▪ “Flying Solo” is the result of sitting in chemo rooms for the past nine years dealing with my multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable cancer. You buy as much time as you can. I’ve been very, very lucky so far. I’d been noticing a sad-eyed nurse for several visits. I’d never dealt with her, but one day she gave me my IVs and I noticed a bruise on her cheek. This day she looked forlorn. She told me she was tired, that she’d moved into an apartment with her two kids late the night before. I assumed she was a battered wife. You hear and see a lot in chemo rooms—usually nothing soap operatic (the rooms I’ve been in are generally friendly places with a lot of smiling faces)—but every once in a while a mask will slip and you get a glimpse of cancer turmoil. Of fear. And not only of cancer but of personal lives that the disease has only made more difficult. Couples divorcing following a cancer diagnosis is not unheard-of. All this caused me to drag out my nickel notebook one day and start taking notes about a mismatched pair of old cancer patients who decided they’d spend whatever time they had left taking care of the nurses and patients in the chemo room. And I still prefer James Garner.
James Grady is the author of Six Days of the Condor, a dozen more novels, and as many short stories, which often appear in “Best of” collections. He’s covered politics, crime, spies, and terrorists as a journalist since Watergate, written for TV and the movies, been awarded France’s Grand Prix de Roman Noir, Italy’s Raymond Chandler Award, Japan’s Baku-Misu literature award, and been nominated for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar. London’s Daily Telegraph named Grady as one of “fifty crime writers to read before you die.”
▪ “Destiny City” let me shed light on the complex mysteries of terrorism and the often messy means we use to fight it. To make sure I got the story as right as writing can, I worked with our good guys and with terrorists—an interesting literary journalism dance. I also wanted to show readers snapshots of America they might not glimpse out the windows of their moving cars, but more than anything, I wanted to bring to life characters—heroes, villains, victims—who, like all of us, navigate through a fog of power politics and personal dreams.
Chris F. Holm was born in Syracuse, New York, the grandson of a cop who passed along his passion for crime fiction. He wrote his first story at the age of six. It got him sent to the principal’s office. Since then his work has fared better, appearing in such publications as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Needle magazine, Beat to a Pulp, and Thuglit. He’s been a Derringer Award finalist and a Spinetingler Award winner, and he’s also written a novel or two, which he’d likely show you if you asked him nice.
▪ I’m not sure where the idea for “The Hitter” came from, but I remember precisely when it arrived. It was late one Sunday night in April of 2010, and I was lying in bed, drifting off to sleep. As my mind wandered, a scene ran through my head. A city square in some nameless banana republic. A teeming crowd, cheering on a petty despot. And above them all, watching through a gun sight, an assassin. Truth be told, I didn’t think much of it until that assassin pulled the trigger—three pounds’ pressure, no more, no less—and I realized that the petty despot wasn’t the target. Once that happened, any pretense of a good night’s sleep evaporated, and I leapt from bed, running to my computer to get down everything I could remember before it faded in the way that dreams do. See, a political assassination is straightforward, uncomplicated—a matter of money or of zealotry, nothing more. But my hitter’s motives were of a subtler sort, and I knew that, much as I’d like never to meet him, I wanted to know what made him tick.
Three weeks later, the story was written. I thought it too long for most markets, but Steve Weddle, editor of the then not-yet-published Needle magazine, assured me that Needle was not your average market. Turns out Steve was right—which seems fitting, since Jake is hardly your average hitman.
Harry Hunsicker is the former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America and the author of three novels, crime thrillers about a Dallas private investigator with the unfortunate name of Lee Henry Oswald. In 2006 his debut novel, Still River, was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America, and in 2010 his short story “Iced” was nominated for a Thriller Award by the International Thriller Writers. Hunsicker lives in Dallas, where, when not working on a book, he is a commercial real estate appraiser and an occasional speaker on creative writing.
▪ “West of Nowhere” came to me in the form of an opening line about a man so inept his friends called him Danny the Dumb-ass. From there I imagined a small crew of robbers, each damaged and ill-functioning in his or her own special way. I placed them in Central Texas, a region where I spent a great deal of time as a child and young adult. For some reason, the relationship between these three lifelong friends solidified itself in my mind early on, and the story grew of its own volition.
Richard Lange is the author of the short story collection Dead Boys and the novel This Wicked World. His stories have appeared in the Sun, the Iowa Review, The Best American Mystery Stories 2004, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly’s Fiction for Kindle series. He was the 2008 recipient of the Rosen-thal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. He is currently working on a novel and another collection of stories.
▪ Children get shot in Los Angeles. It’s a fact. Well, children get shot everywhere, but I live in L.A. and write about the city, so it’s our dead children I was thinking of when I wrote “Baby Killer.” One child in particular, actually, a four-year-old boy who happened to be walking down the street with his sister one afternoon when the local gangsters opened fire on a passing car. A stray bullet hit the boy in the chest, killing him.
