The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Contributors’ Notes

Jennifer Anderson lives with her husband in Napa, California. “Things That Make Your Heart Beat Faster” is her first published story.

▪ The protagonist of this story is my Emma Bovary, looking for transcendence in Active, provincial Saint Amelia, a place inspired by humorous police blotters. She also happens to love her husband and to live in a postfeminist era of unfettered options. Sure, she needs health insurance, but she’s more excited by the esoteric, transforming knowledge of police work.

I had been reading about mythological descents into Hades and was interested in conflict generated by placing a character, in this case idealistic and abstract in thinking, in a situation opposite her temperament; police work and Dionysus’s cold, green vines both represent the same grounded physicality that trips her up. Sight versus insight is a central motif: she sees, she doesn’t see, she sees differently, and in this the story is primarily about personality, not gender.

Russell Banks is the author of thirteen books of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Cloudsplitter, and four collections of short stories, most recently The Angel on the Roof: New and Selected Stories. Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, were made into award-winning motion pictures. His work has received numerous awards and has been widely translated and anthologized. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the president of the International Parliament of Writers. He lives in upstate New York with his wife, the poet Chase Twichell.

▪ “Lobster Night” is a fictional transformation of three different stories told to me by three different people, a woman who was struck by lightning, a man who owned a restaurant and one night lost his temper and shot a foraging bear in front of his customers, ruining his business because of it, and another man who, drunk, shot and wounded a bear, which proceeded to tear down the man’s cabin and bury him in it. The three stories would seem to have little in common, except perhaps unexpected violence, but somehow to me they connected in that restaurant kitchen on “Lobster Night,” establishing the causes, if not the motives, of a murder.

A former reporter and restaurant critic, Michael Downs learned to write fiction at the University of Arkansas’s Graduate Programs in Creative Writing, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He has published short stories in the Georgia Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Oxford Magazine. He teaches journalism at the University of Montana, where he is also at work on two books, both set in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. One is a collection of short stories; the other is a book of nonfiction, supported by a grant from the Freedom Forum.

▪ When I worked as a reporter in Montana, one of the biggest news stories was an execution, the Big Sky State’s first in decades. A man had raped and murdered a schoolteacher, and he was going to get a lethal injection because of it. I didn’t cover his death, but, because it was Montana’s first execution in so many years, it warranted lots of ink. I read every word. A colleague covering the execution from behind the two-way glass noted that for the last meal the murderer ordered a tenderloin steak, french fries, orange sherbet, and whole milk. But the good people in the prison cafeteria also sent him a tossed salad; prison officials thought he needed his greens.

That was the beginning of “Prison Food.”

Leslie Edgerton is an ex-convict who has changed his ways and is now regularly invited into people’s homes, where the silverware is no longer counted after he leaves. He has five books in print, including the novel The Death of Tarpons and the story collection Monday’s Meal. His short stories have been nominated for the O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize, among others, and Tarpons received a Special Citation from the Violet Crown Book Awards, presented by the Austin Writers’ League. Edgerton teaches creative writing online for Vermont College and previously taught online for the UCLA Writers’ Program. He also teaches public speaking at St. Francis University and writing for the Ft. Wayne (Indiana) Neighborhood Connection adult education classes. Last year, one of his screenplays was a semifinalist in the Nicholl’s Awards and another a finalist in the Writers Guild’s “America’s Best Screenplays” competition. Edgerton’s work has also been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award (short story category) and his collection Monday’s Meal was nominated for the Texas Institute of Letters’s Jesse Jones Award.

▪ “In the Zone” is based rather faithfully on a real-life experience I had while serving time in the state prison at Pendleton (Indiana). I won’t reveal which parts are true and which are fictionalized, as there’s this statute of limitations thing… I think I captured the true spirit and outlook of many of those incarcerated with this story. To survive the hell of prison, a person needs to create his or her own world, a la “the zone,” or it becomes madness. You create one insane world to escape the other more devastating and demeaning one.

William Gay’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, the Georgia Review, and other magazines, as well as the anthologies New Stories from the South and O. Henry Prize Stories. He is the author of two novels, The Long Home and Provinces of Night.

