The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Contributors’ Notes

John Biguenet has published fiction in such journals as Book, Esquire, Granta, Playboy, Story, and Zoetrope, where “It Is Raining in Bejucal” appeared. Oyster, his first novel, was published earlier this year, and his first collection of stories, The Torturer’s Apprentice, was widely praised. He has published three books on translation and served two terms as president of the American Literary Translators Association. The winner of an O. Henry Award for short fiction, he currently holds the Robert Hunter Distinguished Professorship at Loyola University in New Orleans.

• Zoetrope commissioned me to write a 10,000-word story based on an idea by Francis Ford Coppola: A man named José Antonio witnesses, at age five, the murder of his mother by his father; fifty years later, he wins a lottery and uses the prize to track down his father. Mr. Coppola was particularly interested in whether the money would lead to justice.

Though I chafed a bit at first under the restraints of the commission, the sensitive and perceptive responses to my work by Adrienne Brodeur and the other talented editors at Zoetrope encouraged me through five drafts. I worked with them on “It Is Raining in Bejucal” for nearly a year and learned yet again that a published piece of fiction is a collaborative work of art.

Michael Connelly is the author of eleven published novels and one short story. His novels included the Harry Bosch series as well as The Poet, Blood Work, and Void Moon. A former journalist who specialized in crime, he was the recipient of numerous journalism awards before he realized they meant nothing and he devoted himself full-time to writing fiction. He spends most of his time in California and Florida.

• I’m not a practitioner of the short story. For years I fended off inquiries, requests, and demands for a short story. I simply liked the long form better and arrogantly felt small stories were made from small ideas. I figured I was a big-idea man. Of course, I was wrong. But I did not realize this until Otto Penzler cornered me and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. A short story about baseball. I nodded. Yeah, I could try that. Nothing is as big and as small at the same time as baseball. I had never played the game on any organized level, but once I moved to Los Angeles I fell in love with watching the Dodgers. I worked out many a plot point between innings at Dodger Stadium. For me it is a place of Zen in a sea of chaos. The seminal moment in modern Dodger history was Kirk Gibson’s home run in the ’88 series. A moment of wonderful joy before the dark times that followed. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t afford it. I actually saw it while standing on a sidewalk on Melrose Avenue and watching with a crowd through a doorway into a sushi bar. After the ball sailed over the wall and the game belonged to the Dodgers, the sidewalk crowd exploded, people running every which way and into the street to tell perfect strangers the news. I was one of them. It seemed like nothing could be wrong in the city that night.

Thomas H. Cook is the author of sixteen novels and two works of nonfiction. He has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award three times in three different categories; his novel The Chatham School Affair won for Best Novel in 1996. He has also been nominated for the Hammett Prize, as well as the Macavity Award. His short story “Fatherhood” won the Herodotus Prize and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 1999, edited by Ed McBain.

• I wrote my first short story while working as a contributing editor and book critic for Atlantic Monthly. I’d never attempted such a thing before but was pleasantly surprised to discover that writing a short story gave me the same feeling of satisfaction as reading one. As a writer, I particularly liked that the payoff, that final moment toward which you have been moving all along, came much sooner in a short story than in a novel, and, with it, the sense of creative completion.

As a reader, I find that a short story is like a brief encounter, intense and highly charged, yet capable of lingering in the heart for a long, long time. In “The Fix” I strove for that intensity and resonance by using boxing, and particularly the battered nobility of a long-maligned fighter, to suggest the daily “fixes” that beckon us, the erosion of character that inevitably accompanies our acceptance of them, and finally the dreadful, dawning truth that corruption may know every pleasure save that of self-respect.

Sean Doolittle’s debut novel, Dirt, a crime thriller set in and around a crooked Los Angeles funeral home, was selected as one of the 100 Best Books of 2001 by the editors of Amazon.com. Doolittle lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife, Jessica, and daughter, Kate. He is working on his next novel and any short stories that tug on his sleeve.

• I imagine that most people, at one time or another, have probably experienced some version of the same gut-level fear: the fear of losing ability. I’ve heard writers say that they’ll never live long enough to write all the ideas they have floating around in their heads. Personally, I’ve never suffered from this affliction. I tend to be the type who wonders, after putting each idea to paper, if I’ll ever have another one. It wasn’t until after I finished “Summa Mathematica” that I began to suspect that this particular anxiety doesn’t really have all that much to do with writing.

