Eighteen

Introduction

Let me tell you about Jan Burke.

I remember thinking sometime during the early 1990s that the baby boom had finally hit the mystery field. Each month brought a crop of new young writers to publishers’ lists, people I’d never heard of and probably would never read. When Jan Burke’s first novel about reporter Irene Kelly, Goodnight, Irene, appeared in 1993 it caused barely a ripple on my consciousness. Even when it was nominated for both the Agatha and Anthony Awards that year I didn’t feel the need to read it. There were too many other books and too little time for them all.

My opinion began to change the following year when Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine published her small gem of a story called “Unharmed,” which promptly won that magazine’s annual Readers Award. While publishing a new Irene Kelly novel each year, Jan was also turning up with increasing frequency in magazines, anthologies and limited editions. One story, “A Fine Set of Teeth,” was unique in having an audio version read by the author with music by her husband Tim Burke. It was the first Irene Kelly short story and I found it a delightful mixture of music and mystery, with some very funny musician jokes along the way.

Though I’d seen Jan at various writers’ gatherings over the years, the first time we had a real conversation was at the 2000 Left Coast Crime gathering in Tucson. We were sharing a table in the signing room after our panels, autographing books and magazines for fans, when a member of the organizing committee came along, urging us to attend the 2001 Left Coast Crime in Anchorage the following year. The event included a plan to fly some writers in small planes to remote communities that had rarely if ever been visited by an author. Inviting someone from cold and snowy Rochester to visit cold and snowy Alaska in February was an exercise in futility and I quickly declined. However I was more than a little surprised when Jan seemed interested in the trip. It occurred to me then that she was a rare writer indeed, one interested not just in promoting her own books but in publicizing all mysteries, all reading, to those who might never have been touched by the pleasures the written word can bring.

Two months later at the Mystery Writers of America awards dinner in New York, Jan Burke won the Edgar for Bones, judged the best novel of 1999. It was the first of her novels I’d read, but certainly not the last. In February of 2001 Jan did indeed go to Alaska, and in May of that year she won the Agatha Award for her story “The Man in the Civil Suit,” published within Malice Domestic 9.

Jan has played an active role in writers’ organizations, chairing several promotional programs for Sisters in Crime and most recently serving as president of MWA’s Southern California chapter. But it is her short stories that interest us here. Those readers who know her only through the Irene Kelly novels will be surprised at the wide range of style and subject matter in these eighteen stories, two of them published here for the first time.

Certainly Irene is here, and one new story “Devotion” brings back some familiar characters from Bones. But you’ll also find unusual historical mysteries like “Miscalculation,” “An Unexpected Condition of the Heart,” “A Man of My Stature,” and “The Haunting of Carrick Hollow,” all showing remarkable degrees of research. There are stories of kidnapping and murder, stories for dog-lovers and Hitchcock-lovers, and one new story, “The Mouse,” that has no crime in it at all. You’ll even find a couple of ghost stories lurking here. One of them, “The Abbey Ghosts,” is a fine tale already included in an anthology of the year’s best mysteries.

Read them, enjoy them! Jan Burke is the real thing.

Edward D. Hoch

Rochester, New York