The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Contributors’ Notes

Raised in northern Michigan, author Doug Allyn served in Southeast Asia in military intelligence during the Vietnam War, later studied criminal psychology at the University of Michigan, then somehow parlayed those credentials into a twenty-year career in rock music before becoming an author.

From the beginning, critical response to his work has been remarkable. After winning the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for best first short story, he has won or been nominated for every major award in the mystery field, including the ultimate prize, the Edgar Allan Foe Award.

• “Miracles! Happen!” features R. B. Axton, a composite character based on a number of amiable thugs I met on the fringes of the music business. The moral is straightforward. If you’ve lived at all, you are scarred. Some marks are visible. But for good or ill, the deepest cuts don’t show.

David Beaty was born in Brazil of American parents. A graduate of Columbia University, he earned an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. He has worked in Greece, England, and Brazil and currently lives in Coral Gables, Florida.

• I once played a version of “Ghosts” — an infinitely more benign and enjoyable version — when I was nine or ten years old. I forgot about it until the day five or six years ago when I looked at my parents and was shocked to see that they’d grown old. And then I remembered the night when, still young, they’d powdered their hair and dressed up in sheets and we played hide-and-seek in our darkened house in Miami.

Tom Berdine was born and raised in Lawrence Park, outside Erie, Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Buffalo. With brief stints in retail sales, textbook editing, construction, and sawmill work, his career has been in the people business, mainly child welfare, from which he retired Iast year. He is a husband, lather of five, grandfather of three.

• “Spring Rite,” in one form and another, gathered rejection notices for about fifteen years. I worked on it from time to time, feeling it was a good story and motivated to capture, or recapture, the intense feeling of a recalled scene — less than a scene really, an image or two — from a live television drama I saw as a kid. (We go way back with television in our family, our first set being homemade by an engineer rooming in the attic.) A fragment from that old video play, seen in boyhood, installed itself in my mind as a market for the sexual mystery and outright dangerousness of women. I was able to finish this story when I stopped being preoccupied with plot and recognized that what I was after was an evocation of that dark, ephemeral little nugget: the women here are mainly offstage, taken in only in sideways glances, at a distance, or in the imagination, so powerful are they, and the Fisher woman in particular is intended as the ghost of that phosphorescent creature I gulped from the surface of a ten-inch cathode-ray tube fifty years ago.

The setting for “Spring Rite” is the area in which I have lived for the past twenty or so years, with place names altered so that my neighbors won’t think I’m talking about them — something I do not do, vis-â-vis the advisory on gossip contained in “Spring Rite” — even though many of them naturally have stories and family histories more interesting than that of the Kramer brothers. For me, one of those people who can’t shut up and has boxes of unfinished novels, the mystery genre is very practical: solve the mystery, that’s the end.

Bentley Dadmun was born and raised in Wisconsin and has lived in New Hampshire for the past twenty years. After spending several decades wandering the wrong roads, he now leads the life of the stereotypical hungry writer, and although it is often frustrating, the act of building a story is a joy without equal.

• I like to write about protagonists who are somewhat dysfunctional and eccentric but get the job done in spite of themselves — people who, while on their quest, must drag their baggage along with them, for that is how most of us function and that is how most of us live our lives, although few of us engage in worthwhile quests.

Before earning B.A. and M.A degrees at Northwestern University, Barbara D’Amato worked as an assistant surgical orderly, a carpenter tor stage magic illusions, an assistant tiger handler, and a criminal law researcher. She is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she now lives in Chicago.

• My husband and I drove Route 66 decades ago, when it still more or less existed as a continuous road. It seemed to me to be a bit of America that had seen most of the changes of the twentieth century, so I wanted to explore that in the story of “Motel 66,” as well as the effects of time on human beings. The story is also about secrets. We all have secrets. In this case, two people who are close have secrets, but what happens when two long-held secrets suddenly intersect?

Geary Danihy was born in New Haven and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut He attended Notre Dame High School, spent two and a half years at West Point, requested release, got married, and six months later was back in the army at the Artillery OCS, in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Discharged in 1970, he attended the University of Idaho to complete his B.A. and then his M.A in English. After several jobs, he opened his own promotion agency, Culdan, which grew to include an advertising agency that handled the Jordache jeans account for two years. When the agency closed, he and his wife decided to take a chance and make a living “doing what we always wanted to do.” For her, that meant creating a company called Binky Botanika, which offers herbs, spices, and handmade bath and facial products. For me, that meant writing.

