The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Introduction

The durability of the short story is astonishing, all in all. It does not these days make any reputations, nor are the financial rewards particularly lush. Today’s slick magazines pay for a short story exactly what the slick magazines of the twenties paid for a short story; not adjusted dollars, real dollars. Scott Fitzgerald got the same pay from the magazines as today’s writers in similar venues, but in his day that was enough to keep him in Paris, whereas today the same income is enough to keep you on the farm.

Today’s digest-size magazines also pay just what their uncles, the pulps, used to pay. Up and down the market, this is the one and only example in the entire American economy of a durable and successful resistance to inflation.

Then why does the short story continue to endure? Given the way our world works, the modest financial return very strongly implies a modest readership; if the millions were clamoring for short stories as though they were Barbie dolls, the price would go up.

Still, there they are. The slicks still publish short stories, though nowhere near as many as they used to. The digest-size magazines toddle along, far fewer than the pulps of yesteryear but still alive and in good health. University publications produce a hefty number of short stories every year, including some you’ll find in this volume, but that’s probably because their content providers are in the main academicians, and it’s a given that the writer of short stories will be keeping his day job.

So it must be love that keeps the form alive, the writer’s love for the work. It has been said that jazz and the short story are the two American contributions to the world of art, and they do seem to have at least this one thing in common: both are engaged in by the practitioner primarily for the love of doing it.

There’s another link as well between the short story and jazz. Both are exemplified by the extended riff on a clean and simple motif. What the novel is to the symphony, the short story is to jazz. Like the best jazz solos, what the best short stories have to offer is a sense of vibrant imagination at work within a tightly controlled setting. That’s what turns the writers on, and that’s what maintains for the form a strong and knowledgeable readership. There is a joy in watching economy of gesture when performed by a real pro, whatever the art.

The short story evolved from several sources. The medieval conte, the tale meant to amuse the idlers at court (and the wanna-be idlers), and which more often than not involved a young wife and her lover putting one over on her much older husband, is one source. The traveler’s tale, such as those in Chaucer and Boccaccio, twists of fate and reversals of fortune, morality lessons in which irony is mostly delivered by the hand of God, is another. The joke, particularly the shaggy dog story, of ancient lineage, is a third.

All of these sources came into the American psyche through the campfire yarns, the tall tales and frontier reports by which the early settlers tried to describe to themselves this new world they were blundering through. When these rowdy chronicles became tamed for print, by Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce and many others, the American short story had begun.

What the short story shares with its forebears, and what it does not share with novels or movies or television plays (except in the early days of live television from New York), is a singularity of focus, of character, and of effect. Though a story might cover years, as does Barbara D’Amato’s lovely “Motel 66” in this volume, or hundreds of miles, as does David Edgerley Gates’s somberly beautiful “Compass Rose,” its movement is nevertheless within the confines of the Aristotelian dictum that a drama consists of the playing out of one action. The short story is not a place for digression.

Which leads me to a second vein of short story writing that’s been popular now for some forty years or more, but which needn’t hold our attention for long, because you’ll find none of them in here (though some of them are very good indeed). This kind of story establishes a mood or an attitude or a situation and stops when the establishing is done. These stories are more closely allied to painting than to narrative and can be very strong, emotionally, though a certain limpness is always a danger.

These other stories are frequently called slices of life, and from a narrative point of view they don’t have endings, which is why I could find none of them to include here. A story in the mystery or crime or detective genre (I’ve never known an inclusive enough term for this particular corner of the literary world) by definition has to have an ending. One way or another, the story of the type you’ll find in this volume begins with a problem and cannot end until that problem has been dealt with, though not necessarily solved. These stories slice life too, but lengthwise. While it is true that one cross-section of a river, shore to shore, will imply everything upstream and everything downstream, it is also true that as a general rule the river itself is more interesting.