People process tragedies like this in different ways. I’m a writer, so I write. And I resurrected a dead woman to tell this story. Blanca was a character from a failed novel, long laid to rest. I brought her back to life and started her talking, and little by little the tale came out. As with all of my stories, I wasn’t sure where it was going until it got there. When it did, I wished it had ended a little better for Blanca. But it didn’t. I also wish that little boy had never died, but he did. I hate this goddamn world sometimes, I really do.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and twenty short story collections, numerous essays and articles, and scripts. He has edited or coedited more than thirty anthologies. His work has been filmed, turned into comics, and performed on the stage. His story “Bubba Hotep” was turned into a cult film. He has received numerous awards for his work, among them the Edgar, seven Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize, the Herodotus Award for Historical Fiction, the Inkpot Award for lifetime achievement in the field of comics, fantasy, and science fiction. He has had two New York Times Notable Books. A martial artist for forty-nine years, he is the founder of Lansdale’s Shen Chuan, Martial Science, has been inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame four times, and owns a martial arts school in Nacogdoches, Texas. He teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he is writer in residence. Currently he is helping produce the low-budget film Christmas with the Dead, based on his story of the same name.
▪ I was born in Gladewater, Texas, and my first memory is of a house on a hill overlooking a honky-tonk, a highway, and a drive-in theater. My mother and I watched the drive-in from the windows of our house, and she told me what characters were saying. From then on I was hooked on storytelling and have often written about drive-ins and honky-tonks and the people who kept them in business. I began to learn boxing and wres tling from my father at an early age; he was forty-two years old when I was born. He could neither read nor write, but like my mother, who could, he was a great storyteller. He rode the rails during the Great Depression from one carnival to the next, where he wrestled or boxed for money. My mother encouraged my love for writing, my fa
ther my love for all manner of martial arts. I still practice them both. On my way to becoming a writer I’ve been an aluminum chair worker, farmer, field hand, bodyguard of sorts, and a janitor. I like writing and martial arts best. Follow me on Twitter. My handle is joelansdale.
Charles McCarry, born in 1930 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worldwide bestsellers, The Miernik Dossier (1973) and The Tears of Autumn (1975). He is the author of nine other novels, translated into more than thirty languages, and the author, coauthor, or editor of nine nonfiction books, in addition to short stories, poems, and about a million words of journalism in leading American and foreign magazines. As a young man he drafted speeches for a president, a presidential candidate, and other politicians. During the early Cold War, he spent an uninterrupted decade abroad as a CIA agent under deep cover. Later on he was the editor in charge of freelance operations at National Geographic and wrote the magazine’s official history for its one hundredth anniversary in 1988. He and his wife, Nancy, married since 1953, live in south Florida in winter and the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts in summer.
▪ “The End of the String” is autobiographical in the sense that it closely reflects the atmosphere and, to a degree, the reality of some of the things I experienced as a secret agent fifty-odd years ago in Africa. As is true of most works of fiction, parts of this story are invented and parts of it are drawn from vivid memory. I knew places like Ndala and made friends with men like Benjamin, the leading character in this tale, and lived through episodes that were not so very different from the ones in this story. But there is no parallel Ndala or real Benjamin. They are, by design, different enough from the originals to give away no secrets. Even for writers who never took an oath of secrecy, fiction is, after all, what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly.
Dennis McFadden lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners in upstate New York. His collection of linked stories, Hart’s Grove, was published in June 2010, and his fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including the Missouri Review, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, CutBank, and South Carolina Review.
▪ For a writer, the blessing of rejection is the opportunity it affords the rejected story to grow and develop. “Diamond Alley” was afforded ample opportunity. One of my earliest stories, it began as a simple vignette about a teenaged peeping Tom and the Voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates, but it underwent some serious evolution after that humble beginning. Over the years the characters and lore of the small, fictional town of Hart’s Grove began to take shape and take over, insinuating themselves into the story from the roots up. “Diamond Alley” probably grew most and developed best, however, the day I decided to shift the narration to the first-person-plural point of view; then, instead of a man remembering a murder that had occurred when he was a boy, I had a Greek chorus singing a Greek tragedy.
As for the mystery in this story, it’s not much different from the mystery in every story I write—mystery in the sense that we can never really know everything that is happening in our lives, or anything that will happen after them. It’s just that this one is magnified by murder. But mysteries in fiction are seldom as insoluble as those in life, as most writers can’t resist the lure of omniscience; given that, and given the nature of the linked collection, it’s not surprising that the answer to the primary mystery of “Diamond Alley”— who do you suppose really killed her? —lies naked there in Hart’s Grove for all who care to see.
Christopher Merkner‘s stories have recently appeared in Black Warrior Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, and Cincinnati Review. He teaches creative writing for the University of Colorado, Denver.
