, greed, fear, envy, insanity, or love—sometimes in combination. Desperate people may be prone to desperate acts, a fertile ground for poor choices. Many of the authors in this cornucopia of crime have described how aberrant solutions to difficult situations may occur, and why perpetrators felt that their violent responses to conflicts seemed appropriate to them.

  The psychology of crime has become the dominant form of mystery fiction in recent years, while the classic tale of observation and deduction has faded further into the background. Those tales of pure detection may be the most difficult mystery stories to write, as it has become increasingly difficult to find original motivations for murder, or a new murder method, or an original way to hide a vital clue until the detective unearths it. The working definition of a mystery story for this series is any work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or the plot. The detective story is merely one subgenre in the literary form known as the mystery, just as are romantic suspense, espionage, legal legerdemain, medical thriller, political duplicity, and stories told from the point of view of the villain.

  As Michele reads the enormous number of submissions, she passes along those worthy of consideration, after which I select the fifty best (or at least those I liked best) to send to the guest editor, who selects the twenty that are then collected and reprinted, the other thirty being listed in an honor roll as “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories.”

  The guest editor this year is Jonathan Lethem, the outstanding author of The Feral Detective. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, published twenty-five years ago, successfully combined elements of science fiction and detective fiction. After publishing three more science fiction novels, he published Motherless Brooklyn, a successful National Book Critics Circle Award winner. His next book, The Fortress of Solitude, became a New York Times bestseller. In 2005 he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

  This is an appropriate time (it’s always an appropriate time) to thank the previous guest editors, who have done so much to make this prestigious series such a resounding success: Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen, George Pelecanos, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais, Lisa Scottoline, Laura Lipp-man, James Patterson, Elizabeth George, John Sandford, and Louise Penny.

  While I engage in a relentless quest to locate and read every mystery/crime/suspense story published, I live in terror that I will miss a worthy story, so if you are an author, editor, or publisher, or care about one, please feel free to send a book, magazine, or tearsheet to me c/o The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. If the story first appeared electronically, you must submit a hard copy. It is vital to include the author’s contact information. No unpublished material will be considered for what should be obvious reasons. No material will be returned. If you distrust the postal service, enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard.

  To be eligible, a story must have been written by an American or Canadian and first published in an American or Canadian publication in the calendar year 2019. The earlier in the year I receive the story, the more fondly I regard it. For reasons known only to the dunderheads who wait until Christmas week to submit a story published the previous spring, holding eligible stories for months before submitting them occurs every year, causing seething anger while I read a stack of stories while my friends are trimming the Christmas tree or otherwise celebrating the holiday season. It had better be a damned good story if you do this.

  Because of the very tight production schedule for this book, the absolute firm deadline is December 31. If the story arrives one day later, it will not be read. This is neither an arrogant nor a whimsical deadline. The tight schedule was established twenty-three years ago and it’s the only way to get the book published on time. I’m certain you understand.

  o.p.

  Introduction

  As a kid, one who’d begun to want to write fiction by the time I was eleven or twelve, the first professional author I knew personally was Stanley Ellin, a master of the American crime short story. This was dumb luck for me—happenstance. Stan Ellin was one of the elders of the Brooklyn Friends Meeting—Quakers, as they’re colloquially called—a religious institution to which my father began taking me for Sunday school around that time.

  Stan was a native of Brooklyn, a former steelworker and shipyard worker and army veteran who’d self-educated as a writer by immersing himself in the storytelling classics like Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, and Edgar Allan Poe. Among fellow writers he was celebrated for his subtlety and perfectionism, his measured craft. Never particularly famous in the wider culture, Stan was treasured in the field. He collected a few Edgars, was the president of the Mystery Writers of America, saw his works filmed a few times, and galvanized everyone who knew him personally with his integrity, fierce attentiveness, and droll charisma. When at some point in my teenage years I declared to Stan my intention to become a published writer, he encouraged me—barely. “Keep writing,” he told me. Simple words.

  Though he wrote remarkable and beguiling novels in a number of different modes—detective novels, urban noirs, Hitchcockian wide-screen chase thrillers—Stan’s greatest accomplishment was in the art of the short story, and the yearly appearance of a new Ellin story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (he rarely managed more than one a year) was considered an event in the field. It took me a long time to realize how lucky I was to read Stan’s stories so early on, since he was the writer in plain sight for me, my parents’ friend and a local fixture, the fellow who somewhat scandalized his fellow Quakers with the darkness and sexuality in his late novels, particularly Mirror, Mirror on the Wall and Stronghold.

  Yet he was also, truly, a marvel. A wizard. Stan’s story “The Question” remains one of the most acute and terrifying short stories I know, a study in complicity and implication th
at permanently illuminated my sense not only of what fiction can do but of what wallows in the recesses of the human psyche. “The Question” features an unrepeatable twist, but that was Stan’s signature: no two of his stories make the same moves. Like those of his models, Stevenson and Poe (and in some ways similar to those of international masters like Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges), each of Stan Ellin’s tales is singular, a tour de force.

  I realize I’m describing stories that don’t appear in the anthology in your hands. You can seek out Stanley Ellin’s fiction now, or not. You can also skip this introduction, since that’s one of the main things introductions are for. I’ll at least explain: when Otto Penzler, who was Stan’s great friend and supporter as well as editor and publisher, asked me to consider selecting the stories for this year’s collection, the first thing I warned him of was that I’d want to make the introduction a tribute to Stanley Ellin. Thankfully, Otto didn’t blink.

  Stan helped make me the person who’d be invited into this remarkable situation—not only a lifetime of reading and writing stories, of understanding how fiction can sustain a life and world-view, but of being invited by Otto to delve into the riches of the present version of the crime and mystery field and work with him on putting together this roster of remarkable stories. I’m not exclusively a crime writer (let alone a “mystery” writer, since I always forget to put in clues), and some people might say that my sporadic visitations to the role—three novels featuring detectives, in three different decades—makes me a wonky choice for presiding over this book.

  I’m glad Otto didn’t think so. One of the things I love most about the present state of the crime field—or genre, that slippery word—is how much its boundaries have expanded and shifted, so that it has in certain ways engulfed and been engulfed by our larger understanding of what stories and novels are and what they can and should do. And yet (here’s the paradoxical part), much like the cousin fields of SF and fantasy and romance, the crime and mystery field remains a splendid affiliation, a community of obsession—perhaps an example of what Kurt Vonnegut called a “karass.” A family created by devotion.