A Century of Great Suspense Stories

Introduction

At my book signings and at mystery conference seminars, I’m frequently approached by fans who ask for advice in getting started in the business of writing suspense fiction. Many times these folks tell me that their intention is to start along this career path by taking up short stories and, once they’ve learned that medium, graduating to novels.

I have to break the news to them that this would be like mastering Japanese to help them learn Russian. Yes, both short stories and novels are literary forms that convey a fictional story to readers, but that’s about the end of the similarity. The skills used in writing a novel are very different from those required to write a short story. Crafting a story obviously takes less time than writing a novel but I’d venture to say that, word for word, the short story is a far more ambitious undertaking. Nuance and suggestion are the keys to successful stories; there is no room for needless atmosphere or characterization or for overwrought exposition. As the adage goes: I didn’t have much time, so I wrote it long.

The responses a short-story writer seeks to elicit are different from a novelist’s. Readers of short fiction have less opportunity to learn to love, or hate, the characters and to form attachments to the locale, so the emotional force in short stories derives from plotting. Twists and surprises are the readers’ payoff and the best short stories are those that deliver a one-two punch. I find that in my novels my protagonists, while possibly flawed, are at their core decent, likable individuals who strive mightily against truly nasty evildoers. They more or less prevail. In the stories I write, on the other hand, that ain’t necessarily so; my apparent heroes often emerge at the end of the story as heinous villains, while the innocent suffer like Job.

Short stories are, in other words, a unique literary form — and one that has remained remarkably consistent throughout this century. Slang, syntax, and fashion may have changed, but — adjusted for inflation, so to speak — the structure and dynamics of stories written in the early days of the century are virtually the same as those written today, as the selections in this volume attest.

It was an enviable job to compile these stories, though culling a handful from the thousands written over the past one hundred years and daring to label those the best was, well, an arduous task. Making the job even more difficult is the key defining word in the title: suspense. While all crime fiction — from whodunits to procedurals to cozies to hard-boiled detective stories — is about conflict and therefore should be suspenseful, I’ve focused on stories whose purpose is to unnerve readers and speed them to the end of the tale, where a twist or turn awaits, rather than to let them spend a pleasant twenty minutes or so with a favorite series character or puzzle about who a killer might be or laugh at the wry observations of a witty amateur sleuth. This has resulted in some glaring omissions, but I find comfort in the fact that the authors not represented here appear voluminously in other anthologies; their work is not neglected.

Apologies disposed of, let me then say what a delightful mix we have here.

While many writers of short fiction recount the exploits of public law enforcers and private detectives (here represented by Marcia Muller; Mickey Spillane; Ross Macdonald, and the mother of detective fiction, Anna Katharine Green), it is in the cobwebby attic of psychological suspense that the short story excels, and these are the tales that form the core of this anthology. Among the contributors who’ve mined this vein are Harlan Ellison, John Lutz, John D. MacDonald, Margaret Millar, Ed McBain, Sharyn McCrumb, Sara Paretsky, and James M. Cain. Some writers in the collection provide us with uncompromisingly grim stories while others take a more fanciful or ironic look at the workings of the criminal mind (Donald Westlake, Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block, and Ed Gorman).

The focus here is largely on American writers, but no collection of this sort would be complete without a sampling of the superb writers from across the Big Puddle, among them Robert Barnard, Ruth Rendell, and... we’ll take a further jump, across the Big Channel — the prolific Frenchman George Simenon.

Every practitioner approaches the craft of writing differently, and short-story authors are no exception. Some of the stories here are lush, some are austere — in the best postmodern tradition. Length varies dramatically, points of view differ — even the methodology of creation varies significantly. We have represented here perhaps the two most polar opposite of craftsmen: Stanley Ellin would slowly rework and polish each page of his stories many times before proceeding to the next. Rex Stout, on the other hand, shunned revision at all costs and his fiction would explode, virtually unedited, from his mind.

Some of the writers here are specialists in a particular genre and never deviate from that category; others are comfortable with other genres. Contributor Fredric Brown wrote science fiction in addition to suspense. Stephen King is, of course, the master of the horror genre (not to mention any other category he might wish to write in). Robert Barnard, another of the British delegation here, is a well-respected critic and writer of nonfiction.

No anthology compiling suspense in the 1900s would be complete without a few legal thrillers (not as new a genre as youngsters who’ve recently discovered John Grisham would think — consider Bleak House and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy). Here we have stories by masters Steve Martini; Lisa Scottoline; Jeremiah Healy; and Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of the most popular fictional lawyer of all time — Perry Mason.

The settings of these stories vary widely and several I’ve included because, in addition to being excellent tales, locale is virtually another character: the Southwest (Tony Hillerman), the Carolinas (Michael Malone), the California/Nevada woods (Bill Pronzini), and Papua New Guinea (Janwillem van de Wetering).

A final note: Special mention should be made of several of our contributors, who might be called the linchpins of short suspense fiction in the past one hundred years: the cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay, known to the world as Ellery Queen, critic and reviewer Anthony Boucher, and Edward D. Hoch, who is perhaps the only person in the country whose full-time career has been writing short stories.

Enough of my rambling. Now it’s time to do your part: Make a cup of tea or pour a glass of whisky, sit yourself down comfortably in your favorite chair, and enjoy the highlights of a hundred years of writing by men and women who love nothing more than to take their readers on a brief, but delightful, literary roller coaster ride.

Jeffery Deaver