▪ “Last Cottage” started as a touching and lighthearted meditation on my youth and my hometown in Illinois. I don’t know what went wrong. At some point it became clear that the story had no interest in being touching or lighthearted. Writing and rewriting, I could not drop the image of the carp that sucked the surface of the lakes and rivers near my hometown. I have so many good memories of my youth in northern Illinois, but those carp—those mouths gasping and sucking, those oily eyes rolling—kept returning instead. So I decided to kill them. “Last Cottage” followed. A huge thanks to Brock Clarke and the amazing people at the Cincinnati Review for their help and support and encouragement.
Andrew Riconda lives on City Island in the Bronx. His fiction has appeared in the Amherst Review, Criminal Class Review, Oyez Review, Phantasmagoria, Rio Grande Review, Watchword, and William and Mary Review. He is currently at work on a novel, The Three People I Had to Kill Last Year, featuring the protagonist of the story in this collection.
▪ “Heart Like a Balloon” was my first attempt at the mystery genre. Most of my stories are quirky tales about sad, alienated men—just without crimes, guns, paring knives, and the flayed skin. Like many of my characters, the narrator, Brian Rehill, is trying to remain God-oblivious in a world that just won’t permit that. Speaking of deities, I like to think that one of the gods of quirky crime tales, Charles Willeford, might have enjoyed this story. Hail Hoke Moseley.
S. J. Rozan was born and raised in the Bronx and is a lifelong New Yorker. She’s the author of eleven books in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, the most recent of which is Ghost Hero. She also has two standalones, Absent Friends and In This Rain, and three dozen short stories published in various periodicals and anthologies, including a number of “Best of the Year” collections. She has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity Awards for best novel, as well as the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and the Edgar for best short story. She lectures and teaches widely and runs an English-language writing workshop in the summers in Assisi, Italy. Visit www.sjrozan.com.
▪ I get a lot of comments from readers about Lydia Chin’s mother. Everyone, it seems, either knows someone with a mother like Chin Yong-Yun or has one. (My favorite comment ever at a book signing: a young Chinese man who said, “I only have one question. When did you meet my mother?”) “Chin Yong-Yun Takes a Case” was my first shot at giving Ma Chin her own voice, at seeing things from her side of the kitchen table. It probably won’t be the last; I have a feeling she’s just getting started.
Mickey Spillane was the best-selling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial PI has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, two television series, and numerous films, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of several books, among them In Search of Snow, The Hummingbird’s Daughter (winner of the Kiriyama Prize), and The Devil’s Highway (a finalist for the Pulitzer and winner of the Lannan Literary Award). He was born in Mexico and currently lives in the Chicago area, where he teaches at the University of Illinois. His story “Amapola,” from Phoenix Noir, won the Edgar Award in 2010.
▪ This story began its life as a set of notes dating back to my time as writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I was taken—as who wouldn’t be—by zydeco music and Cajun/Creole culture. I was a huge Beau Jocque fan, and when I finally met him and talked one night, I knew a zydeco story had to happen. I jotted notes for a “literary” fiction. What is that? I knew ol’ Chester Richard was my hero, but beyond that … I had no idea. My advice to all lazy writers is to team up with David Corbett. He writes like some well-oiled machine and apparently doesn’t mind doing a year’s worth of research in one night.
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2010
BEALL, WILL
The Blood-Dimmed Tide. Hook, Line & Sinister, ed. T. Jefferson Parker (Countryman)
BRUCHAC, JOSEPH
Helper. Indian Country Noir, ed. Sarah Cortez and Liz Martinez (Akashic
)
COHEN, ROBERT
Our Time with the Pirates. Ploughshares, Fall
COLE, DAVID
JaneJohnDoe.com. Indian Country Noir, ed. Sarah Cortez and Liz Martinez (Akashic)
COLEMAN, REED FARREL
Another Role. Indian Country Noir, ed. Sarah Cortez and Liz Martinez (Akashic)
EGAN, K. J.
Black Hole Devotion. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, June
FINDER, JOSEPH
Neighbors. Agents of Treachery, ed. Otto Penzler (Vintage)
HAYWOOD, GAR ANTHONY
The Lamb Was Sure to Go. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November
HENDRIX, LAURA FRANCES
Mister Visits. Kenyon Review, Summer
HOWARD, CLARK
Escape from Wolfkill. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, August
HUDSON, SUZANNE
All the Way to Memphis. Delta Blues, ed. Carolyn Haines (Tyrus)
HUNTER, STEPHEN
Casey at the Bat. Agents of Treachery, ed. Otto Penzler (Vintage)
HYER, BRIAN
Package. Greensboro Review, Spring
JACKSON, ALICE
Cuttin’ Heads. Delta Blues, ed. Carolyn Haines (Tyrus)
KILPATRICK, LYNN K.
Domestic Drama. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, May
KLAVAN, ANDREW
Sleeping with My Assassin. Agents of Treachery, ed. Otto Penzler (Vintage)
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