• “Jumping with Jim,” my first published story, is the result of my lifelong interest in the conflict between desire and duty. (I was raised on a steady diet of movies like High Noon, Beau Geste, Casablanca, and Captains Courageous.) My wife and I disagree over whether Conrad’s Lord Jim did the right thing by sacrificing his love for a “higher principle,” but we have no disagreement with Frank Taylor’s decision.

Jeffery Deaver, a former attorney and folksinger, is a Sew York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels. He has been nominated for four Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America (two for his short stories) and is a two-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award for Best Short Story of the Year. His book A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector, starring Denzel Washington, was a feature release from Universal Pictures. His most recent novels are The Devil’s Teardrop, The Empty Chair, and Speaking in Tongues. He lives in Virginia and California.

• Rarely do I write novels or stories based on actual occurrences, but “Triangle” is one that I did extract from real life. I lived in Manhattan for a number of years, and now that I am a resident of the sort-of South (outside-the-Beltway D.C.), I find myself returning to New York with some frequency. One summer day, en route north, I stood at the United Airlines gate at Dulles Airport and watched a tiny drama unfold — it involved a mother and stepfather seeing off a young boy, flying to the city, presumably to spend the weekend with his natural father. The boy was upset, the mother bored, and the stepfather pleased, possibly looking forward to some rime without the youngster at home. A psychologist undoubtedly could find in this sad scenario a number of insights about dysfunctional families and the anger of youth. The mind not being my forte, however, I decided to turn the situation into a story more aligned with one of my specialties: murder.

Edward Falco is the author of the hypertext novel A Dream with Demons, the print novel Winter in Florida, and the short story collections Plato at Scratch Daniel’s and Acid. Acid won the Richard Sullivan Prize and was a finalist for the Patterson Prize. His stories have been widely published in journals, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, Playboy, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly. Annual anthologies that have selected his stories include The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Erotica, and The Pushcart Prize.

• “The Instruments of Peace” is a story that emerges out of the years I spent working with racehorses, first as a farmhand in Wallkill, New York, later as groom in Orlando, Florida, and finally as a trainer at Monticello Raceway in the Catskill Mountains, where my career ended ignominiously after I bought a yearling with bone spurs and my one and only moneymaker bowed a tendon. Having failed as a horseman, I retreated to the quiet of academia, where I have since consoled myself with writing.

Tom Franklin won the 1999 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story for his novella “Poachers,” the title piece of his first book, published in 1999. The novella also appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 1999 and The Best American Mystery Stones of the Century. Franklin, from Dickinson, Alabama, now lives in Galesburg, Illinois, with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly. He is currently working on a novel, Hell at the Breech.

I worked at a plant very much like the one in “Grit” for over four years, frequently on the night shift, during my early twenties. Nowadays, when I tell people about the grit factory, they often think it’s grits, the kind you eat. I tell them no, no, it’s sandblasting grit. At the plant, I ran the front-end loader and the forklift, unloaded slag from railcars, and loaded hundred-pound bags (for which I’m still seeing a chiropractor).

“Grit” is dedicated to the great bunch of guys I knew there: my uncle. D Bradford, who got me the job; Steve Sheffield: Bryan Ward: Roy Simon: Robert Evans; and the plant manager. Jim Seidenfaden. Uncle D, Bryan, and Jim still work at the plant; Robert is out owing to a back injury; and Roy died a few years ago.

David Edgerley Gates grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His earliest influences were Kipling and Stevenson, Puck of Pook’s Hill and Treasure Island, which his father read aloud to him, but what he first read on his own was the Hardy Boys mysteries and Carl Barks’s Donald Duck adventures in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock, A Matter of Crime, and Story. An earlier mystery featuring Placido Geist, “Sidewinder,” was a Shamus nominee for 1998. Gates lives in Santa Fe.

• “Compass Rose” is the fifth story I’ve written with Placido Geist. In the first story, he wasn’t even introduced until about a third of the way in, and I didn’t realize at the time he was going to be the hero. I underestimated him at first appearance, just like everybody else.

The ghost of Sam Peckinpah inhibits these bounty-hunter stories because of the period, and because I’m trying for an elegiac quality but without making it too obtrusive. Placido Geist is himself an unsentimental sort.

