The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Contributors’ Notes

Born and raised in Northern Michigan. Doug Allyn majored in criminal psychology at the University of Michigan, served in military intelligence during the Vietnam War, and parlayed those credentials into a twenty-five-year career as a rock guitarist.

Since 1986 Mr. Allyn has published five mystery novels and fifty short stories. He has won, or been nominated for, every major literary award in his field, including the Edgar Award for 1995.

Mr. Allyn and his wife live in chaotic bliss in Montrose. Michigan.

• Some years ago I read an Aldous Huxley novel. Point, Counterpoint, in which Huxley structured his plot around the classical musical form of the fugue. I was attracted by the idea of transmuting elements of music into prose, but borrowing the structure of a work is a bit like breaking into a jewelry store to heist a display case. If you’re going to steal something, why not filch the elements that actually empower music: passion and dynamics?

The story “Blind Lemon” is an attempt to do exactly that.

I can only hope it’s half as effective as the performances of the original Blind Lemon Jefferson were.

James Crumley lives in Missoula. Montana. Since taking an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa, he has crisscrossed America as an academic tramp, published one collection of short pieces. The Muddy Fork, and six novels, most recently Bordersnakes. His work has been published in a number of foreign languages and awarded a Pushcart Prize and the 1993 Hammett Award.

• I hadn’t written a short story since 1972 and had never written one about crime when Otto Penzler asked me to contribute one to his Murder for Love collection. Aside from the fact that my imagination doesn’t seem to lend itself to the short story form, I discovered once again that the little devils are hard as hell to write. Alter a dozen false starts, I went over to Mike and Eve Art’s Chico Hot Springs Lodge, planning a week floating the Yellowstone River trying to catch the brown trout fall run. It’s Montana, right, and October is often the finest month. Of course it snowed like crazy. So I spent the week in a cabin on a bench watching the weather work the Paradise Valley — snow and freezing rain, occasional shafts of sunlight exposing the peaks through the low clouds, and steam curling off the hot spring pool. Somehow I was reminded of a story I had once tried to write while living in Mexico, started with that woman’s dreams, layered with the scenery outside the window, memories of the Ozarks, football notions, and poker games. After more drafts than I care to remember, the result was “Hot Springs.” Crime seldom pays, love seldom works. Thankfully stories, like fishing, occasionally work. In ways unexplainable.

Jeffery Deaver, former journalist, folksinger, and attorney, has written thirteen suspense novels. He has twice been nominated for Edgar Awards and is the recipient of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s Best Short Story of the Year for 1995. His recent A Maiden’s Grave was an HBO film and his The Bone Collector is soon to be released by Universal Pictures. The London Times has called him “the best psychological thriller writer around.”

• While my novels certainly have their dark side (a carping reviewer once wrote that the largest part of the film budget for a recent book of mine ought to go for fake blood), I nonetheless try to make sure that good prevails, that violence is unseen, and that readers arrive at the last page harrowed but happy, content in their knowledge that most of their favorite characters have survived the journey with them, principles and body parts intact.

With short stories, however, all those rules go out the window. For a reason I have yet to figure out, when I write stories, I feel a refreshing license to be as dark as I can be and dance gleefully back and forth over that fishy boundary between good and evil.

“The Weekender” is typical of my short fiction: A violent incident, a gothic setting, people pushed to extremes, psychological mind games, and a sense that nothing is quite what it seems to be. My influences are, not surprisingly. O. Henry, Poe, and The Twilight Zone.

Brendan DuBois grew up in New Hampshire and received a B.A. in English from the University of New Hampshire. A former newspaper reporter, he has been writing mystery fiction for more than a decade and still lives in his native state with his wife. Mona. He has published two novels — Dead Sand and Black Tide — and has recently completed a third. In 1995 he received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for best mystery short story of the year, and he has three times been nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his short fiction.