▪ I always think of “The Paperhanger” as a sort of gothic fairy tale, and the fact that it is completely a work of the imagination appeals to me. Though it is a very recent story, it grew out of a tale a plumber told me a long time ago concerning a small vicious dog, a pipe wrench, and a handy toolbox.

Jeremiah Healy is a graduate of Rutgers College and Harvard Law School. The author of thirteen John Cuddy novels and two legal thrillers, he’s been nominated twelve times for the Shamus Award, receiving it for The Staked Goat. Healy has served as president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he is currently the president of the International Association of Crime Writers:

▪ While visiting Chicago, I mentioned to a friend that though my forebears had come from Ireland, everybody with a brogue had died before I was born. She suggested we visit the Irish-American Heritage Center, occupying space in the grammar school she’d once attended. Upon entering the building, I felt strangely “at home,” and upon seeing the Center’s facsimile of the magnificent Book of Kells, I knew I’d been given the kernel of a John Cuddy story as well.

After spending most of his life in the Midwest, Steve Hockensmith recently moved to northern California just in time to find his power flicking on and off at random intervals. He is senior editor of Cinescape, a magazine devoted to films and TV shows in which spaceships, cars, and/or humans explode. “Erie’s Last Day” was his first published mystery story. He shares his home with his wife, Mary, a big yellow cat, and a big black cat.

▪ Most detective stories are about helping people. Our hero catches the killer/retrieves the diamond/foils the kidnapping/what have you, thus making the world a better place for all of us. In “Erie’s Last Day,” I wanted to write about how hard it really is to do good. Does catching the killer always make the world a better place? Can you set out to help someone and end up destroying him? I guess “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is a heck of a lot pithier than my story, but hopefully I was able to take that basic idea and give it some extra shading.

On the lower West Side of Chicago, Clark Howard grew up a ward of the county and habitual runaway who eventually was sent to a state reformatory for being, he recalls, “recalcitrant.” He later served in combat in the Korean War as a member of the Marine Corps, and he began writing shortly thereafter. Having written more than one hundred short stories, sixteen novels, and five true crime books, he is an eight-time Mystery Writers of America Edgar nominee in the short story and true crime categories, and winner of the Edgar for best short story. He is also a five-time winner of the Ellery Queen Magazine Readers Award, and has been nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award, and twice for the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award.

▪ A lot of my work is steeped in the streets of Chicago. Despite what many consider to have been an underprivileged and deprived youth, my recollection of it is shot throughout with memories of great fun and fine friends, frayed clothes and a hungry belly at times, but never a day without a challenge, always a damned good run before being caught, and never any regrets looking back. Hard knocks just make the sweet times sweeter. I could not have written “Under Suspicion” without seasoning it with memories of Chicago.

Michael Hyde grew up in Dover, Pennsylvania, and received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 and M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1998. His fiction has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, XConnect, and the Ontario Review. Currently he lives in New York City and is at work on a novel.

▪ I like to think that Connie Pratt in “Her Hollywood” is something of what Nancy Drew might have been like, had she been born into different circumstances. Special thanks to Ronald Spatz, Robert Clark, and the Alaska Quarterly Review.

Dan Leone comes from Ohio and lives now in San Francisco, where he writes a humorous food column for the Bay Guardian and weekly fiction for the Guardian’s Web site, www.sfbg.com. He has two books, a collection of short stories called The Meaning of Lunch and a nonfiction collection called Eat This, San Francisco. He has won the Paris Review’s John Train Humor Award and published fiction recently in Literal Latte and the Antioch Review. When he’s not writing or eating, he’s usually playing music with his wife, Tami, and his brother, Chris.

▪ I come from a gigantic and very close-knit family: eleven kids, couple of parents… fairly functional… more wedding dresses than skeletons in our closets, at any rate. I’m not sure how that figures into “Family,” the story, but I reckon I’ll tip my cap right here to brother #5, Dave, who lives in a “prefab” house on a dirt road in rural Missouri, last house on the left… you can’t miss it.

Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of poems, most recently Still Life in Milford (1998) and two collections of essays, The Undertaking (1997), which won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Bodies in Motion and at Rest (2000), which won the Great Lakes Book Award. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, the New York Times, Poetry, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Milford, Michigan, where he has been a funeral director for twenty-seven years, and in West Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

▪ “Blood Sport” is the first fiction I’ve published and borrows from events I’ve been involved with over the years as a funeral director in a small town in Michigan. I am struck by the different territories of poetry and essay and story — how each presents essential challenges and delivers essentially different satisfactions. Over the years I have attempted to deal with the dynamics of “Blood Sport” in verse and in nonfiction without success. The comfort — odd word here — of occupying this narrative, for the writing of it, was real.

David Means’s second book of stories, Assorted Fire Events (2000), was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, before migrating east to New York. Now he lives along the Hudson River.

▪ I’ve always been interested in those mythic shadow figures moving secretly around American culture: hobos, roadies, circus folk, and the like. Then a few years ago — one hot summer day — a carnie set up in a field near our house. I went with my family and, while we were standing in line, made eye contact with one of the roadies, a mean, scary-looking kid smoking a cigarette (of course it was drooping from his lip) while he handed out tickets. Out of that long gaze, and the deep parental anxiety it sparked, the story arose.

Kent Nelson has written three novels and four collections of short fiction, in addition to more than one hundred short stories published in America’s best literary magazines. He has worked as city judge, squash coach, hired ranch hand, and university professor. In 1997 he ran the Pikes Peak Marathon (8,000 feet elevation gain) in his home state of Colorado in 5 hours 53 minutes.

▪ The Ben Sawyer Bridge to and from Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, intrigued me for its simplicity of operation. Years ago I wrote a draft of a story about a troubled bridge operator, but the motivation for what he did in that earlier story was not thorough enough. I hope, in this version, it is.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of The Barrens, a novel of suspense, and Faithless: Tales of Transgression. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a professor of humanities at Princeton.

▪ I’ve long been fascinated by the effects upon “ordinary” people of sudden, seemingly random acts of violence. My family history was marked, decades ago, by two mysterious events, neither of which has been satisfactorily explained: the violent suicide of a great-grandfather, and the brutal murder of a grandfather. The second event in particular irrevocably changed the course of my family’s life.

One of the consequences is that I seem to be under the spell of “mystery,” especially conjoined with violence. “The Girl with the Blackened Eye” dramatizes the utterly random way in which a more or less average girl is selected for a horrific fate. She quickly becomes anesthetized to emotion, she adapts to her new situation, she survives, and she will never forget. Yet her horrific situation — raped, assaulted, brutalized by a psychotic killer — somehow becomes for her suffused with a lurid sort of romance: she has learned that she is “special,” as in a malevolent fairy tale.

T. Jefferson Parker was born in Los Angeles and has lived in southern California all his life. He has worked as a janitor, waiter, veterinary hospital emergency attendant, newspaper reporter, and technical editor. All of his nine novels are set in southern California. He lives in San Diego County with his wife and two sons. The T doesn’t stand for anything.

▪ Jim Seels of ASAP Publishing asked me to write a short story for him, so I did. I’d had the idea of competing brothers for a long time but could never work it into a novel. The crimes are loosely based on a series of bank robberies that took place in Orange County. I like the overt sexuality of the story, the atmosphere of lazy danger, the desperate sense of entitlement that drives Sonny to make things right for Laurel. It reads more like a compacted novel than a true short story.

In a career spanning more than thirty years, native Californian Bill Pronzini has published nearly sixty novels, four nonfiction books, ten collections of short stories, and scores of uncollected stories, articles, and essays. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award and three Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America and has been nominated for six Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards and the International Crime Writers Association Hammett Award. His most recent novel is a nonseries thriller, In an Evil Time, published earlier this year.

▪ Contrary to the opinion of some critics, the Nameless Detective series is not hard-boiled fare. I make a conscious attempt to keep violence and sexual content to an understated minimum. If I had to pin a label on it, I’d say it’s “humanist crime fiction with an edge.” Even more to the point, it’s a multivolume chronicle of the personal and professional life of a detective — all the good, bad, funny, sad, bitter, ugly things that affect and change him in one way or another from year to year, book to book.