Robert Girardi is the author of three novels — Madeleine’s Ghost, The Pirate’s Daughter, and Vaporetto 13 — and one collection of novellas, A Vaudeville of Devils: Seven Moral Tales, from which the selection in this volume is drawn. He is a native of Washington, D.C., but spent a good portion of his youth in Europe, an experience reflected in the international settings of much of his fiction. He lives in Washington with his wife, the poet and mystery writer Linda Girardi, and their two children, Benjamin Oliver and Charlotte Rose. He can be reached at 1girardi@aol. com.

• I’ve always been amused by the various goofy ways there are to die, and to my mind falling out of or off of a building has always had an element of comic absurdity. I’ve also long wanted to write an anti-Grisham lawyer story in which the lawyer is not only incompetent but utterly mistaken regarding the guilt or innocence of his client — and I suppose from these two slightly ridiculous impulses “The Defenestration of Aba Sid” was born.

Chad Holley was born and raised in Mississippi and received an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1999. His stories have begun to appear in such places as the Chattahoochee Review and the Greensboro Review. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of stories.

• In one of her letters, Flannery O’Connor said something to the effect that too often the stories she fussed over least seemed to be the ones folks liked the most. I want to say that’s been true of “The Island in the River,” but then maybe it’s been long enough now that I’ve just forgotten the fussing. There is always fussing. The initial ingredients for this story were a terrible dream, a recent hunting trip, and the crackling vinyl soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Ex-police officer, ex-army tank gunner, and ex-auto parts salesman, Edward Lee is the author of more than a dozen novels, most recently the police procedural Dahmer’s Not Dead (with Elizabeth Steffen), and the conspiracy thriller The Stickmen. Lee has also sold over sixty short stories in the horror and suspense field, plus a number of comic scripts. Currently he lives in Seattle, where he pursues a peculiar hobby: collecting crab shells.

• “ICU” actually went through several phases of revision over the past few years. I wanted to write something hard, fast, and dark, with a payoff ending, but something that also probed fairly deeply into the psyche of a sophisticated modern sociopath. I wanted the trimmings to be real: hence, via a stack of textbooks and some law enforcement journals, I did quite a bit of research involving the technical mechanics of child pornography. its statistics, its distribution, etc. I reworked the piece a number of times, avoiding telling the story from the antagonist’s point of view, which seemed too dark, but then I just said to hell with it and did it. Lastly, I tweaked the ending at the suggestion of editor Al Sarrantonio and was thrilled to have the piece published in Avon’s 999.

Dennis Lehane considers himself a short story writer who somehow fell into writing novels. He has written five crime novels, including Gone, Baby, Gone and Prayers for Rain, with the Boston private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro as the lead characters. His next novel, Mystic River, is his first novel not of that series. He lives in Boston with his wife, Sheila, and their two bulldogs, Marlon and Stella.

• I went to college in Florida, and usually I’d drive to or from Boston at the beginning and end of the school year. Sometimes I’d take I-95, and other times I’d spend four or five days driving the back roads through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Delaware. For some reason, every time I passed through the Carolinas, the roads were littered with what seemed like a prodigious number of dog corpses. I’ve never discovered any logical reasons for this, but just the same, time and time again. I’d drive through the Carolinas and see several dead dogs. It stuck in my head, and when I was in graduate school I wrote an early draft of “Running Out of Dog” that was solely about a guy who worries that his best friend has become one of those men who may one day walk into a place of business with a loaded rifle and kill everyone he sees. Five years later, I dusted the story off and decided to open it up. I added several characters (as well as twenty-five manuscript pages), changed the time in which the story was set, and created a far more ambiguous ending. What stayed the same was the basic idea — a guy who shoots dogs for a living and gets an unhealthy taste for it — and the tide. Like all my stories, I’m not sure how I feel about it, but it’s my wife’s favorite. My dogs, however, hate it.

A native of Houston, Texas, Thomas H. McNeely has recently received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the J. Frank Dobie Memorial Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “Sheep” is his first published work of fiction. He teaches at the Grub Street Writers’ Workshops and Emerson College in Boston, where he is currently at work on a collection of linked stories.

• The idea for “Sheep” came to me while I was working for a nonprofit law firm in Texas that defended death row cases. At the time, I spent many hours looking at crime scene photos and many hours with the men who committed those crimes. I was struck by my inability to connect what I saw in those pictures with the men I came to know. That moment, and the comparisons it suggested to me about the criminal justice system’s inability to consider how the men they sought to execute came to be who they were, formed the kernel of the story.

