The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Contributors’ Notes

Born in Buffalo, Lawrence Block has lived in New York City most of his adult life — although, like Keller, he gets around a lot. 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. A Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Block has won a slew of awards, including four Edgars.

After I’d introduced Keller in “Answers to Soldier,” I never thought I’d write further about him. A couple of years later I wrote two more stories about him and realized I was writing a novel on the installment plan. “Keller’s Last Refuge” was the ninth often such installments, and its source may be found in his initial appearance. Keller’s father was a soldier, after all, and how could the wistful hit man, the urban lonely guy of assassins, fail to heed his country’s call?

Gary A. Braunbeck was born in the Year of the Rat and has been apologizing for it ever since. He grew up in Newark, Ohio, the inspiration for his Cedar Hill stories, and wrote his first short story at the age of seven. He has published nearly 150 short stories. His first book, Things Left Behind, had unanimously excellent reviews.

“Safe” took fifteen years to get onto paper, because it hit close to home. I had worked with a janitorial company that cleaned up the aftermath of a murder-suicide. The boss had to find volunteers, not only because it involved the washing away of blood and other sad human remains, but because the man who’d done the killing had taken three other people with him — two of them children.

I wound up cleaning the children’s room and will never forget the chill silence nor the overwhelming grief I felt for them as I washed away the last traces of their existence.

Thomas H. Cook was born and reared in Fort Payne, Alabama. He holds graduate degrees from Hunter College and Columbia University, where he was a President’s Fellow. He is a four-time nominee for the Edgar Allan Poe Award. His novel The Chatham School Affair won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1996. He lives in New York City and on Cape Cod. He is husband to Susan and father to Justine.

“Fatherhood” is my first mystery short story and my first of any kind I have written in over twenty years. But it was a chance to write with the kind of concision that only the short story form provides, to deliver a tale’s deepest irony or most unexpected twist with maximum impact. The reader may truly be held in the fist of the story until the writer, not the reader, lets go. For the writer there is no more demanding literary form; for the reader, no more concentrated literary experience.

Jeffery Deaver is an internationally best-selling author of thirteen suspense novels. He’s been nominated for three Edgar Awards and is a two-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year. A Maiden’s Grave was an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and The Bone Collector, from Universal, starred Denzel Washington. His latest books are The Coffin Dancer and The Devil’s Teardrop. He lives in Virginia and California.

I rarely put messages into my work For me the point of a story is to surprise, thrill, and entertain, not to enlighten or instruct; there are writers more talented than I who can make brilliant political, personal, and social observations. Last year, though, I was asked to write a story to commemorate a fiftieth anniversary and some of the implications of reaching that milestone. “Wrong Place, Wrong Time” looks at the timeless question of age versus youth. What better way to examine heady philosophical issues than in a story filled with murder, kidnapping, gunplay, and deceit?

Brendan DuBois is a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, where he received his B.A. in English from the University of New Hampshire. He has been writing fiction for nearly fifteen years and lives with his wife, Mona. He is the author of the Lewis Cole mystery series — Dead Sand, Black Tide, and Shattered Shell — and his fourth novel, Resurrection Day, was published in June. He has had nearly forty stories published in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and others. In 1995 he received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for Best Short Story and has three nominations for Edgars for his short fiction.

In “Netmail,” a computer expert tries to blackmail a man with older, more “hands-on” skills. The computer expert is sure in his expertise and his arrogance that he will emerge the victor. After all, hasn’t his generation proven the superiority of computers, the truth that those with computer skills will live and thrive in the years to come? But my older character is not ready to give up. He has ideas of his own. Some of them quite explosive.

Loren D. Estleman has been called “the absolute best in the hard-boiled business” (Philadelphia Inquirer). Since his first novel, in 1976, Estleman has published forty-two books, including the Amos Walker mysteries. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Edgar Award. He won fourteen national writing awards, including three Shamuses from the Private Eye Writers of America.

I conceived of Amos Walker as a hero-for-hire, quite independent of the practical business of private detecting in the nine-to-five world. In “Redneck” (first published as “Double Whammy”), Walker delivers the results he was hired for but falls short of his ideal.

Gregory Fallis has been a counselor in the psychiatric/security unit of a prison for women, a private investigator specializing in criminal defense work, and a criminology professor. He is the author of one novel and three nonfiction works, all of which deal with crime and detection. He lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where he earns a meager living as a writer.

I’ve always managed to cobble out a living doing things that intrigued me. It wasn’t always pleasant, but it seemed better than regular employment. It wasn’t until I started writing that I realized I’d spent my life gathering material.