• I’ve always been fascinated with the tale of the outsider intruding upon a closed community, and this is true in my story “The Dark Snow.” The community in this case is a lakefront town in rural New Hampshire, with its own rules, mores, and ways of getting along. The people in this town are not necessarily bad or evil; they just have a certain way of doing things, and outsiders who come in and do things differently often come under uncomfortable scrutiny or, in the case of my story, outright hostilitv.

The main character in this story is an outsider in the truest sense — not only is he a stranger to the people of this small New Hampshire town but, after years of service in some of the dark corners of our government, he’s also a stranger to the world of civilians. He does his best to adjust, he does his best to make friends with his community, and he does his best to try to ignore some old whispers that tell him what to do in the face of the hostility that’s tossed his way. But doing your best doesn’t always work.

With characters and a theme in place, the setting of the story was next. My parents once owned a cottage on a lake in New Hampshire, and my wife and I still vacation each year to a hideaway home on another lake, farther north. We have both come to love the times we spend at the lake, swimming, sailing, and stargazing at night. And a moonlight paddle in a canoe on water as still as glass, with the hooting sound of loons in the distance, is enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Lakewater can be comforting and soothing. It’s often beautiful.

But as I proved in this story, it can also be deadly.

Elizabeth George published her first novel. A Great Deliverance, in 1988. It was recognized with an Edgar nomination, and it received an Anthony Award, an Agatha Award, and France’s Grand Prix de Litérature Policière. She’s been awarded the MIMI, Germany’s award for international mystery fiction, and she’s been nominated twice for Svenska Deckarakademin, by Sweden’s Crime Writers Association. She’s an instructor in creative writing, offering courses in universities, colleges, and with private students throughout the country. She divides her time between Huntington Beach, California, and London.

• I know exactly the moment when I conceived “The Surprise of His Life.” It was the same moment in the summer of 1994 when I put together how O. J. Simpson had murdered his wife and Ronald Goldman. My story, however, isn’t an attempt to explain the Simpson murder in any way. Far be it from me to quest ion the conclusion of a jury sitting in a criminal trial. On the contrary, the Simpson murders acted as a foundation for a set of ideas about the nature of obsession and where it can lead.

Since all of my novels are set in England, this short story was a departure for me. It’s set in Newport Beach, California, and instead of my Scotland Yard detectives, it features a crusty private eye and a fifty-five-year-old man with prostate problems. Quite a departure, indeed.

It was a new experience, writing about my own back yard. I hope the effort proves enjoyable for the reader.

Jeremiah Healy, a graduate of Rutgers College and Harvard Law School, was a professor at the New England School of Law for eighteen years. He is the creator of John Francis Cuddy, a Boston-based private investigator who has appeared in eleven novels and thirty short stories. Healy’s first novel, Blunt Darts, was selected by the New York Times as one of the seven best mysteries of 1984.

• The idea and title for “Eyes That Never Meet” came to me in an unusual way. I’d been asked by James Grady to contribute a piece to the anthology Unusual Suspects, benefiting Share Our Strength, a Washington. D.C., organization that fights hunger in America. On a trip to New York City, I happened to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art during an exhibition of stelae, gravestones from ancient Greece in which the eyes of the departed and surviving spouses never meet, a symbol for the dead spouse no longer being able to see. It occurred to me, as it does to the fictional Marla Van Dorn in my story, that we who are fortunate seldom make eye contact with the homeless and hungry who beg on our sidewalks. Given the final twist in Eyes That Never Meet, I thought the title was particularly apt.

Melodie Johnson Howe lives near Santa Barbara. She is the author of two mystery novels. The Mother Shadow and Beauty Dies. Another Diana Poole short story, “Dirty Blonde,” can be found in the anthology Sisters in Crime, fourth edition.

• Diana Poole was created out of my admiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Pat Hobby Stories. His wry observations on Hollywood and his character’s often funny and somehow sad attempts at regaining his past success are wonderful. I wanted to try to do something similar, but in the genre I write in and love — the mystery. So I created an out-of-work, middle-aged actress.

