The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Contributors’ Notes

David Ballard was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, the son of two teachers. He majored in English at Miami University, and he received his law degree from the Ohio State University. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife, Jeanne, and his son, Jack. “Child Support” is his first published story.

• I am addicted to games. I also love reading suspense stories where a character encounters some sort of contest or wager, whether by choice or coercion, and naturally the stakes are high. My earliest influences are the stories of Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, and the early nonsupernatural stories of Stephen King.

“Child Support” is that kind of suspense story. The idea began as a “what if’ scenario while I was throwing Frisbee in the park with Jake, our black Labrador, and Jack was watching in his stroller. I began playing a mental game of how many Jake could catch in a row, and then it struck me just how secluded we really were in that park as it was getting darker.

I listen to movie soundtracks as I write. I’ll pick a certain one to set the right mood for a particular story, and then I’ll play it over and over until the story is finished. For “Child Support,” I must have listened to the soundtrack for Pulp Fiction at least three hundred times.

Charles Raisch at New Mystery Magazine accepted my story and published it as an “author debut,” something he tries to accomplish in each issue. I cannot imagine any better care and handling of a new writer than what the folks at that magazine gave me.

Scott Bartels is a graduate of the University of North Florida, where he won the North Florida Young Writers Award. This is his first published piece. He doesn’t use the “F word” nearly as often as this story might lead you to believe.

• “Swear Not by the Moon” started with nothing more than a title (“Creole the Killer”) and the last sentence. Then I set about crossing the twain that separated the two. It was never a matter of wanting to see how the title and that last line intersected, but a matter of needing to. I paced the streets of the Quarter with Creole, rattled about in his empty house, traversed I-ioona shared pilgrimage.

So you can imagine my consternation when Tamaqua offered to publish the piece but asked me to change the title to “almost anything else.” For whatever it says about me, I agonized over this as much as I did the names of my children. I finally settled on Juliet’s admonition about pinning one’s love to things variable, although I ultimately disagree with her since we all wax and wane.

This story is about a number of things, among them, reconciling obligations with addictions. Creole’s is heroin, and I’d like to think that he beats it. Mine is writing, and I hope I never do.

Born in Buffalo, Lawrence Block has lived in New York City most of his adult life — though he travels almost as much as Keller, if to less purpose. His fifty-plus books range from the urban noir of Matthew Scudder to the urbane effervescence of Bernie Rhodenbarr, and include four volumes of short stories. An MWA Grand Master, Block has won a slew of awards, including three Edgars, and been presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana.

• Short stories, I’ve come to feel, ought to speak for themselves; writers, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t. I’ll just say that Keller first saw the dark of day in a short story called “Answers to Soldier.” I never thought I’d have more to say about him, but what do I know? A few years later I wrote “Keller on Horseback” and “Keller’s Therapy” and realized I was writing a novel on the installment plan. The novel, Hit Man, consists of ten short stories, of which “Keller on the Spot” is the eighth. It is, like its fellows, a variation on a theme.

And it was written by hand, with a ball-point pen and a yellow pad, aboard the SS Nordlys off the coast of Norway. I don’t know that Norway got into the story at all, and the only water’s in the swimming pool, salt-free but heavy on the chlorine. But it seemed like an interesting thing to mention.

Mary Higgins Clark is the author of fifteen novels, beginning with Where Are the Children? and three short story collections, each of which has been an international best-seller. She is the mother of five and lives in Saddle River, New Jersey.

• I took my first writing course when I was twenty-one. The professor gave our class the best advice I’ve ever heard. “Take a dramatic situation, one that appeals to you, ask yourself two questions, ‘Suppose?’ and ‘What if?’ and turn that situation into fiction.

That was a long time ago, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I did add a third question, “Why?” because a strong motive is vital.

Last year when I was doing publicity for my newly released book, I was in the Midwest and read about a man who had been arrested for breaking into his neighbor’s home by cutting the cinderblocks in the common basement wall between his townhouse and hers.

The situation made me feel creepy, and I began to ask myself the three questions. Suppose? What if? Why?

“The Man Next Door” is my answer.

Merrill Joan Gerber has published five novels, among them King of the World, which won the Pushcart Editor’s Book Award for “a book of literary distinction,” and The Kingdom of Brooklyn, which was awarded the Ribalow Prize from Hadassah magazine “for the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme.” She has also published four volumes of short stories; the most recent, Anna in Chains, was published in 1998 by Syracuse University Press. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Redbook, The Sewanee Review, The Chattahoochee Review; The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. “I Don’t Believe This” was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, 1986. A recent essay was published in Commentary magazine. She studied writing with Andrew Lytle at the University of Florida, held a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship at Stanford, and now teaches writing at the California Institute of Technology. (More about Merrill Joan Gerber can be seen on her website at http://www.cco.cal-tech. edu/~mjgerber.)