As for this story: I was remodeling our basement (another story), trying to figure board feet or something, when I realized it had been so long since I’d done any math beyond using a high-powered PC to balance the checkbook that I had actually forgotten most of the multiplication tables I’d memorized in grade school. This bugged me a little in principle, but not that much overall. I never knew ’em all that well anyway, and I always hated math. But I remember thinking something like, “If you held a gun to my head, I couldn’t times these fractions.” Stephen Fielder wasn’t far behind that thought.

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 half a dozen literary reviews, including the Georgia Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Willow Springs. This is the second of his stories to appear in The Best American Mystery Stories series; “Prison Food” appeared in the 2001 edition. Downs lives and writes in Montana, where he is 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.

• One snowy Easter morning when I was a boy of eleven or twelve, my family awoke to find police cars clogging our dead-end street. It was not long before we learned that our neighbor had killed his wife and their two dogs. I had liked the neighbors, and I had especially liked their dogs. This was when we lived in a small town in Vermont. Later in the afternoon that Easter Sunday, a reporter from the Rutland Herald rang our doorbell, but my father declined to say anything about our neighbors out of what I took to be a sense of propriety. Years later I became a reporter, and whenever I got frustrated that people wouldn’t talk to me, I tried to remember my father’s perspective. That dual vision — and, in general, the complicated needs of any reporter and any witness (in specific, my reporter and Dudek) — infuses “Man Kills Wife, Two Dogs.” I first tried to set the story in Vermont, mimicking my childhood experience, but as is often the case, fact could not accommodate fiction. Once I moved the story to Hartford and made Dudek my character (instead of a man like my father), imagination and story rocked loose. In truth, I know no more of what happened on that morning of my boyhood than Dudek knows about the murders in his landlord’s apartment.

Brendan DuBois is a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, where he received his B.A. in English from the University of New Hampshire. A former newspaper reporter, he has been writing fiction for nearly twenty years and still lives in his native state with his wife, Mona. He is the author of the Lewis Cole mystery series — Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, and Killer Waves — and his fourth novel, Resurrection Day, a look at what might have happened had the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted into World War III, received the Sidewise Award in 2000 for Best Alternative History Novel. He is currently working on two new novels and has had more than sixty short stories published in Playboy, Mary Higgins Clark Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

His short stories have been extensively anthologized in the United States and abroad. He has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for Best Mystery Short Story of the year, and he has been nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his short fiction three times. Visit his Web site at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

• My short story “A Family Game” was written for an original collection of short fiction revolving around the game of baseball called Murderers’ Row. Knowing that many of the other authors for this anthology would be submitting stories concerning major league play, I decided to take a look at how all baseball players get their start: by playing in youth leagues in their hometowns.

But although the play on the field in these leagues is that of children being introduced into what really is a family game, the tensions, pressures, and yes, even violence, off the field can sometimes mirror the worst aspects of the major leagues. During these times when there are often news stories about “rink rage” or “stadium rage,” where angry parents get into fights with each other or referees or umpires, I was curious how someone with a criminal past — desperate to keep this past secret — might react when confronted by an angry parent intent on doing harm.

All too often the real cases of parental violence at sporting events end up in court or in the hospital. In “A Family Game,” I’d like to think I came up with an original and satisfying story, where not only a bully gets his due, but a special family is protected and kept safe by a loving parent.

David Edgerley Gates grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, A Matter of Crime, and Story. He was a 1998 Shamus nominee for “Sidewinder,” and another of his stories, “Compass Rose,” was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2000.

He lives in Santa Fe.

• A lot of my stories are drawn from historical incident, or some contemporary oddity that floats around in my head until I can make use of it, but “The Blue Mirror” is based more nearly on my own experience. Stanley Kosciusko is modeled on a real guy I worked in a garage with, years ago, who did in fact survive fifty missions as a tail gunner in Liberators, flying against the Germans, only to later die of cancer. Much of the other detail in the story, like the biker bar and the locale of the showdown, is real enough, too, but the methamphetamine turf war is generic, not specific.