“And Maybe the Horse Will Learn to Sing” is loosely based on actual cases. It’s what real PI work is about.. crisis, confusion, and the hope that somehow things will turn out right.

Tom Franklin grew up in Dickinson, Alabama, and received his M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas in 1997. His work has appeared in the Nebraska Review, Quarterly West, Smoke, and elsewhere. His first collection, Poachers, was published in June; his novel, Hell at the Breech, will appear in 2000. He is married to the poet Beth Ann Fennelly.

I rewrote “Poachers” several times, trying to make it work. Among other problems, I couldn’t figure out how to kill the third brother. Then one day my wife (fiancée then) said, “Why does the last brother have to die? You don’t need to murder everybody, you know. Maybe the game warden just hurts him.”

“Or blinds him,” I said.

That evening, celebrating at a restaurant with a deck overlooking Lake Tahoe, I was wondering aloud what would happen if you dripped snake venom in someone’s eyes when the couple at the next table exchanged a look, paid quickly, and hurried away.

Victor Gischler received his M.A. in English from the University of West Florida. While he still resides in Florida with his wife, Jackie, he’s currently serving a two- to three-year stretch in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he’s attempting to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi.

“Hitting Rufus” was a breakthrough for me. I’ve knocked around the last few years, trying to find a voice and a genre with which I feel comfortable. These elements clicked finally, and I’ve gained confidence in my writing. “Headless Rollo,” forthcoming in Plots with Guns, is another Charlie the Hook story. I’m halfway through a novel with Charlie as the hit man turned hard-boiled hero. I’ve also written hard-boiled poetry. So far, nobody wants it.

Ed Gorman’s most recent suspense novel is The Day the Music Died, which the Wall Street Journal said “wonderfully evokes the sorrows and pleasures of a certain Midwestern past.” Gorman has won the Shamus and been nominated for an Edgar and a Golden Dagger. The author of several crime novels and five collections of short stories, he is editorial director of Mystery Scene magazine.

I’ve always been fascinated by (and terrified of) how quickly one’s life can change. One mistake, one accident, and a life can be altered forever. I’m equally fascinated by the sense of the shadow world I knew back in my drinking days — petty crooks, grifters, ex-cons, thieves of every description, and all those fallen middle-class alcoholics like myself who seemed to be trapped in a David Goodis novel. I’ve expanded “Out There in the Darkness” into a novel called The Poker Club. It will be published next year.

Joseph Hansen has published thirty-five books, the best known being the Dave Brandstetter mysteries. In 1982, he began writing stories for Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock. Not all are about Hack Bohannon, the ex-deputy sheriff who runs a stable on the central California coast, but most are. For much of his writing life he lived in Los Angeles, but when Jane, his wife of fifty years, died in 1994, he moved to Laguna Beach.

In 1991, I think it was, federal agents surrounded the cabin of a survivalist in northern Idaho to attempt to arrest him. The story made headlines. The man’s fourteen-year-old son was killed. But what haunted me was the absolutist, contrarian mind-set of the survivalist and the people among whom he lived. Down the years, I’d wonder how I could get them into a story. Bohannon’s sidekick, rodeo veteran George Stubbs, died, giving me an excuse to send Bohannon to Idaho to take his old friend’s body home for burial. Bohannon would stumble into an encampment of these outsiders, and how he saved himself would account for the plot.

David K. Harford was born and raised in the northwestern Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, where he lives today. From 1968 to 1969 he served as a military police investigator for the 4th MP Company, 4th Infantry Division, in Vietnam. “A Death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” the third in the Carl Hatchett series, draws from those days.

I’ve been a freelance writer for over twenty-five years — published so many magazine articles, I’ve lost count. Poetry, too. When I concentrated on my first love, the mystery short story, I realized there were no mysteries coming out of the Vietnam War years. Carl Hatchett was born then.

The trick to writing good military-related stories is to use jargon familiar to military people and at the same time slide in explanations for nonmilitary readers so they don’t feel lost or left out.

Gary Krist is the author of two New York Times Notable Books — the novel Bad Chemistry and the short-story collection Bone by Bone — as well as another collection, The Garden State. His second novel, Chaos Theory, will be published in 1999. He lives with his wife and daughter in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and can be reached atwww.garykrist.com.

I’ve always been interested in the way we tell tales to get what we want — tales that are sometimes misleading, sometimes blatantly deceptive, but hardly ever true. Two such tales are told in “An Innocent Bystander,” and although one is more clearly a manipulative fiction, each has its own ulterior motive.