• There are all kinds of mysteries in life and one of the most puzzling to me is the failure of friendship, or worse, the betrayal of friendship. In “This Is a Voice from Your Past” I examine the circumstances of such a failure and its terrifying consequences.

Edward D. Hoch, past president of the Mystery Writers of America and winner of its Edgar Award for best short story, is a native of Rochester, New York, where he still lives with his wife, Patricia. He is the author of some eight hundred published short stories and has appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for more than twenty-five years.

For twenty years Hoch edited Best Detective Stories of the Year and its successor, Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories. He has published forty-two books in all, including his two most recent collections, Diagnosis: Impossible and The Ripper of Storyville.

• Just thinking about writing a story like “The Old Spies Club” makes me feel old. My former British code expert, Jeffrey Rand, was introduced to readers of EQMM back in 1965, and for many years I made the mistake of aging him along with the calendar. Though he took early retirement from British Intelligence in 1976, he still manages to find mystery and intrigue just about everywhere.

And happily he isn’t aging nearly as fast these days as he once did.

Pat Jordan is a freelance writer living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is the author of hundreds of magazine articles (New York Times Magazine, GQ, Playboy, Men’s Journal, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Life, etc.) and nine books. “Beyond Dog” continues the adventures of Sol, Bobby, and Sheila, all of which have been published in Playboy.

• Sol, who was the inspiration for my story “The Mark,” which was selected for last year’s Best American Mystery Stories, was again the inspiration for this year’s selection, “Beyond Dog.” Before Sol was sent to prison on a marijuana smuggling conviction, he lived in the apartment next door to mine and my wife’s. When I took my dog, Hoshi, for a walk I often stopped first at Sol’s apartment to talk about his latest scam. One day, Hoshi was annoyed that Sol was delaying his walk, so he raised his leg and pissed on the chair Sol was sitting on.

Sol was very amused. It appealed to his perverse sense of humor, and after that he took a liking to Hoshi, whom he called either “The Hosh” or “My Man.”

Then Sol went away on his “sabbatical” to a prison in Georgia. Often, my wife, Hoshi, and I would visit him. Hoshi had to remain in the car while we talked to Sol in the prison visitors’ room. When we returned to the car Sol would already be walking across a field to his dormitory, so we would let Hoshi out of the car. Hoshi would smell Sol off in the distance and begin to howl pitifully while Sol waved to him.

After Sol returned from his sabbatical, he would often go with me to Hoshi’s obedience classes. One day, Hoshi’s trainer tried to introduce him to a 130-pound rottweiler. Hoshi took a distinct dislike to the rotty and leaped at him with a great gnashing of teeth. The trainer pulled back the rotty and just looked at my 40-pound Hoshi in disbelief. Sol was looking at Hoshi, too, with a smile.

“Heh, you should make that little fella look in the mirror,” the trainer said. “Let him see what a little dog he is.”

Sol, not smiling now, snapped at him. “Heh, Slick. Don’t ever call him a dog, ya hear. The Hosh is Beyond Dog.”

Hence, the story.

Stuart M. Kaminsky lives, survives, and thrives in the sunshine and rain of Sarasota, Florida, where his story in this collection is set. Nominated five times for Edgar awards, he has written a dozen works of nonfiction and more than forty novels, including series books about Toby Peters, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Abraham Lieberman, and Jim Rockford. His film work includes writing credits for Once Upon a Time in America, Hidden Fears, Enemy Territory, and A Woman in the Wind. Kaminsky has a B.S. in journalism and an M.A. in English from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in speech (film, theater) from Northwestern University, where he taught for two decades. He is currently on leave from Florida State University.

• I’ve been writing short stories since I was fourteen and long ago found that the effort was relatively easy for me. I learned early that there was no correlation, however, between how long a story took to write and how good it might be. My short story writing was influenced by Jesse Stuart, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Chandler, and a brilliant teacher at the University of Illinois named George Scoufas. Now everything I read influences me. This morning I read about Arthur Ashe on my box of Wheaties and the legend of Dundee Marmalade on the familiar white jar on the breakfast table. Both were fascinating.

The story in this collection features Lew Fonesca, who has settled in Sarasota as a result of his car breaking down. Lew is a process server, a finder of people, and an easy mark for a sad story. This is neither the first nor the last of my stories about Lew and his friends.