The other thing about “The Blue Mirror” is that I didn’t spend a lot of time connecting the dots. I figured the private dick in the story ought to be at least as sharp as the reader, and if the reader could put it together, why wouldn’t Jack?

The late Cathleen Jordan bought this story for Alfred Hitchcock. Cathleen was a terrific person, and a canny and sympathetic editor. She had an eye for the exact detail and an ear for clunkers. Her taste was elastic, not arbitrary, and she did me many kindnesses. I’m far from being the only one who’ll miss her. To use Norman Mailer’s apposite phrase, Cathleen added a room to the house.

Joe Gores lived for a year in Tahiti and three years in Kenya, spent two years at the Pentagon writing biographies of army generals, and for twelve years was a P.I. in San Francisco. He is a past president of Mystery Writers of America and has won three Edgars. His novel Hammett, filmed by Francis Ford Coppola, won Japan’s first “Maltese Falcon” award in 1986. Other work includes scores of short stories and articles, three collections of his short fiction, and a massive fact book, Marine Salvage. He has also written ten screenplays, two TV longforms, and teleplays for most of the episodic TV mystery shows of the 1970s and 1980s, including Columbo; Kojak; Magnum, PL; Mike Hammer; and Remington Steele.

He and his wife, Dori, live near San Francisco and travel whenever they can get away.

• “Inscrutable” started with a parrot. My wife, Dori, has a friend named Carol Colucci who has three pet parrots. One of them is named Knuckles. The first time I heard this, I exclaimed, “Knuckles Colucci? He just has to be a Mafia hitman out of Detroit!” But at the time I was working on Cases, a novel fictionalizing my early years as a detective in San Francisco in the 1950s, and Knuckles sort of slid from my mind.

Fast-forward to 2000. My editor at Mysterious Press, Bill Malloy, asked me to contribute an original story to a projected twenty-fifth anniversary Mysterious Press anthology. Then Bill added the kicker. He wanted the DKA crew to appear in the story. By then I was working on the most recent DKA File Novel, Cons, Scams & Grifts, and all my DKA energies were focused on that. But I said I would try to come up with something.

A January night, pouring rain. Waiting in my 4-Runner for Dori with nothing to read. Suddenly, bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom, as they like to say on The Sopranos, three short stories leaped into my mind. One was “Summer Fog,” which appeared in another 2001 anthology, Flesh and Blood. The second was a golf story I’m working on right now. The third was “Inscrutable.” Ballard, Heslip, Giselle, and O.B. get involved in saving a Chinese grocer being threatened by... who else? A Mafia hitman out of Detroit named Knuckles Colucci!

I hope you have as much fun pecking all of the bird references out of “Inscrutable” as I had writing them in.

James Grady’s first novel, Six Days of the Condor, became a Robert Redford movie picked by the Washington Post as one of the ten most defining films of the twentieth century. Grady has published a dozen other novels across genre lines, and three of his previous short stories have received national awards, including an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2001, the Cognac (France) International Film Noir Festival gave Grady’s collective prose work its highest “master of noir fiction” award. Grady has also been an investigative reporter, as well as a script writer for both TV and feature films. He and his family live in Silver Spring, Maryland.

• Growing up in Shelby, Montana, I always felt embarrassed by my hometown’s bizarre claim to fame: its nearly suicidal self-promotional sponsoring of a heavyweight championship boxing match, a world event crash-landed in the middle of the great American nowhere. I always wanted to be a writer, but swore I would never — never! — touch that Dempsey-Gibbons debacle.

Then inspiration ran smack into absolutism, and the resulting big bang blasted characters and a twist of history out of the most savage and sentimental sections of my soul. While the mechanics of the resulting story are fiction, its heart is as true a piece of work as I’ve ever done.

Clark Howard grew up on the lower west side of Chicago, a ward of the count} 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 began writing shortly thereafter. Haring written 120-plus short stories, 16 novels, 5 true-crime books, and 2 short story collections, he is an eight-time Mystery Writers of America Edgar nominee in the short story and true-crime categories, and winner of an 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 Shamus Award, for the Derringer Award, and twice for the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award.

