The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17
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About this Book
About the Editors
Also in this Series
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2012
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Foreword
Introduction
Smothered and Covered
A Fine Mist of Blood
Misprision of Felony
The Sailor in the Picture
The Devil to Pay
The Street Ends at the Cemetery
Crossing
Remora, IL
Thy Shiny Car in the Night
Drifter
The Ring of Kerry
Quarry
So Near Any Time Always
Light Bulb
Gunpowder Alley
The Indian
When They Are Done with Us
The Don’s Cinnamon
Bullet Number Two
Bound
Contributors’ Notes
About this Book
Also in this Series
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2012
About the Editors
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Permissions
Foreword
As preparation for writing the foreword to each new book in this wonderful series, I reread those I wrote for previous volumes. This serves the purpose of reminding me of things I may already have said and therefore assists my efforts to eschew repetition in the off-chance that readers actually pay attention to these things instead of immediately diving into the stories on these pages (as I heartily recommend).
The second goal is for this rereading process to suggest something that may be of interest to readers, to provide a slim thread that might be followed to produce a few worthwhile thoughts. Or even a single one, for that matter, which usually exhausts me.
Although I’m not certain either goal was achieved when I read the sixteen earlier forewords produced for The Best American Mystery Stories, that stroll down memory lane did provide an interesting (to me) autobiographical view of my connection to the series that illuminated numerous changes in attitude and process.
Naively and foolishly, an early foreword somehow seemed to display my comfort, perhaps even pride, in the fact that I didn’t have a computer and wouldn’t have known how to turn one on if I did. As it happens, almost immediately after I wrote that I went to the London Book Fair and returned to find my much-loved IBM Selectric typewriter missing from my desk, replaced by a computer. I asked my assistant what the hell was going on and she said simply, “It’s time. I used your credit card and ordered it.” I told her she was fired. “I know,” she said, “but first I’m going to teach you how to use it.” It was a struggle for an old Luddite, but I recognize now that I couldn’t function without it.
As evidence of the change in me, and the world, since those simpler days, I now run a publishing company, MysteriousPress.com, devoted entirely to e-books. Okay, I still may be technologically challenged, but I’ve accepted the inevitable.
My life has always been deeply involved with books, beginning when I read them at a very young age, followed by collecting them, then editing and publishing them, and finally selling them through my bookshop. I lament that the number and influence of independent bookstores has dramatically diminished over recent years, and that Nooks and Kindles are now seen more frequently during my travels than hardcover books are, or even paperbacks, for that matter.
On the other hand, I have embraced some of the valuable elements of this change. It is now possible to have access to hundreds of thousands of books that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find less than a decade ago, for instance.
At a more pertinent level, perhaps, the BAMS volumes have (finally) just recently become available as e-books, and sales of these electronic versions just about match the sales of the physical books, giving them a much wider readership than ever, a turn of events that doesn’t appear to have any downside that I can see.
The ubiquity of computers in most of our lives has also transformed the publishing landscape a great deal, as would-be authors can now self-publish and any number of websites publish original stories, many of which are in the mystery and crime fiction category. This, too, points out a major change from the beginning of this series to the present time. I thought that my wonderful reader, Michele Slung, and I had done a pretty good job by reading five hundred to six hundred stories to find the best for that 1997 edition of BAMS; the number of stories that Michele checks out to see what might be worthy of consideration now approaches five thousand. Many are not read all the way through, of course, as it is clear that some writers really ought to find a different outlet for their creative impulses, but still, it’s a daunting challenge.
A challenge, I am pleased and proud to say, that yet again has been met with triumph, as the superb pieces of fiction in this collection will attest. One can only speculate, either with fear or with excitement, depending on one’s personality, what changes will transpire over the next seventeen years. As technology not only changes but changes at an ever-faster rate, the person who will make the next great leap forward is now probably seven years old, ecstatically watching Toy Story for the fifty-fifth time, mouthing the dialogue while multitasking with a laptop on which he or she has created a stunning website to publish a collection of original illustrated stories.
After Michele has gathered the stories to be seriously considered, I read the harvested crop, passing along the best fifty (or at least those I liked best) to the guest editor, who selects the twenty that are then reprinted, the other thirty being listed in an honor roll as “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories.”
Sincere thanks are due to this year’s guest editor, Lisa Scottoline, the New York Times bestselling author of such novels as Don’t Go and Come Home as well as the hugely popular mystery series featuring Rosato & Associates. She is a former president of the Mystery Writers of America and won an Edgar Award in 1995 for Final Appeal.