Janice Law lives with her sportswriter husband in rural northeastern Connecticut. She has taught extensively at all levels, from junior high school to college, and is currently an instructor at the University of Connecticut. She has published fourteen books, ten of them mysteries, plus short stories and both popular and scholarly articles. She has been nominated for an Edgar.

• The germ of “Secrets,” as of so many of my short mystery stories, came from a newspaper brief: the unconventional weapon disposal method used in the story was a gift from the press. Characters to go with the plot emerged only when I thought of setting the story in an immigrant neighborhood like the ones on the west side of Hartford, Connecticut, familiar to me after many years of living in a neighboring town.

As the child of immigrants myself, I was especially sympathetic to the mother and daughter in “Secrets,” and it was a pleasure to put this story of violent emotions and remarkable self-control amid the mundane streets, triple-deckers, and small businesses of Connecticut’s capital city.

In stories like “Secrets,” I am chiefly interested in the surprises afforded by characters, in their unexpected capacities for good and evil, and in their ability to cope with disaster and opportunity.

John Lescroart (Less-kwa) has published ten novels. The first, Sunburn, was a paperback original that won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Best Novel by a California Author.

The following two books, Son of Holmes and Rasputin’s Revenge, are historical mysteries set in World War I featuring master sleuth Auguste Lupa, the son of Sherlock Holmes (who was perhaps the young Nero Wolfe).

The Dismas Hardy novels include Dead Irish (nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Novel), The Vig, Hard Evidence, The 13th Juror (a New York Times best-seller, nominated for the Anthony Award for Best Novel), and The Mercy Rule.

Lescroat’s other novels are urban thrillers and include A Certain Justice, which explores the themes of race and politics in America, and Guilt, the story of a successful and cultured man who is also a killer.

All of Lescroat’s thrillers have been selected by various book clubs, and all his books since Dead Irish have been translated and published extensively abroad. He lives in northern California and is working on his next Dismas Hardy novel.

• Years after first reading Watson’s delightful tease about the “missing” story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, and after I’d already enjoyed a couple of the humorous takes (Firesign Theatre, etc.) on this most famous of the apocryphal Holmesian titles, suddenly one day it came to me. I simply knew the story. It was amazing to me that it hadn’t already been written, for what else could a Holmes rat story be about except for the plague? It has to be the plague, a missing (or found) serum, and, of course, Professor Moriarty.

I was far from being in “Holmes mode,” as the last Holmesian thing I’d written was about a decade ago, but this one hit me in a bolt. The idea was so grandly obvious — surely it was floating around in the ether that day — that I was afraid somebody else would pluck it out and grab it before I did, so I started writing as fast as I could. This was one of the times that really felt almost as if someone were dictating the words to me (Watson?) (Doyle?) and I were a mere conduit. I started writing around ten in the morning, and by four o’clock that same day I’d finished it.

Sometimes they write themselves, and this was one of those times.

John Lutz’s first short story was published in 1966, and he’s been writing ever since. The author of over thirty novels and two hundred short stories and articles, Lutz is a past president of both Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America. He won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award in 1986, and the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award in 1982 and 1988. He is also a recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America Life Achievement Award. Lutz’s work has been translated into virtually every language and adapted for foreign radio and television. His novel The Ex was produced as a film of the same title, and his SWF Seeks Same was made into the hit movie Single White Female. He divides his time between St. Louis, Missouri, and Sarasota, Florida.

• I’ve long been a fan as well as a writer of Florida mystery fiction. One of the main reasons for this is that it has a special relationship with one of the most primal environments in the country. The lush foliage, teeming animal life, the sultry climate with its brilliant, revealing sunlight, pervade Floridians’ lives as well as their fiction. The heat is always on and getting hotter. In writing “Night Crawlers,” I wanted to make maximum use of that unique Florida atmosphere. Originally I was going to title the story “Primal,” because my object was to appeal to the primal part of the reader’s mind, the dark and merciless area where simple survival rules. Some researchers call it the crocodile part of the brain. I hope this story provides a path to that dim and desperate arena, but only for a brief visit.

Born and raised in eastern North Carolina, Margaret Maron lived “off’ for several years before returning to her family’s homeplace. In addition to a collection of short stories, she’s also the author of fifteen mystery novels featuring Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD, and District Court Judge Deborah Knott of Colleton County, North Carolina. Her works have been nominated for every major award in the American mystery field and are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary southern literature. In 1993 her North Carolina-based Bootlegger’s Daughter won the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Anthony Award for Best Mystery Novel of the Year, the Agatha Award for Best Traditional Novel, and the Macavity for Best Novel — an unprecedented sweep for a single novel. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime, current president of the American Crime Writers League, and a director on the national board for Mystery Writers of America.