Being an ex-actress I have an intimate knowledge of the entertainment business. Hollywood reminds me of that old expression about New York: It’s a great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. Hollywood is a great place to write about but I wouldn’t want to work there.

The idea or need to write this particular short story came about when my husband and I were invited to attend a party for a rock-and-roll star. As it turned out, the star arrived after everyone had left. Some entrances, even in Hollywood, can be delayed too long. On our way home from the party I turned to my husband and in a theatrical, world-weary voice said, “Well, another tented evening.” I knew in that moment I had a story to tell. I also knew it wouldn’t be about a rock-and-roll star.

I put Diana Poole in the middle of a tented Hollywood party, created some guests, and the story almost wrote itself. When I realized that the story was really a long confession, I knew I would need a device to keep the tension and the suspense going. So I gave the party guests an almost phobic concern about the character Robin’s singing. What didn’t they want to hear? And what would happen if Robin did sing? While the questions regarding the murder are answered early in the story. I let these unanswered questions linger until the end.

I loved writing this story And I’m glad the rock-and-roll star didn’t arrive on time. Because if he had, well, who knows? I hope to group the Diana Poole stories together someday. When I do. I’ll put them on the shelf next to Pat Hobby, who is still trying to sneak onto the studio lot.

Pat Jordan is a freelance writer living in Ft. Lauderdale. He is the author of hundreds of magazine articles (New York Times Magazine, C.Q., Playboy, Men’s Journal, L.A. Times Magazine, Life, etc.) and nine books. This story, “The Mark,” is only the second short story he’s ever written. The first, “Bobby2” was published in November 1992.

• Sol, not his real name, was the best man at my wedding in January 1992. He was serving out the last six months of his six-year marijuana smuggling conviction at a halfway house for felons in Dania, Florida. I had to pick him up on the day of the wedding and return him to the halfway house a few hours later. He missed the reception. That part of “The Mark” is true. The rest is fiction. Sol is a little annoyed at the fiction part of the story. He thinks the story should have more accurately portrayed him as a heroic “Don Juan type of guy,” rather than as “comic relief.” Alas, you can’t please everyone.

I am grateful, however, that I have been able to please Alice K. Turner, Playboy’s fiction editor, who ran the third story about Bobby, Sheila, and Sol this summer. She has encouraged me at every step to pursue these characters and is a willing and enthusiastic reader of each adventure I send her. All she demands of me is that I tell a good story.

Trained as a child clinical psychologist, clinical associate professor of pediatrics at USC School of Medicine, Jonathan Kellerman is the author of twelve best-selling novels translated into twenty-four languages, two volumes on psychology, and two books for children. His awards include the Edgar, the Anthony, the Samuel Goldwyn, and the Media Award of the American Psychological Association. He is married to the novelist Faye Keller man.

• I don’t write very many short stories. I could get all highfalutin and say it’s because I enjoy developing characters gradually; subtly, adding layer upon layer of texture, mining deep lodes of exquisite psychological nuance. But a great short story writer can accomplish all that within the confines of the form. I know. I’m married to a great short story writer and I’m well aware that I’m not very good at this truncated, accelerated business. That’s the real reason I shy away from anything briefer than a novel. If you’re willing to suffer, it might as well add up to a book with your picture on the jacket.

But this story percolated in my mind for many years and I think I know why.

You don’t have to be a shrink to realize that all fiction is, on some level, autobiography. I am a shrink, but sometimes it takes years for me to understand why I really wrote a specific book. So much for the value of a Ph.D. and all those insights acquired on both sides of the couch.

The big epiphany is: I’m a father. Boy, am I. Four kids with a fourteen-year age difference among them. Parenthood in my twenties, thirties, and forties. Sometimes it seems all Faye and I have done is play Maw and Paw. So far the young’uns have turned out great — despite the Ph.D. — and it’s been tremendously fulfilling. Also a helluva lot of work.