This is 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, and Robert Crais.
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 it 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, please enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard, on which I will acknowledge receipt of your story.
To be eligible, a story must have been written by an American or a Canadian and first published in an American or Canadian publication in the calendar year 2013. The earlier in the year I receive the story, the more fondly I regard it. For reasons known only to the nitwits 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 much gnashing of teeth as I read a stack of stories while my wife and 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 whimsical nor arbitrary but utterly necessary in order to meet publishing schedules. Sorry.
O.P.
Introduction
Abraham lincoln famously said, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.”
I understand exactly what Lincoln meant by that, and nothing illustrates his point better than a short story. I’ve written almost twenty-five novels in as many years, but I’ve written only three short stories for anthologies: one for breast cancer research, another to preserve open space, and the last for Otto Penzler.
Bottom line, I avoid the short form unless I’m saving the world or working for Otto Penzler.
Why?
Because I adore Otto, who knows more about crime fiction than anybody on the planet.
And also because it’s too much work to write something short. I don’t have the time.
Plus I’m Italian, and Italians need three thousand words just to say hello.
Hand gestures not included.
On top of that, I’m a woman, which means that at eight thousand words, I’m just warming up. A typical novel is ninety thousand words, but mine always run longer, and even my acknowledgments don’t get to the point anytime soon.
By the way, I’m divorced twice, and these things may be related.
Anyway, you get the idea. It’s harder to write something short than something long.
Why?
Because you have to know exactly what you’re doing before you do it. You have to know where you’re going before you get in the car. You have to think what to say before you open your mouth.
That’s not me.
People ask if I know how my book ends when I begin to write, and I have to tell the truth. Not only do I not know how it ends, I don’t even know how it middles.
I start with the idea and see where it takes me, then live by the motto “Great books aren’t written, they’re rewritten.”
Come to think of it, probably anybody who’s divorced twice isn’t the type of person who looks before they leap. In fact, I bet that all of the wonderful authors herein are happily married, or at least have not made as stupendously bad decisions as mine.
Their stories prove as much. Because without exception, each of these stories is perfect, and told in just a few pages. Each one plunges the reader into the plot with the very first sentence, and there are no wasted words, no excessive descriptions to establish setting, time of year, or barometric pressure. We aren’t told a lot of irrelevant backstory, all dialogue is pithy and pertinent, and, most important, once a point is established, it isn’t reestablished. The writing is lean, lacking cellulite and stomach flab.
These are stories with abs.
And to my mind, the great value of having them all in one collection is that when you read through them all, you, as the reader, will begin to see the similarities that construct a great story, and, equally important, though perhaps paradoxically, you’ll also see the great breadth of the stories and come to understand that though their settings, characters, plots, and voices are radically different, what makes them all great is exactly the same.
My point is illustrated by a comparison of two stories, Randall Silvis’s “The Indian” and Eileen Dreyer’s “The Sailor in the Picture.” These stories could not be more different in almost every respect, except that they’re both sensational stories, for exactly the same reasons.
Silvis’s story begins with a man walking into a bar, which in itself is kinda brilliant, and Silvis tells us, without missing a beat, that the man, an angry truck driver named Harvey, wants to kill his brother-in-law in a dispute over a motorcycle, an Indian. Silvis’s voice perfectly captures, if not epitomizes, a working-class taproom outside Pittsburgh, where the Pirates game is always on and the patrons drink Schlitz. The bar is tended by Harvey’s mild younger brother, named Will, who admits that he’s “nobody’s genius,” even in a world populated by handymen, ditch diggers, and trash haulers.
So the central conflict is established on page 1 of the story, and before we know it, Harvey will suck Will into a plot to ruin his brother-in-law, during the commission of which the story’s plot will twist in such a completely shocking manner that the blood is flowing only a few pages later, the motorcycle forgotten.
The story is not only lean, it’s positively muscular, and the prose so clean that it borders on poetry. Even as the plot charges toward its horrific conclusion, Will’s sleep is disrupted by a dream in which he’s hunting and comes upon a deer. The hunter confronts the hunted, “the two connected by the invisible thread of the bullet about to fly.”
The dialogue is equally pithy, as well as doing double duty to inform character and advance plot. For example, Silvis tells you everything you need to know about Will when he writes that Will asks a group of golfers if they’re ready for another pitcher “with the lift of his eyebrows.” The golfers answer, as they would, “We’re good.” That’s pitch-perfect dialogue, without a wasted word.