• “The Cobalt Blues,” like much of my work, is drawn from my early memories of the streets of Chicago and the scores of colorful people who passed through my young life there. The character of Lewis is based on an old guy I knew when I was an after-school runner picking up next-day bets for an illegal bookie (in the days before off-track betting). This old guy’s whole life was lived by the starter’s bell at racetracks all over the country. Potts was based on a man I served with in the Marine Corps. He was a real hard-luck guy. After he was killed, another Marine said, “What’s the difference? With his luck, if he’d made it back, he probably would’ve got cancer or something anyways.”

I like to write stories about life’s losers who sometimes become winners just once before the end. Like the men do in “The Cobalt Blues.”

Stuart M. Kaminsky was born, raised, and grew damned cold in the winters of Chicago. He has, for the past dozen years, lived in the warmth of Sarasota, Florida, where he writes novels, short stories, movies, teleplays, comic books, and poetry and plays softball three days a week when he isn’t on the road. Winner of the MWA Edgar for Best Novel in 1989, he has been nominated for six Edgars in three categories. His series characters include 1940s private eye Toby Peters, Russian policeman Porfiry Rostnikov, Chicago policeman Abe Lieberman, and Sarasota process server Lew Fonesca. He has also written two original Rockford Files novels. His screen credits include Once upon a Time in America: Enemy Territory, and Hidden Fears. His teleplay Immune to Murder was shown on A&E’s Nero Wolfe Mysteries.

• “Sometimes Something Goes Wrong” was a first for me, an experiment. I wanted to see how quickly I could make a story move, a story in which I had no idea of what was going to happen, a story in which I started with two men in a parking lot and wrote in furious fascination to find out what they were doing there and what would happen to them. I always know who my characters are and what will happen in my novels and short stories. In this case, I had no idea and I had a great time. I plan to do it again and soon.

Joe R. Lansdale was born in Gladewater, Texas, on October 28, 1951. He left college when he decided his main interest was writing, and he worked a variety of jobs, including farming and janitorial work, while writing in his spare time. He became a full-time writer in 1981, producing more than two hundred short stories, articles, and essays, as well as more than twenty novels and several short story collections.

He is well known for his series of crime/suspense adventures featuring Hap Collins and Leonard Fine. Mucho Mojo, a New York Times Notable Book, has been scripted for film by Oscar winner Ted Tally.

A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has won numerous awards, including an Edgar for The Bottoms, six Bram Stokers, and the Critic’s Choice Award.

• In my early twenties my wife and I owned a mule. I used the mule for plowing. We bought some land with a nice pond and plenty of grass, but we didn’t move there. We planned to, but never made it. We ended up selling the land and moving somewhere else.

But when we thought we were going to move there, we moved our mule to our land while we made plans. I went over every day to feed it, pet it, trim its hooves, make sure it was okay.

One day it was gone.

Mule rustlers.

Really.

Many years later, I got to thinking about that, the fate of my old stolen mule. About the same time I was feeling nostalgic, I came across an article about criminals who cruised neighborhoods looking for things to steal.

That’s when I came up with my boys here. And their plan to steal a mule. I decided to make them like some old boys I’d known while growing up. Not exactly nuclear scientists. Not exactly sanitation engineers, either. More like crash test dummies.

Guys who wanted quick money, and though not exactly evil, not exactly a boon to the universe either. This welded to other things I had read, experienced, heard about. This story resulted.

Keep your mules locked up.

Edgar and Emmy-winning novelist Michael Malone, critically acclaimed as one of the country’s finest novelists, has also written books of fiction and nonfiction, essays, reviews, short stories, and television screenplays. Often compared to Dickens for his comic vision and the breadth of his fictional landscape, over the past quarter-century he has introduced readers to a gallery of memorable Southern characters in such novels as Handling Sin, Dingley Falls, and Foolscap, as well as in the internationally praised mystery trilogy Uncivil Seasons, Times Witness, and First Lady, narrated by wisecracking Southern police chief Cuddy R. Mangum and his aristocratic homicide detective Justin Savile V.

Educated at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard, Malone has taught at Yale, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at Swarthmore. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy

After a long (perhaps too long) exile in television, he has returned to the novel and to his native South. He now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, chair of the English department at Duke University.

