Suspended Sentences

Introduction

Writing introductions to one’s own stories is at best an exercise in awkwardness (if this isn’t self-promotion, what is?) and at least an exercise in redundancy (if a story cannot stand on its own, without explanatory introduction, then isn’t it inadequate?).

So I hope you will forgive my cowardice in trying to steer a course that avoids both the foregoing hazards. In the prefatory notes that accompany each story I’ll abstain from discussion of the story itself and thus try to avoid the temptation to defend or boast. Instead, I’ve tried to address the circumstances that inspired or provoked each story.

Most of these were written during or shortly after trips to the locales in which the stories are set. Most of them were written by hand in notebooks while on airplanes or beaches or in hotels; later at home I would type and revise them.

Short stories are harrowing: for some of us they are precarious and difficult and unforgiving, which may explain why I have written twice as many books as short stories. For this paucity please grant the excuse, if you will, that there are very few markets for short stories and even fewer markets that pay enough.

(Do not ask for a definition of enough. To a writer there is no such thing as enough.)

As to subject matter, my short stories fall mainly into three categories. There are espionage stories, collected in the book CHECKPOINT CHARLIE a few years ago; there are Western stories, anthologized hither and yon but not yet collected in one place; and there are crime-suspense stories, most of which are gathered herein. Some of the tales overlap more than one category because my background is in the American West and so that is where many of the yarns are situated.

I’m grateful to Ed Gorman for suggesting that we compile these stories and for having the nerve to publish this volume.