All this, plus two sex scenes in the first eleven pages!
What a story!
Now let’s compare Silvis’s story with “The Sailor in the Picture.” I am a huge fan of Eileen Dreyer’s mysteries, which feature strong and smart women, and the story is classic Dreyer, though it takes place in a different time period, during World War II. The story’s jumping-off point is the iconic picture of a sailor kissing a nurse on VJ Day, and Dreyer takes us into the world of that picture through the eyes of a bystander, one Peg O’Toole, who was “facing her own sailor” that very day in Times Square. He was her husband, Jimmy, home from the war, and Dreyer tells us that Peg now carries his memory “like a sharp shard of glass,” because that was the day he died.
Dreyer is skilled enough to make us feel instantly sympathetic for Peg’s loss, then take us back to a time before Jimmy died, and we’re happy at her upcoming reunion with him. In the process, Dreyer deftly brings to life wartime America, where women on the home front wear hairnets, “sturdy shoes and work pants,” and carry lunches, cigarettes, lipstick, and bus fare. They find a way to deal with the terrible grief when they lose a son or husband, and Dreyer describes the “quick stab of an envelope” when the dreaded Western Union telegrams are thrust into their shaking hands.
The war has taken Peg’s dreams as well as her husband. She had dreamed of becoming a nurse, of wearing a white cap and a “gleaming white dress” and always looking “clean and bright,” but instead she has to work in a butcher shop for the war’s duration, to support herself and her children. But Peg learns to enjoy the work, slicing meat, filling the parts bucket, and grinding hamburger until her back and arms ache. She’s a practical woman, not a complainer, and her self-esteem grows. In just a few sentences, Dreyer makes Peg instantly relatable to every working mother, transcending space and time.
Dreyer’s story moves to the day when Peg is going to Times Square to meet her returning husband, and the reader goes along as Peg makes the trip into New York City, with its “hard energy,” touching her savings-and-loan passbook as if it were a “talisman against temptation.” Once she gets there, she’s kissed, “standing there flat-footed,” by the sailor in the iconic photo, then left behind when he moves on, kissing other women while the photographer snaps away. But as soon as Peg sees Jimmy in the crowd, she freezes, with “the instinctive reaction of all hunted animals,” and in that moment Dreyer’s plot turns about-face and the unthinkable happens.
Dreyer’s prose is as heartfelt as Silvis’s is spare, but the voice of her Peg O’Toole resonates with such truth and power that the heroine’s plight, problem, and solution make absolute sense, and you’ll find yourself cheering her on. Both stories, Silvis’s and Dreyer’s, pack a dramatic wallop, and both explore families, r
elationships, and the deep hatred that can come only from the deepest love—the weightiest of themes, in mere pages.
Both stories are page-turners, and I think you’ll race through them and the other ones in the collection. Read them all in one sitting and your head will be spinning. Read them again, more slowly, to examine the skill, talent, and artistry it takes to write stories that fire with the speed of an automatic weapon and are over just as fast.
That’s what’s between these covers, pure explosive fiction.
Otto Penzler sure knows his stuff.
And so did Abe Lincoln.
LISA SCOTTOLINE
TOM BARLOW
Smothered and Covered
FROM Needle
The young girl walked into the Waffle House, alone, at 3 A.M. on a Thursday morning. We all looked up from our coffee and cigarettes, waffles, sausage and hash browns. She stood on her tiptoes to take a seat on a counter stool, picked up a menu and held it close to her face, like one of the 6 A.M. retirees without his bifocals.
Sandy, the night shift waitress, looked at me and raised her eyebrows. I knew the look; she gave it to me four or five times a week. It meant, Do you think I should call the cops?
I considered the idea. The girl looked no more than twelve, black, slim, but composed. Her hair was plaited so tight I wondered if they tugged at her eyebrows. Her perfume, spicy with a hint of sandalwood, cut through the onion and batter odors of the diner. She wore clean, well-fitted jeans, a pink fuzzy sweater over a lime green top, and new-looking Nikes. Gold chain, oversized plastic watch. Not enough clothes for February.
She displayed no fear or uncertainty, which struck me as odd. Twelve-year-olds are always uncertain around adults.
I turned to look outside. The day manager had finally replaced the broken lights in the lot, so our cars were brightly lit. There were none I didn’t recognize, and I would recognize a new one. I’d been running into the same people at the same hour of the night for almost three years, and had come to know them by their cars, the sound of their nasal congestion, and their bathing habits. We rarely spoke.