• “Maniac Loose” first appeared in the anthology Confederacy of Crime. Its sardonic heroine, Lucy, who could give even the most ruthless a lesson in how to get away with murder, is one of the twelve Southern women of my new short story collection, Red Clay, Blue Cadillac.

Fred Melton lives in Wenatchee, Washington, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two sons, Matthew and Andrew. He is a full-time dentist whose writing has been published in Talking River Review, California Quarterly, Black Canyon Quarterly, as well as other publications, and is to appear in the forthcoming anthology Scent of Cedar. His story “Counting” has also earned a 2001 Pushcart Prize nomination. Melton’s poetry and prose have been honored in the following contests: Pacific Northwest Writers Association (short stories 1996, 1997, and 1998), Seattle Writers Association Writers in Performance (1998–2001), and Washington Poets Association (2000).

Melton has lived in Spain, taken a fling at American bull riding, is fluent in Spanish, and holds a second-degree black belt in karate. He also holds a fly rod in his hand as much as possible.

• One October day, I took our younger son, Andrew, deer hunting in eastern Washington. While walking the windswept bluffs overlooking the Palouse River, we met a middle-aged wheat farmer with a stocky build and dust-caked hair. Although initially irritated by our presence, he eventually granted us permission to hunt on his property — provided we stayed clear of his grain silos. When I later learned of this farmer’s lifelong bachelorhood, he became the seed for “Counting.”

As I wrote about Uncle Keven, I began to see a man for whom justice and revenge were convictions connected at a gut level. I also discovered a man to whom fate refused to deal a fair hand; yet, he remained fiercely loyal to the thing that mattered most to him — family.

Born in New York, raised on a chicken farm in New Jersey, Annette Meyers came running back to Manhattan as soon as she could. Using her long history on both Broadway and Wall Street, she wrote The Big Killing, the first of seven mysteries featuring Wall Street headhunters Xenia Smith and former dancer Leslie Wetzon. The eighth is near completion. Her novel Free Love, set in Greenwich Village in 1920, introduced poet Olivia Brown and her bohemian friends. Murder Me Now followed in 2001.

With her husband, Martin Meyers, using the pseudonym Maan Meyers, she has written six historical mysteries in the Dutchman series, set in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century New York. In February 2001, Meyers and her husband were the subjects of a feature on their life and work for CBS-TV’s Sunday Morning.

She is a past president of Sisters in Crime and current secretary of the International Association of Crime Writers, North America.

• Although I keep a file of short story ideas, I often plunder from my life experience. The character of Olivia Brown first appeared in a short story, “The House on Bedford Street,” and came from my youthful determination to be a writer and my admiration for Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I wrote “You Don’t Know Me” in response to an invitation to submit an erode noir story for the anthology Flesh and Blood. Fuhgeddaboudit. Erotic noir is not my style. But wait, wasn’t I a writer, and shouldn’t the writer continue to surprise the writer?

“You Don’t Know Me” came from my file of ideas. It had been on the edge of my consciousness for years and came surging out as if it were waiting to be told. This was the first time I’d written from a male point of view. It had to be that way, because it was his story.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of suspense and psychological horror, including most recently the novella Beasts and, under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, the novels The Barrens, Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon, and Double Delight. Her suspense and crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. She lives in New Jersey and is professor of humanities at Princeton.

• “The High School Sweetheart” was inspired by my uneasy sense that those of us who write, and perhaps even those of us who read, crime fiction are in some ambiguous way moral accomplices to evil. To celebrate the master crime writer is to celebrate the artful appropriation of violence that, in “reality,” would appall and terrify us. Yet, such actions are redeemed through “art.” (Or are they?)

Robert B. Parker lives in Cambridge with his wife, Joan. They have two sons, David, a choreographer, and Daniel, an actor. Parker is the author of more than forty novels and two short stories, the second of which is “Harlem Nocturne.” A novel based on “Harlem Nocturne” should appear in perhaps 2004.

• When I was a small boy living in western Massachusetts, Sunday baseball was not broadcast from Boston, so my father listened to the Dodger games on WHN, which came to us straight up the Connecticut Valley. That is why I was a near terminal Dodger fan when Jackie Robinson came to the Dodgers in April 1947. I never saw it, but I remember it as if I did. The dark skin and the white uniform. The bright green grass, and Red Barber’s marvelous Southern voice remarking carefully that Jackie was “very definitely brunette.” I thought then that Jackie Robinson was one of the great men of the twentieth century. I have not changed my mind.