We began our brood in 1978, when procreation was unfashionable and the only car seats around were designed by the Marquis de Sade. Yuppie scum looked down their rhinoplastied noses at us and preached about zero population growth. Waiters glared in horror when we schlepped our son into restaurants. (Twenty-four-hour places were best because he was up at 4:00 A.M., famished and ready to... play!) Undaunted, we continued through the eighties when the drive to self-perpetuate suddenly hit the yuppie scum like a sucker punch to the id, and we had to tolerate incessant nattering about how to develop perfect babies (usually something to do with flashcards and various canvas and titanium contraptions developed by light-starved, vengeful Scandinavians). Persisting into the nineties, too exhausted to notice fashion and foible, we mostly sleepwalked through the initial years of elderly parenthood, amazed that the newest edition seemed to develop quite nicely in the face of periodic senility.

So when I was asked to write a story about love, I thought about family love. Marital love. Parental love. All of the above. Since I’m trained as a social scientist, I also thought about Cosmic Issues: balancing family and career. Looking after one’s own health, physical and mental, while not neglecting the Tiny Toon in the car seat. Trying to keep said Toon quiet in a restaurant. Changing diapers. Getting away with murder.

’Nuff said.

Andrew Klavan currently lives as an expatriate in London with his wife and two children. His last novel. True Crime, was an international bestseller. His new novel, entitled The Uncanny, is due out from Crown next year. Klavan is now at work on a mystery screenplay for Fox 2000.

• The first time I heard that TV cameras were to be allowed into U.S. courtrooms, I could not restrain a cynical laugh. For one thing, I have quite an attractive cynical laugh and like to show it off whenever possible. But for another thing, human folly always amuses me. Years ago, as a reporter covering courts in a small town in upstate New York. I had time to reflect at length on the similarities between the trial process and classical drama. Add cameras to the mix, I reasoned, and there would be nothing to distinguish the legal system from show business.

When the O. J. Simpson trial came along, I was proven right. American law and show business had become one. It’s such a rare event for me to be proven right about anything that I thought I’d write a story about it. And that’s how “Lou Monahan. County Prosecutor” came to be. I wanted to depict a regular guy, a stalwart guy — an honest public official like many I’ve known — who finds himself a part of the glamour and unreality of television simply by virtue of doing his job. It’s a very intimate process, a seductive circle, or a vortex perhaps. Like everyone else, Lou expresses his most basic desires in terms of fantasy. Like all fantasies, Lou’s have the elements of drama. That drama is reflected in the courtroom and that courtroom is going to be on TV, thus offering Lou the chance to fulfill his desires. There’s a price, of course, and that’s the heart of the story: how Lou reacts when the bill comes due.

My father was a performer and I’ve worked in journalism, so I’ve been around show business — and the news business, which is part of show business — all my life. It’s very tricky stuff. No matter how you react to it, it can make you part of the act. You think people watch too much TV? Write a book about it and maybe I can get you on Oprah. You think undue publicity can cause a miscarriage of justice? Good story — you’re on in five. Showbiz is like the make-believe tennis ball in the movie Blow Up. Pick it up — and you vanish. So that’s the dramatic question of “Lou Monahan”: Will our hero accede to the world of make-believe? Stay tuned.

Elmore Leonard has been writing fiction for the past forty-five years and claims he’s still having a good time assembling characters to see where they decide to take him. When asked if he knows how a book is going to end before he gets there. Leonard replied. “If I know that, why write the book?” His thirty-fourth novel, scheduled for early 1998 release, is set in Cuba one hundred years ago, at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Quite a number of his books, including Get Shorty, have been adapted for the screen.

• I wrote “Karen Makes Out” to see if I’d like Karen Sisco enough to develop a novel around her as a federal marshal. I liked her a lot and Out of Sight was published in the fall of 1996. We will next see Karen on the screen in the film adaptation of the book. No one, though, has yet told me who will play her part.

Michael Malone was born in North Carolina and educated at Chapel Hill and Harvard. He’s taught at various colleges on various subjects from fiction-making to the rise and the fall of the great American musical. Among his novels are Dingley Falls. Handling Sin, Uncivil Seasons, Time’s Witness, and Foolscap. He’s also written on the movies, as well as screenplays and television shows.

