The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Introduction

Recently I was asked by Otto Penzler, the series editor of this collection, to come up to Manhattan and do a reading at his store, The Mysterious Bookshop, in Tribeca. The event was to promote a huge volume of classic pulp stories that Otto had edited, Black Mask-era work from the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain, Erie Stanley Gardner, Horace McCoy, and many others. Initially I was looking to read something obscure and promote an underappreciated writer, but in the end I went with a selection from Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind,” perhaps his most beloved short story. To read Chandler to an audience in New York was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, and I took it. Here’s the famous first paragraph of “Red Wind”:

Beautiful, right?

After the reading, I spoke with many of the people who had come to the event. One of them opined that “Red Wind” might have been the best thing Chandler had ever written, as the short fiction form had forced him to focus and had prevented him from meandering and losing his grip on plot, one of the few negatives critics have cited when commenting on his novels. “Red Wind” is a remarkable short story, though at fifty-seven pages (my Ballantine paperback edition from 1977) it stretches the definition of “short.” I don’t know that it can be called Chandler’s best (for me, it’s The Long Goodbye, hands down), but then “best” is subjective, up to and including the contents of the book you are holding in your hands.

Now would be an appropriate time to explain how the stories in this volume came to be chosen. The mechanics went like this: Otto Penzler and his esteemed associate combed through hundreds of crime/mystery stories published during the year and came up with fifty candidates deemed to be of the highest quality. The fifty were sent to me in a cardboard box, and I read them. From the fifty, I chose twenty stories. Biographies were not supplied. I am friendly with a couple of the writers, and know the names of several others, but I was not acquainted whatsoever with the majority of the authors whom I chose. Don’t know their race, ethnicity, political persuasion, or shoe size, and in some cases could not determine their gender. I chose the stories that I enjoyed reading the most and that I hoped you would enjoy, too.

Having said that, I was asked to be the editor, and took the invitation seriously, so naturally the stories I selected are representative of the type of prose I generally read. What you will be reading here has a degree of realism to it. I liked the characters and recognized something in them that rang true. The writing, I promise you, is good, thoughtful writing.

Which brings me to my next point. There is another book out there, from the same publisher as this one, called The Best American Short Stories. I would contend that several stories in this collection are among the best American short stories of the year. So why two books? The short answer is marketing. There are folks who fancy themselves too erudite to try a volume of mystery stories. They believe that one is mere entertainment, and the other is good for you. It’s my opinion that any kind of reading is good for you but, rather than reopen the literary-versus-genre can of worms, I will again defer to Raymond Chandler, from a section of his landmark essay “The Simple Art of Murder”:

Damn, he’s good.

I’ve leaned pretty hard on Raymond Chandler for this introduction, and there’s a reason for that. Chandler, and the teacher who turned me on to his books, pretty much changed the course of my life.

I was a senior at the University of Maryland when I took a college course called Hardboiled Detective Fiction (ENGL 379X), an elective that I used to fill out my schedule, an easy three credits on the home stretch to graduation. I recall the syllabus course description as “read and discuss paperback novels.” which sounded like something I could do, despite the fact that I was not even a casual reader of novels at the time.

The teacher was a bearded, bearish fellow named Charles C. Mish, an accomplished, intelligent man who did not look down his nose at the subject matter but rather sought to give us an appreciation of what he considered to be an important, uniquely American art. Twice a week he paced the aisles of our classroom, paperback rolled in his meaty fist, converting us with his enthusiasm and energy. I learned later that he was in Dutch with his academic colleagues for treating crime fiction with the same reverence as one would the classics. It made me like him even more.

The books we read that semester included Hammett’s Red Harvest, Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury, John D. MacDonalds The Deep Blue Good-by (the first Travis McGee); and Ross Macdonald’s The Blue Hammer (late Lew Archer). Though it is a spy novel, John le Carré’s Call for the Dead was in there, too, probably because Mish simply liked it. And in the mix was Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake.

I was struck at once, as if socked in the jaw, with Chandler’s descriptive powers, and that he could say so much about the human condition by setting his story in a world mostly shunned by “serious” novelists (I had not yet read Steinbeck. Edward Anderson, Upton Sinclair, A. I. Bezzerides, John Fante, or any of the other social realists I would begin to devour in the coining years). Mostly I was impressed with the clarity of his prose, obviously written to be read and understood by folks who did not know the secret handshake. It was populist literature, and I wanted to be a part of it.

From the early pages of The Lady in the Like, here is the introduction to the dominant female character in the book:

Those eyebrows and the “not unstudied” wave of her hair are deft shorthand for the true nature of Miss Fromsette’s character. She, and the brutal cop, Lieutenant Degarmo, are two of Chandler’s greatest creations. The novel ends, hauntingly, in the following manner:

That clinical, unromantic view of death and a distrust of authority figures and politicians, hallmarks of the genre, fit the worldview of a certain segment of my generation, who had rejected the hippie-gone-yuppic lifestyle that emerged as the decade turned and the Reagan years began. The time was ripe for many of us to connect or reconnect with crime lit. Writers like Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, Newton Thornburg, and Kem Nunn were turning crime fiction on its head, implicitly telling young hopefuls with ambition that the game didn’t have to be played the same way anymore. Several students in my class had come to the hard-boiled canon through an interest in punk and new wave music. Pre-punk rockers like Warren Zevon had been writing songs influenced by California crime fiction since the early seventies. Reggae and ska bands had hooked into James Bond and spaghetti Westerns, and guitar-is-back bands like the Dream Syndicate and artists like Stan Ridgway were crafting sonic, short-story valentines to Ross Macdonald and Jim Thompson. What the punk ethic meant to me and the prospect of my work was that I didn’t need the pedigree of an advanced writing program degree to, at the very least, try to contribute something worthwhile to the genre. If an untrained musician could pick up a guitar and make righteous noise, I could attempt to do the same thing with a pen and notebook. The fact that I knew nothing about the craft or the business side of publishing actually went in my favor. If I hadn’t been so naive, I might not have given it a try.

I know I’m not alone. If you throw a rock in a room full of modern crime novelists, it will probably hit someone who got ignitioned after reading his or her first Chandler. Or Hammett, Macdonald, Patricia Highsmith. Robert Parker. Lawrence Block, Leonard, Crumley... take your pick. And don’t forget the teachers. I bet there is one good teacher in most of our backgrounds who at one point gave us words of encouragement.

Still, there is no obvious direct line from the grandfathers and fathers of crime fiction to the stories in this collection. I certainly don’t think you will detect anyone here trying to be Chandleresque. Neither are any of the contributors writing in a faux hard-boiled style. Though there are twists and surprises to be discovered, none of these stories are puzzles, locked-room mysteries, or private detective tales. I did not deliberately exclude the traditional. I simply chose these authors because of their original, unique voices. But make no mistake, we are all standing on the shoulders of the writers who came before us and left their indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.

I hope you enjoy these wonderful stories.

George Pelecanos