“Harlem Nocturne” is based on no actual event that I know of. It came about because Otto Penzler asked me for a short story for his baseball anthology, and I couldn’t think of one, so I asked Joan and she said, “You know so much about old-time baseball. Why don’t you write about that?” So I did.

Southern Californian F. X. Toole wrote for forty years before being published at age sixty-nine in ZYZZYVA, the San Francisco literary magazine. Having that first short story accepted, Toole considered himself a success, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel.

Since then, his book of short stories, Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner was published — first in England, then in the United States. Translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese, Rope Burns received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction in 2000 and was also chosen by the New York Times as one of its Twenty Memorable Books of that year. “Midnight Emissions” is Toole’s first venture into the world of whodunits.

• Though I wrote “Midnight Emissions” in the first person, I considered it a dry run for a third-person novel I wanted to set in the boxing world of Los Angeles and San Antonio, Pound for Pound. I say “dry run” because I felt that if I could get my Texans right in “Midnight Emissions,” then I might also have a good shot at getting them right in the novel. Pound for Pound is at 120 K at this point, only now I’m stuck with Texans and prune-pickers who won’t shut the fuck up.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Daniel Waterman is a writer and editor who now resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This is his first published story.

• Skeet’s tale, his condition, recuperation, and evolution into the brute he becomes erupted from me over the span of a few weeks I spent alone in a four-bedroom ranch house, barren of furniture, in Alabama, knowing not a soul, waiting for a new chapter in my life to begin. Skeet’s history and path seemed clear to me but meant nothing in themselves until I painted him with some redemptive features and paired him with a family, or at least a few individuals capable of loving him. And then it became their story ever so much as Skeet’s.

I’ve found it interesting that although many friends, family, and colleagues have read the story, only one has ever asked, “What, exactly, happens to Skeet?” It’s a fair question — I’m the first to admit that what actually happens to Skeet in the end is ambiguous — but one with an annoying and unsatisfactory answer. All I can really say is that I leave Skeet’s fate to the reader’s imagination. Though I have a fairly clear idea myself, I’m not sure the answer is all that important. Skeet is a golem of sorts — not without heart or thought — yet stands for a part of us that becomes leaden. And though a multitude of mysteries surround Skeet — how he becomes the man he does, what accounts for his obsessive need to collect such an improbable fauna, what it signifies that he must destroy life to hold onto it — the principal mystery seems to me to be the fate of the narrator: In molting from one life to another, what has he lost or gained, how will he resolve any feelings of guilt or betrayal, and how will he contend with an unanchored sense of self that might abide for a lifetime unresolved?

Scott Wolven is a graduate student at Columbia University, where he’s finishing an MFA in creative writing. He is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories and lives in New York City with his wife. His stories have appeared in HandHeldCrime, Plots with Guns, Crossconnect, the Mississippi Review on-line, Permafrost, and Thrilling Detective.

• “The Copper Kings” is one of several stories I’ve written about these characters, and I’m sure I’ll keep them together for a few more. I lived in Idaho for a while, and it’s a beautiful and hard-boiled setting for all types of things. I like big dogs and sometimes put them in my stories. The phrase “copper kings” originated as a reference to the 1880s businessmen who owned the huge copper mines in Anaconda and Butte, Montana. More recently, Butte had a minor league baseball team named the Copper Kings. I really liked it as a title.

It also allowed me to run a loose, obscure thread through the story. One of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories is “The Copper Beeches,” where Holmes and Watson take a short trip through the English countryside by train. When Watson says he likes the country, Holmes replies that it terrifies him, much as Greg admits that farms scare him on the drive toward Ryan’s. Holmes describes potential crimes in the country as “deeds of hellish cruelty,” and I thought about that as I wrote the story.

Very special thanks to Alan Ziegler, Leslie Woodard, Colin Harrison, Sloan Harris. Victoria Esposito-Shea, Neil Smith (go Grimedogs!), Elise Lyons, and best brother Will.