• The best thing about short stories is that they’re short, which is why I spent the first twelve years of my career writing them. I was too intimidated by the novel’s length even to attempt one. My first book (Sigrid Harald’s first appearance) started out as a short story that kept growing, and Deborah Knott also began as a character in a short story. Although I’ve managed to fill three hundred consecutive manuscript pages fifteen times now, I think I’ll always prefer the shorter form.

Gardenias are the smell of summer in North Carolina, and for anyone who grew up with huge bushes of those fleshy white blossoms planted beneath every open window, they evoke a tangled web of memories. “Prayer for Judgment” details a young child’s memory-in-the-making.

Jay Mclnerney is still recovering from the tumult occasioned by the publication of his first novel, Bright Lights Big City, in 1984. To date, Bright Lights has been translated into twenty languages. Mclnerney accepts full blame for the screenplay of the United Artists movie, starring Michael J. Fox and Jason Robards. His subsequent novels include Ransom (1985), Story of My Life (1988), Brightness Falls (1992), and The Last of the Savages (1996). He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker And writes a monthly wine column for House and Garden. His new novel, Model Behavior, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in the fall of 1998. With his wife, Helen Bransford, and their twins, Maisie and Barrett, Mclnerney oscillates between New York City and Franklin, Tennessee.

• “Con Doctor” has its origins in a trip to a privately run prison outside of Nashville, Tennessee. A friend of mine, who was the prison doctor, invited me to spend a day making the rounds with him. I posed as an intern. It was an eye-opening and stomach-turning experience. The maladies and injuries described in the story were those we encountered over the course of the day. Whether I have done justice to the brooding malevolence of the place I can’t say.

Walter Mosley is the author of six best-selling Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, was filmed with Denzel Washington in the titular role. His work has been translated into twenty languages. Much of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, in which “Black Dog” first appeared, was initially published in Black Renaissance Noir, Buzz, Emerge, Esquire, GQ Los Angeles Times, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Story, and Whitney Museum. The central character and some elements of that book were converted into a filmscript by Mosley and televised by HBO. Born in Los Angeles, he now lives in New York City.

Born and raised in upstate New York, the setting for “Faithless” and much of her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is a professor of humanities at Princeton University and co-edits the Ontario Review with her husband, Raymond Smith. She is the author of a number of works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, she has published six mystery-suspense novels, including, most recently, Double Delight. A number of her stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and a story of hers was reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories 1997.

“Faithless” was originally imagined as a mysterious tale in which a family is haunted by the absence of a woman who, it eventually turns out, has never really been “absent.” For years in my notes I would come across this enigmatic situation. In time, it evolved into “Faithless,” which I’ve thought of as a miniature novel. At the heart of mystery is the profoundly obdurate, utterly stubborn and implacable refusal of certain individuals to see what is staring them in the face; and, if they’re forced to see, to deny it. This is called “faith” — “blind faith.” My alliance is with the doomed but defiant heroine of my story — and with “faithlessness.”

Peter Robinson was born in Castleford, Yorkshire. His first novel, Gallows View (1987), introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who has since appeared in eight more books and three short stories. Past Reason Hated, his fifth, won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel in 1992. Wednesday’s Child, the sixth, was nominated for an Edgar in 1995, and Innocent Graves, the eighth, also won the CWC Arthur Ellis Award. His short story “Innocence” won the CWC Award for Best Short Story. A collection of his short stories, Not Safe After Dark, is to be published by Crippen & Landru in the fall of 1998. He now lives in Toronto, where he occasionally teaches writing courses.

• Because I spend most of my time writing the Inspector Banks series, I find it especially liberating once in a while to try something different, and short stories provide the perfect outlet for this impulse. Though part of “The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage” takes place in Eastvale, Banks’s patch, it takes place in the fifties, before Banks was born, and it is far from being a police procedural. I have been a great Thomas Hardy fan for some years now, and this story has its origins in a visit my wife and I paid to the house in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, where Hardy was born and lived on and off until shortly after his marriage to Emma Gifford in 1874. We stood in the room where Hardy was cast aside as dead by the doctor who delivered him, only to be revived by a quick-thinking nurse. We also looked out on the same view he saw as he wrote his early books, up to Far from the Madding Crowd, and somehow the idea for a story about someone who actually knew Hardy began to form. It didn’t have a murder at that point — the crime came later — but it did have the two elements that most of my stories have in their early stages: a sense of place and an interesting character to explore. As it turned out, “The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage” became my first historical mystery.

