Stacked Deck: A Short Story Collection

...But First, A Few Words from the Author

Topic for debate: Should a fiction writer specialize in one type of story, or should he diversify as much as possible?

In today’s limited marketplace, many writers feel specialization is the way to go. Concentrate on one particular category, such as crime fiction; perhaps go a step further and concentrate on a particular sub-genre, such as the series detective story. By doing this, proponents claim, the writer avoids the pitfail of spreading himself too thin; and hones his craft in effect by repetition — writing the same sort of thing over and over until he perfects it.

I don’t happen to agree with this literary philosophy. There is too much danger, it seems to me, of stagnation; of familiarity breeding burnout or complacency; of the fine edge of one’s abilities being unconsciously dulled rather than sharpened. The challenge of writing — and, one hopes, writing well — something new and different on a regular basis is what helps keep my interest keen and what allows me to stretch and grow. Over the past quarter-century I’ve written mainstream, detective, suspense, adventure, horror, fantasy, Western, men’s magazine, erotic, and science fiction stories — most types of each, from the satirical to the deadly serious. Not always successfully, God knows, but always with enthusiasm and without failing to learn something about my craft. Even in my series fiction — the “Nameless Detective” has now appeared in nearly twenty novels and more than thirty short stories — I try to make each book and each story in some way distinct from the others, to the point of taking a major departural risk now and then (vide: Shackles).

The present collection is an example in miniature of my philosophy of fiction writing (or “fiction racketeering,” as Jack Woodford used to call it). Each of the seven selections is quite different from the others in both style and content, though each in essence is a crime story.

“Stacked Deck,” for openers, is solidly in the Black Mask school (and was, in fact, first published in the New Black Mask, a short-lived revival of that fine old pulp magazine). It is one of the few stories of this type that I’ve done, despite the critics and labelers who persist in calling the “Nameless Detective” series “hardboiled.” (The “Nameless” series is actually humanist crime fiction — or, as another labeler once termed it, “confessional crime fiction.”) The true hardboiled story was born in the Depression Thirties and died in the post-war Forties; everything since that has been labeled hardboiled is either a pallid imitation, or an homage perpetuated by a fictioneer such as me who loves the real thing, or some other kind of criminous tale (usually one featuring a private detective as protagonist) that has been misrepresented so it will fit into a convenient niche.

“Night Freight,” which originally appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in early 1967, was my second published story. (The first, “You Don’t Know What It’s Like,” a shameless Hemingway pastiche, appeared in Shell Scott Mystery Magazine a few months earlier.) Flawed though it is, “Night Freight” is a reasonably effective sample of the psychological crime story, the sort that has a nasty little stinger in its tail.

“Here Comes Santa Claus” is a “Nameless” yam, the only one I’ve included here. It was commissioned for Mistletoe Mysteries, an anthology edited by Charlotte MacLeod of, according to its publishers, “new mystery stories centered around a Yuletide theme, written by some of the best practitioners of the cozy mystery working today.” See what I mean about misrepresentative labeling? I chose it because it is both an atypical “Nameless” and a humorous crime story. (Well, I think it’s funny, anyway. Ho, ho, ho...)

“I Didn’t Do It,” from Maxim Jakubowski’s New Crimes 2, is several things despite its brevity: a monologue story, told entirely in the singular voice of the narrator; a slice-of-life character study; an exercise in dark irony; a commentary on present-day attitudes and mores. And if that sounds as though I’m portraying myself as a literateur who sets out to write multi-level set pieces, let me hasten to add that I began the thing with only a vague notion of where it was going and didn’t realize what I had until I finished it. So much for genius. I’ll settle for blind luck.

“Connoisseur” started life in a puzzle book, though it isn’t and was never intended to be a puzzle story. Puzzled? The explanation is simple: It was written for an anthology called Who Done It? edited by Alice Laurence and Isaac Asimov, in which the authors’ names were presented in code and the reader was challenged to literally decipher who done what. For this reason, contributors were urged to create a story that was markedly different from their usual output, so that readers couldn’t make easy guesses based on style and content. “Connoisseur,” therefore, is unlike anything I did before or have done since — an old-fashioned biter-bit story featuring a lot of esoteric information about fine wines. (Amazing, isn’t it, how knowledgeable on a given subject us scribblers can seem to be after a little diligent research?)

“Out Behind the Shed” is a pure horror story — not the bloody slasher variety so prevalent today, though it does contain a measure of violence, but the ambiguous kind calculated, after the fashion of William Fryer Harvey’s “August Heat,” to make you think as well as shudder. Charles Grant included it in the last of his fine series of Shadows anthologies.

“Vanishing Act,” written in collaboration with Michael Kurland, is another kind of detective tale — an impossible-crime story, one of my favorite subgenres, about a baffling murder and disappearance during a stage magic show. The sleuth is a magician named Christopher Steele, who was created as a series detective but who appeared in just one other Kurland/Pronzini impossible-crime novelette, “Quicker than the Eye”; both stories were first published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in the mid-Seventies. I can’t remember exactly why we didn’t write more Steele adventures. Certainly we both enjoyed concocting the two, in particular because the Magic Cellar, the setting of the stories, was an actual San Francisco night club which catered to local writers and in which Michael and I spent many pleasant evenings. (One of the characters in “Vanishing Act,” Cedric Clute, is a real person who did in fact own the real Magic Cellar.) The Cellar no longer exists; it and Earthquake McGoon’s, a jazz club that shared the same premises, were rendered extinct in the late Seventies when the building was tom down to make way for a damn parking garage.

Have I succeeded in my aim to not only write seven different varieties of crime story, but to write each of them well? You’re the final judge of that. If you give thumbs-up to at least four of the selections, I’ll be happy. And relieved. Fiction writers, unlike multi-millionaire baseball players, have to maintain an above — .500 batting average to stay in the major leagues.

— Bill Pronzini

Sonoma, California

April 1991