• I’m not an instinctive short story writer. My characters keep trying to be in novels and their stories get away from me. Back in the seventies I had considerable luck with women’s magazines, writing a type of story about whimsical young men who’d had their consciousness raised, sometimes violently, by liberated young females, and I did a story for Playboy about Elvis right after he died but before anybody — except Southerners — expected he was immortal. But mostly I write long. So I was intrigued when Otto Penzler asked me to write a story about a murder for love. It was a mystery, which I love. It was an assignment, which is friendlier than an entirely blank page. Best, it was a theme of movie proportions — murder for love — and I immediately thought of a movie star to tell about.

As the vagaries of my career confess. I grew up infatuated with the movies. We had one small musty “art film” theater in my Piedmont town, and there as a teenager I fell in love every Saturday with a foreign woman — Jeanne Moreau, Simone Signoret, Melina Mercouri. Women worth dying for. Women who might kill you. The original image of “Red Clay” is a native goddess. Ava Gardner, one of the few American actresses with the epic beauty and grand gestures and sweeping self-destructiveness of a great star. Ava Gardner grew up in North Carolina and every Tarheel with any romance in his body sensed what an extraordinary gift we’d given the world in her. Stella Doyle in “Red Clay” is such a woman, on trial for murdering her husband. The story imagines an adolescent boy’s coming to share the truth of his father’s belief that any man who hadn’t desired Stella Doyle had missed out on being alive.

Mabel Maney is a book artist and writer living in San Francisco. She is the author of the gay and lesbian Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys parodies: The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse, The Case of the Good-for-Nothing Girlfriend, and A Ghost m the Closet. Her short stories have appeared in many anthologies, including Girlfriend Number 1. Beyond Definition, and Out for Blood.

• I was in a cranky mood on the day Victoria Brownworth, a writer and editor, called me and asked if I could write a story for one of her mystery anthologies. Whenever I get tired of all the work it takes to get one girl and her small dog through the day, I think of my maternal grandmother, who sewed her own clothes, made bread from scratch, and made enough quilts to blanket the entire Great Lakes region. Then I feel crankier.

What better way to work oneself out of a bad mood than with a tidy little murder?

The setting is my grandmother’s basement in Appleton, Wisconsin, where I spent many a stifling summer reading by flashlight in the cool darkness. Although my grandparents bear little resemblance to the nice couple in the story, I must confess I’ve never forgotten my grandfather’s lesson on how to skin a catfish. “First, make sure your knife is sharp,” and so on. Despite the fact that my grandparents were devout Catholics, and so considered even the thought of murder a sin. I think they’d be pleased that their home was the setting for this story.

Besides, few tears will be shed for the corpse. If anyone deserves his fate, it’s our Mr. Feeley.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author, under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, of several mystery /psychological suspense novels, including Snake Eyes, Nemesis, Soul/Mate, and, most recently, Double Delight. She has published mystery fiction in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Since 1978, she has lived and taught in Princeton, New Jersey.

• “Will You Always Love Me?” is one of a number of thematically related stories I’ve written in recent years that turn upon questions of love, fidelity’, and the acknowledgment of or denial of “truth”: Can our most intense love relationships withstand “truth”? Or is love, in a crucial sense, based upon the purposeful denial of certain elements of “truth”? The story leapt into my head after I’d heard just the skeleton of a tale of a woman haunted by her sister’s brutal murder many years before. So far as the woman knew, her sister’s murderer had been found and sentenced to life imprisonment. But, to me, that seemed only the start of another, more elusive and tantalizing story.

George Pelecanos was born and raised in and around Washington. D.C., where he has lived his entire life. He is the author of six novels, including the Nick Stefanos mysteries, Shoedog, The Big Blowdown, and King Suckerman.

• “When You’re Hungry” is the only short story I have written, and my sole work of fiction that is set outside of my native D.C. I wrote this story in the fall of 1993, during a three-month stay in Brazil, when my wife and I were in the process of adopting our second child.