Given the constrictions of length and of subject matter — there must, after all, be a crime somewhere in the story — it’s still astonishing to me just how broad a range the mystery short story can cover. For instance, the American South has always been fruitful ground for stories of every length and kind, and here we have Thomas H. McNeely’s harrowing “Sheep,” Dennis Lehane’s gothic “Running Out of Dog,” Tom Franklin’s gritty “Grit,” and Shel Silverstein’s rollicking “The Guilty Party.” All are clearly and evocatively set in that part of America, all are steeped in the flavor of the region, but could any four stories be more unalike?

(It’s a sad reminder also that, Shel Silverstein having died last year, long before his time, this is probably the last effusion we’re likely to see from that wonderfully fertile and varied mind, but at least he certainly did go out on a roisterous high note.)

I am encouraged also when I see that the field is in no way stuck in yesteryear, trough the traditions of fairness, cleverness, and excellence remain intact. Within those traditions, we find much that couldn’t be more new. Here we have a story told to a video camera, a story that makes bizarre use of the latest telephone equipment, and a new way of seeing — look out for it — the ICU.

The venues where these stories first appeared remain, as always, as broad a spectrum of American periodical publishing as you’re likely to find anywhere. Here we have the major mainstream magazines Playboy and the Atlantic Monthly, and here we also have the more specialized Oxford American and Chattahoochie Review. Plus we have selections from three fine anthologies, from Mystery in the Sunshine State assembled by Stuart Kaminsky, Murder and Obsession compiled by Otto Penzler, and Murder on Route 66 edited by Carolyn Wheat. And of course we have the faithfuls, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, principally the latter.

For nearly sixty years, Ellery Queen has been the polestar of the mystery short story, finding and publishing the newest writers, the latest expansions of the genre, everything that keeps the field exciting and fresh. Ellery Queen’s Department of First Stories, the first published work by a brand-new writer, has been a staple of the magazine forever, and an amazing number of those stories have made it onto best-of-the-year lists. I’m happy to say we have one this year, “Jumping with Jim” by Geary Danihy, that is I think one of the best debuts ever, told with such assurance and skill that I had to keep looking back at the first page; yes, this is the Department of First Stories. Long may it continue.

It’s been a long time since the mystery story was no more than a puzzle acted out by marionettes for the amusement of the cloistered Victorian mind. In the stories in this volume there are surprises galore, but they are surprises of character, of motivation, of story, not merely surprises of mechanical puzzle-playing. Although it is certainly possible for some writer somewhere to come up with a new and richer variant on, say, the locked-room story, there’s no tired smoke-and-mirrors exercise of that former sort to be found here. Every one of our writers has more serious fish to fry.

And many show their awareness that they are writing at the end of the millennium, that, in a way, everything that was published in 1999, in any genre, served as a kind of summing-up. Even our Department of First Stories entry begins by contrasting past with present, the current narrator with Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. At the other extreme, Robert Girardi’s “The Defenestration of Aba Sid” and half a dozen of our other stories all draw a picture, clear and concise, of just where America found itself at the end of the twentieth century.

I suppose that must inevitably lead me into a discussion of the future of the mystery short story. Our genre began with the publication, in April 1841, of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe, so it is now entering its third century and its 159th year, so wouldn’t I like to say where I expect it will travel next? “Whither,” and all that?

Well, no. I’m terrible at predictions, always have been. I don’t even know what I’m going to do next, so I’m not likely to be a particularly reliable oracle when it comes to the fate of an entire genre of popular fiction. Come to think of it, it’s probably my inability to guess what’s going to happen next that makes me such a fan of the mystery short story in the first place.

More a fan than a practitioner, I’m afraid. I’ve done a few short stories myself, enough to inform my admiration when I see the thing done well, but I admit I find it hard. In the novel I feel more at home, I can stretch and wander and take my time. In the short story, I can’t be self-indulgent, I can’t explain at length, I can’t distract the reader with subplots or amusing but ultimately irrelevant characters and settings.

All of which, of course, is the point. A good short story is a jewel in miniature, as concise and carefully wrought as a fine watch, but at the same time alive. Like the stories herein.

Donald E. Westlake