Dave Shaw spent his youth playing baseball on a small field near his house in Loudonville, New York. He received his M.E.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and since then his stories have appeared in The Southern Anthology, The Quarterly, Southern Exposure, and many other magazines throughout the United States and abroad. His work has been awarded the Southern Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a Wurlitzer Foundation Grant. He lives with his wife in Pittsboro, North Carolina, where he plays on a slow-pitch softball team and is completing Cures for Gravity, a collection of stories.

• The best satire, I think, leaves us naked in a room with our clothes at our feet — clothes which, we suddenly realize, were see-through all along. In “Twelve Days out of Traction” I found a narrator and situation which I liked a great deal: a con-man whose crimes have more to do with anarchy and identity than with any willful cruelty. I also found a happy marriage between humor and anarchy. Laughter, I think, often is anarchy, an open acknowledgment of personal and societal foibles. At the same time, laughter also can be an acknowledgment that each of us perhaps desires, to some extent, that which is the object of our ridicule. I hoped “Twelve Days” ultimately would work as a story about surrender, in the process describing some of those odd transparent garments to which we all cling. If the story fails to achieve these aspirations, though, I hope it will at least make the reader laugh.

Helen Tucker grew up in Louisburg, North Carolina. A former newspaper reporter and writer for radio, she also worked in the editorial department of Columbia University Press in New York and as director of publicity and publications at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.

She is the author of eighteen novels and a number of short stories. In 1971 she became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Alumni Award from Wake Forest University, and in 1992 the Franklin County (North Carolina) Arts Council named her Artist of the Year for outstanding service in the field of literary arts.

She and her husband, William Beckwith, live in Raleigh, where she writes fiction full-time.

• Included on my “beat” as a newspaper reporter was Superior Court, and I was completely fascinated, not only by the machinations of the lawyers and the court system, but also by the criminals. Studying them, their motives, and exactly how their crimes were committed became almost second nature to me.

I think probably the idea for “The Power of Suggestion” first came to me as I watched one of those TV commercials for psychics, and I began to solve the mystery in my mind of how a woman could convince her husband that she was psychic.

Donald E. Westlake was born many years ago in the dorp of Brooklyn, New York, but was raised in exile in Albany, also in the great state of New York. He began telling lies at an early age, then figured out how to do so at a profit, and has never looked back. Telling lies for money, he has published over seventy novels, been credited (or debited) with five produced screenplays, and filled the interstices with short stories, criticism, and the occasional essay (aka occasional occasional). The only flaw in his happy existence is that he now finds it impossible to lie for free.

• It was a dark and stormy night. Fortunately, I was indoors, at a party that had something to do, as I recall (or, more accurately, do not recall), with the Mystery Writers of America. As in uffish thought I stood, Mary Higgins Clark approached to say that she and Liz Smith were assembling a collection of original short stories to be published in a book called The Plot Thickens to raise money in aid of literacy. Now, if it weren’t for a general run of literacy in this world I have no idea what would have become of me (farmhand, perhaps, losing limbs one at a time), so that was a charity I felt I could wholeheartedly support. Also, I have been grateful to Mary for some time for her having wrested the annual Edgar Awards dinner out of its church-basement-supper era and brought it to a height of splendid occasion. So I said yes. So she told me the gimmick: All the stories had to contain a thick book, a thick fog, and a thick steak. So I went away and mused, and wondered if I could do a switcheroo with one of those elements: “Stake” instead of “steak,” for instance, as in “through the heart.” But then it came to me to use “stake” in another way, and do the switcheroo on a different requirement. Thus the story pratfell into existence, and here it is. And isn’t it nice that we are all literate.

A native of Mississippi, Steve Yarbrough lives in Fresno, California, where he is professor of English at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of the short story collections Veneer (due out in the fall of 1998), Mississippi History, and Family Men. His novel The Oxygen Man will be published in 1999. His stories and essays have been published in many journals and magazines, and he has won a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

• In 1996 Kathleen Kennedy, who produced such movies as The Color Purple and E.T., read an essay of mine about southerners and guns and got interested in my work. I went down to L.A. and had a meeting with her, and before too long her production company had optioned an unpublished novel of mine called The Oxygen Man and hired me to do the screenplay for it.

The novel has two time frames several years apart, and many of my struggles with the screenplay involved either cutting out material from the past or trying to find a way to work that material into the present action. “The Rest of Her Life” is the first piece of fiction I wrote after finishing the filmscript. The structure of the story, in which most of the action takes place in the past, probably grew out of my impatience with the limitations screenwriting placed on me.