At the time, with a one thousand percent rate of inflation. Brazil was on the verge of economic collapse, with no safety net provided for its people. Every day, standing on the balcony of my apartamento in Recife. I witnessed mothers and their children sifting through garbage bins in search of something edible, or simply lying down in the street from hunger and its attendant fatigue. In restaurants, tiny hands attached to painfully thin forearms reached beneath dividers, begging for table scraps. Meanwhile, receiving my daily English newspaper, I first began to read of the so-called “revolution” being touted in America, where our own welfare system would be radically restructured or completely eliminated.

This story is told from an American’s point of view until it nears the end, where it switches, significantly, to the point of view of a Brazilian native.

As a toiler in the arena of crime/noir. I’ve often been tagged as a “dark” writer. “When You’re Hungry” truly earns that description. There is nothing more horrifying than the sight of a starving child.

S. J. Rozan is the author of the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, which includes China Trade, Concourse (winner of the 1995 Shamus Award for Best Novel from the Private Eye Writers of America), Mandarin Plaid, and No Colder Place. Chin/Smith stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, P.I. Magazine, and numerous anthologies; “Hoops” was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. S. J. Rozan is a practicing architect born, raised, and living in New York City.

• “Hoops,” like everything I write, is about motivation and moral ambiguity: what makes people do what they do and how they justify what they do when it results in evil. The characters in it are essentially characters I had used in my novel Concourse; I found I couldn’t let them go so easily. The story, like so many stories, is about dreams unfulfilled and unfulfillable, and undreamt. It’s also about people who have no power and very little experience with justice, using what power they can scrape together to demand justice — and, in the end, it’s about the impossibility of justice: a word we use all the time, but one, I think, with no real meaning.

Allen Steele was born in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his B.A. in communications from New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, and his М.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He became a full-time science fiction writer in 1988, following publication of his first short story, “Live from the Mars Hotel” (Asimov’s mid-Dec. ’88). Since then he has become a prolific author of novels, short stories, and essays.

His novels include Orbital Decay; Clark County, Space; Lunar Descent; Labyrinth of Night; The Jericho Iteration; and The Tranquillity Alternative. He has also published two collections of short fiction. Rude Astronauts and All-American Alien Boy.

His “The Death of Captain Future” received the 1996 Hugo Award for host novella, won a 1996 Science Fiction Weekly Reader Appreciation Award, and was nominated for a Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. His novelette “The Good Rat” was also nominated for a Hugo in the same year. Orbital Decay received the 1990 Locus Award for best first novel and Clark County, Space was nominated for the 1991 Phillip K. Dick Award.

Allen Steele now lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife and three dogs.

• Until the idea for “Doblin’s Lecture” occurred to me, virtually all of my published novels and short stories were science fiction; although my last two novels are suspense thrillers, they’re primarily SF in terms of genre classification. When I sat down to write this particular tale, though. I wasn’t concerned about which genre it would fall into: I simply wanted to tell a good, scary story.

A couple of years ago. I read a brief item in the New York Times about how Jeffrey Dahmer, the convicted serial killer, had received about $30.000 since he had been sent to prison, principally in the form of small checks sent from people who apparently felt sorry for him; one of his benefactors had gone so far as to give him a Bible along with a check for several thousand dollars. I then recalled reading elsewhere that John Wayne Gacy made a tidy profit from sales of his paintings while he was on death row. Charles Manson occasionally receives royalties from the songs he wrote before he became notorious: a small indie label has released an album he recorded while in prison. And since the New York State Supreme Court recently struck down the “Son-of-Sam Law” as unconstitutional, there’s nothing to prevent David Berkowitz from writing a best-selling memoir (a “kill-and-tell”). So why would anyone give money to these monsters, or pay for their mediocre art?