All of my models for Lloyd, unfortunately, are dead. The story is a tribute to their courage, and the courage of the people who defended them. Many thanks also to James Carroll and Pamela Painter.

Martha Moffett was born at the end of a dirt road in St. Clair County, Alabama, was a student of Hudson Strode’s at the University of Alabama, then worked in publishing in New York City (GQ the American Heritage Dictionary, Ladies’ Home Journal). She wrote her first novel on the subway on the way to work and raised three daughters. She currently lives in Florida, where she recently won a state fellowship and grant for a play. She remembers with gratitude a fellowship at Yaddo, where her lunch was left on the front porch so that she could work all day.

• I’ve always liked to read scary, suspenseful stories, but this is the first story I’ve written that scared me. I think it works because the reader knows what a bad type Nick is, and feels anxiety for Storey, who doesn’t have a clue.

Several readers have commented on the difficulty of writing from a male viewpoint, but there was no difficulty. I’ve never seen why there should be. Don’t we all think about each other, study each other, pretend to be each other, remember all the words spoken in bed? Writing from a male viewpoint is an interesting undertaking.

Patently squeamish when it comes to reading about himself in the third person because of its obituary-like overtones, Josh Pryor lives outside Los Angeles, where he is a part-time professor of composition at El Camino College. He has published several pieces of short fiction in both national and regional magazines and is currently at work on a collection of stories and his second novel, The IT Conspiracy. He can be reached at joshuapryor@yahoo. com.

I’ve never really thought of myself as a “mystery writer” per se. My fiction, however, seems to have a mind of its own, often wedding characters to circumstance in suspenseful, typically macabre twists of fate. Usually I’ll start out with the best of intentions, but when I sit down to write, something comes over me, and had things have a way of happening to those unfortunate souls spawned from my imagination.

“Wrong Numbers” was inspired by a friend who actually worked in human resources at Pac Bell. My initial intent was to write a story about a new hire gone wrong. At the time, not even I realized that Karloff was a budding psychopath and how terribly wrongly events would unfold.

Shel Silverstein was born in Chicago in 1930 and is best known for such children’s books as The Giving Tree, which sold more than five million copies, and A Light in the Attic, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 182 weeks. One of the most versatile and successful artists of our time, he regularly published cartoons and illustrations in Playboy, and he wrote the words and music for many popular entertainers, including Lynn Anderson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dr. Hook, the Brothers Four, and Johnny Cash, including Cash’s famous “A Boy Named Sue.” The kind and gentle man who brought so much delight to so many millions of children of all ages died on May 10, 1999.

Peter Moore Smith was born in Panama and has lived in Nebraska, Alaska, North Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and West Germany. Currently his home is Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Brigette, a graphic designer. His short fiction has appeared in a number of literary publications, and his story “Oblivion, Nebraska” was selected for the Pushcart Prize 2000 volume. His first novel, Raveling, is forthcoming.

• There is something about the image of a little girl splashing around in one of those backyard swimming pools and the play of light across the surface of the water that is to me central to my American childhood. I can practically taste the chlorine. There is also something about the idea of losing a sister that I find deeply disturbing. I have two. Losing either one of them would be the worst thing in the world and, to my twisted writer’s imagination, well worth writing about.

Brad Watson’s collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. He was born in Mississippi, was educated there and in Alabama, worked as a newspaper reporter among other things, and taught at the University of Alabama. He currently is Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction and director of the creative writing program at Harvard University.

• “Water Dog God” began as a major revision of another story, then became its own thing. I first thought of it, though, as a failed revision of the other story, “A Blessing,” and put it away in a drawer. Only after Dog-Men had come out did I rediscover it and realize it had possibilities. I revised it every six months or so for the next couple of years, and revised it more than once for Marc Smirnoff at the Oxford American. It went from very weird to nicely strange. Or at least that’s my view. In “A Blessing,” a couple expecting a child drive out to get a new dog from the owner of this place on the lake. The couple became, after a fashion, the girl Maeve, and the dog owner became a very different person from the one he was in “A Blessing.” The original story was in the third person, from the point of view of the pregnant woman. As far as I can tell, the only things the two stories still share are the setting and the sense of nascent — later delivered — violence about this place. The sorts of things the pregnant woman fears in “A Blessing” are realized in “Water Dog God.” Sort of.