During a twenty-five-year career as a criminal defense attorney, Phillip M. Margolin appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, represented approximately thirty people charged with homicide, including a dozen who faced the death penalty. His novels frequently appear on the New York Times bestseller list. Heartstone, his first novel, was nominated for an Edgar, and his second, The Last Innocent Man, was an HBO movie.

Early in my career, I was appointed to represent a defendant who was being held on serious charges. I made it clear to him that there was no way that any judge would release him on bail. He promptly fired me and represented himself. The next day I ran into him in the courthouse lobby. He told me that he had persuaded the judge to release him. “The Jail-house Lawyer” is my tribute to these lawyer wanna-bes who, every so often, prove to be a lot sharper than we law school graduates.

Born and raised in upstate New York, 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 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, she has published six mystery-suspense novels.

There’s a hybrid of genres to which I’m drawn that might be called “memoirist-fiction.” These stories evoke considerable emotion in me as I compose them. I seem to return to a past life, often adolescence, in a kind of waking dream; I see again places I’ve lived. I embark upon adventures I’d once had, or almost had; as in a dream, I’m led into experiences I can’t control, yet which possess a dream-logic. “Secret, Silent” grew out of a strange episode when I traveled by Greyhound bus to be interviewed (by a rather odd male administrator) for college. The seductive young woman may belong to another time. The domestic situation is analogous to my own, though somewhat altered. The distress over some problem with one’s clothing is familiar to anyone who has been an adolescent girl, as is the sense of dreamlike strangeness in being alone in an unfamiliar setting through a night. The ending is emotionally autobiographical.

Peter Robinson was born in Castleford, Yorkshire. His first novel, Gallows View (1987), introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks of the North Yorkshire Police, who has since appeared in nine more books and three short stories. Past Reason Hated and Innocent Graves both won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel. Wednesday s Child was nominated for an Edgar. He lives in Toronto.

I did a lot of research on the Second World War for In a Dry Season, especially research into conditions at home. One story made mention of the murder of an eccentric old woman in the village of Scarcroft, near Leeds. Old Miss Barker used to dress in nineteenth-century fashions, such as feather hats and buttoned boots, and was found beaten to death in her cottage; there was no apparent motive and her killer was never found. That started me on the story. The rest, of course, is pure invention. I was particularly interested in the contrast between a domestic murder and the wholesale, state-sanctioned slaughter of war.

David B. Silva lives in rural northern California. He is the author of more than one hundred short stories and the winner of the 1991 Stoker Award for superior achievement in the short story. The Disappeared is the most recent of his four novels.

“Dry Whiskey” is about my favorite subject: families. I am continually amazed at the complexity of family relationships. The people we know who have the greatest influence on how we turn out as adults, we often don’t understand at all. Will and his father never chose to be thrown together. It was their lot and they struggled to do the best they could with it. But like most families, their relationship was an evolution, with rules and roles changing with time. The words that went unspoken between them were far more telling than the words we read.

L. L. Thrasher is the author the Zachariah Smith series (Cats-Paw, Inc. and Dogsbody, Inc.) and the Lizbet Lange series (Charlies Bones and the forthcoming Charlies Web). “Sacrifice” is her first published short story, and it was nominated for the 1999 Edgar Allan Poe Award. She lives in Oregon with her husband and their two teenagers.

I started writing “Sacrifice” with just a glimmer of an idea: a little girl asks a PI to look for her missing doll. I liked the interaction between them, the contrast between innocence and experience. I had expected to write about the PI’s search for the doll, which would have some connection with a crime. I was on the second page when the little girl suddenly explained that the doll has two names, and the rest of the story became clear to me. This wasn’t a story about a missing doll; it was about a tragedy. It isn’t a story of innocence lost; it’s a tale of innocence maintained, of the core innocence of childhood that is untouched by even the most dreadful of experiences.

John Updike, born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932, graduated from Harvard College in 1954. After working for The New Yorker, he moved to the North Shore of Massachusetts and has been a freelance writer ever since. He is the author of eighteen novels, ten or so collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, and five books of essays and criticism.

Henry Bech appeared in a short story called “The Bulgarian Poetess” in 1964. Like me, he is a writer, but in other respects he lives a life I envy but have not lived. While looking through the two Library of America volumes of crime novels from the thirties, forties, and fifties, I got the idea of Bech as a noir hero. Murdering critics is something most writers, I suspect, have wanted to do, and once Henry got going, there was no stopping him. As a boy and young man, I read a great deal of mystery fiction. As an adult, I have always been leery of violence and character assassination, but I found that once you get going there is an intoxicating pleasure to it. Evildoers, beware!