The answer is obvious: America is fascinated with serial killers. We regularly send books like The Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac, anti Mind Hunter shooting up the bestseller lists, and we make movies like Natural Horn Killers and Seven into box-office hits. Multiple murderers, both real and fictional, are staples of popular culture. Which person has better name-recognition: Stephen Hawking or Jeffrey Dahmer? Hawking is the most brilliant physicist since Albert Einstein while Dahmer slaughtered dozens of young men, but who is more famous?

Playing the “what if” game common to science fiction. I then asked myself: If Manson or Berkowitz (or, speaking in the past tense, Gacy or Dahmer) were put on a university lecture circuit, would I buy a ticket to see him speak? Yes, I probably would, it only out of curiosity. And it I knew that he would perform a demonstration of his... well, talent... during the course of his presentation? Probably not, but only because I’m squeamish about violence.

However. I’m sure I could easily scalp the ticket for a few hundred bucks an hour before showtime.

Brad Watson is from Meridian. Mississippi, and earned degrees from Mississippi State University and the University of Alabama. His first book. Last Days of the Dog-Men, was published by W. W. Norton in April 1996: Dell published a paperback edition in the spring of 1997. He has taught creative writing at the University of Alabama and currently teaches at Harvard University.

• “Kindred Spirits” grew out of a couple of anecdotes people told me while I was a reporter on the Alabama Gulf Coast. I heard the story of a man who repeatedly — with little effect — beat up his wife’s lover. And I heard the story of a wild pig hunt that went wrong. When I first wrote my story. I dressed these anecdotes up considerably but had nowhere to take them. The stories of the murders — the narrator’s story of a murder trial and the loss of his wife, and Bailey’s story about his own ill-fated marriage — began to form around these early anecdotes as I worked on successive drafts. And I began to understand the kindred natures of these men and their stories, their patterns of violence, betrayal, and loss.

John Weisman is one of the select company of authors to have written both fiction and nonfiction New York Times bestsellers. He has written seven novels, including four in the current, best-selling Rogue Warrior® series. Two of his nonfiction projects. Shadow Warrior, the story of CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, and Rogue Warrior, the autobiography of Navy Commander Richard Marcinko and the top-secret unit Seal Team Six, were the subjects of 60 Minutes segments.

Weisman and his wife, Susan, a State Department official, live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with their three dogs.

• I hadn’t attempted a short story since college. Then Jim Grady called and asked me to contribute one for a collection he was putting together as a way to raise money for a charitable organization called Share Our Strength. With the perfect confidence of the naff, I told him he’d have something from me in a couple of weeks. Then I.sat down and tried to write. Nada. Bupkes. I must have false-started half a dozen times. Problem was, writing a short story was impossible. I write novels; that’s marathoning — you grind out the words day after day. Grady needed a forty-meter dash. I had no idea how to start, how to dig down to get the right traction for this word-sprint.

Finally, I convinced myself that I wasn’t writing a short story, but the prologue to a new novel. That worked. Indeed, once I’d shattered the initial psychological barrier, the characters broke away; started acting on their own, and the story told itself. One interesting sidebar to the little psy-op I ran on myself is that I definitely want to see a lot more of the protagonist of the story. And so, “There Are Monsterim” may turn out to be the prologue of a novel after all.

Monica Wood is the author of Secret Language, a novel; Description, a book on fiction writing; Short Takes, a teaching guide to contemporary fiction; and 12 Multicultural Novels: A Reading and Teaching Guide. Her short stories have been widely published and anthologized.

• Forgiveness is a theme that runs through much of my fiction, and usually I don’t recognize the theme until a story is well underway. “Unlawful Contact” is the first story I ever wrote that began with a theme. I asked myself, “Is it possible to forgive the unforgivable?” and set up a situation in which a character wishes to do just that.

My story’s inclusion in a book of mysteries was, at first, bewildering to me. Otto Penzler, the series editor, assured me that the story fit the requirements because it involved a crime. As I reread the story myself I recognized not one but two crimes. The brother’s act is a crime in a formal sense; the sister’s desire to forgive him is, in the eyes of her family, a messier, even less comprehensible crime — as are all crimes of the heart.