From 1967 to 1995 I produced enough short stories featuring “Nameless” to fill two collections, Casefile (1983) and Spadework (1995). “The Big Bite” is my only short case since the publication of Spadework.

Peter Robinson was born in Castleford, Yorkshire. His first novel, Gallows View (1987) introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who has since appeared in eleven more books, including Wednesday’s Child and In a Dry Season, both of which were nominated for an Edgar. In a Dry Season won both the Anthony and Barry Awards. Robinson’s short stories have also been nominated for many awards, including the Edgar, Arthur Ellis, and Agatha. “The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage” won a Macavity. His early stories were collected in Not Safe After Dark, published by Crippen & Landru in 1998.

▪ “Missing in Action” is the second story featuring Special Constable Frank Bascombe, about whom I first wrote in “In Flanders Fields.” I think the opening of the story really sums up its main theme: that amidst the sanctioned slaughter of war, other crimes are committed that cannot go unpunished. I like Frank as a narrator; he’s sarcastic and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but he is also a compassionate and learned man. I hope to write more stories about him in the future.

Roxana Robinson was born in Pine Mountain, Kentucky, and grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She attended Bennington College and graduated from the University of Michigan. She is the author of two short story collections, two novels, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Three of these were named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times, and one, by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, the New York Times, The Best American Short Stories, and other publications. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in New York.

▪ I’m honored to find myself here, though surprised, since I wouldn’t have identified what I do as mystery writing. My modest qualifications are as follows: my father, the head of a small Quaker school, was famous throughout the community — and our family — as a teller of heart-stopping ghost stories. I myself am a long-time admirer of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, and P. D. James.

“The Face-Lift” isn’t a conventional mystery story, but I’d be pleased to think it contained a certain suspense, as well as the sort of narrative muscle necessary to the mystery form. To me, the story — a true one — is about alternative endings, about women solving the problem of violence in a brave and unexpected way. But perhaps all serious fiction is a kind of mystery writing, in which author and reader together unravel the tangled knot of confusion that obscures the human heart.

John Salter was born in North Carolina, raised in eight states, and educated at the University of North Dakota. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, Nancy, and their three children. His short story collection, Alberta Clipper, will be published in 2002.

▪ When I lived in the northern Sierras, there was a rumor going around about extended Bacchanalian events held at a remote logging company ranch. Looking for this secret property gave purpose to a few otherwise aimless Sunday drives. Roaming around gloomy mountain clear-cuts in my pickup, I got to thinking about the mentality behind these festivities, and how women might become involved. That’s how Anna Lee was born. I never found the ranch but I got this little noir story cooking in the back of my mind.

Nathan Walpow began writing at the age of forty-three and is fond of pointing out that, like Raymond Chandler, he published his first novel at fifty. This was The Cactus Club Killings, first in the Joe Portugal series, which also includes Death of an Orchid and the forthcoming The Petal Pushers. He recently completed work on Steel Cloud, a suspense novel. His stories have appeared in a variety of speculative fiction publications; “Push Comes to Shove” is his first short crime fiction. Walpow lives in Los Angeles with his wife and inspiration, Andrea Cohen. For more, see www.walpow.com.

▪ I’ve been an on-again-off-again professional wrestling fan since I was a teenager. About five years ago I saw a call for submissions for an anthology of wrestling-related horror stories. I kicked out an early version of “Push Comes to Shove,” but by the time I sent it in the market was already closed. I tried unsuccessfully to place the story a couple more times, then packed it away in my electronic trunk. A couple of days later, my local Sisters in Crime chapter put out a call for stories for a book of members’ work. I dusted off “Push” and discovered that it consisted of four thousand words of good story and a thousand of darlings to be killed. I made the cuts and the editors liked what was left.

I’m fond of this story because its protagonist is very different from the urban neurotics who usually populate my work. Just a guy faced with a big problem while trying to do his job. I thought Thumper’s costume and persona might be a little over the top, but recent developments in the WWF have proven me wrong.