The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Introduction

The short story is the novel writ small. It’s reduced for revelation. Its features are epiphany and lives in sharp duress. Miniaturization is difficult. It’s the watchmaker’s trade revised for words.

I prefer the form of the novel. I dig the short story dictum of “every word counts” in concert with the sweep of lives in deep duress. I’ve written twelve novels and an equal number of short stories. The novels required years of work. The short stories required more time per page, more time per sentence, more time per word. An editor friend dragged me into the craft. I’m glad he did.

The short story balances narrative line and characterization and limits the scope of plot. The short story form teaches the novelist to conceive more simply and condense the payoff. The short story form taught me to think more surely and directly. The short story form taught me to assume the reader’s perspective and curtail my reliance on plot. The short story form taught me to gauge thematically and employ brevity to make my characters pop.

My editor friend brought me to the medium kicking and screaming. I owed him favors. My commitment to the short story paid off the debt. The debt proved to be a gift disguised as hard work. The short story is the novelist’s alternative universe. It’s a respite from sustained concentration and a crash course in concentrating that much harder in the moment. It’s a reprieve from the vast borders of scope and a primer on scope contained. It’s the watchmaker’s trade taught to architects and large-scale engineers.

Plot and character must merge and meld quickly. Revelation must grab and hold hard. A world must build from overt phrase and implication. Balance must fall perfectly.

The mystery short story is a craft within a craft. The necessity for plot makes that balance tough. Mystery fiction is crime fiction. Crime fiction is mainstream fiction possessed of superior story-line and equal character-development skill. Casting plot-nets wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide is relatively easy. Constricting them to short story dimensions makes a novelist hurt. Yeah — but the hurt is so goooooooood.

Concision. Precision. Distill the essence or succumb to your reader’s derision. Sting with story, rap with revelation, plotz with your plots.

You can’t languor with language. You can’t dither in discourse. You can’t indulge idle idylls. You have to see, select, say.

The form liberates as it impinges. Crime and mystery fiction has always celebrated the extraordinary more than the prosaic. Personal honor and corruption. Societies divided. Murder as moral default. The Big Themes of crime and mystery fiction maul mainstream minimalism and minutiae. They enrapture, edify, entertain. They often orbit in orgiastic excess. They muddle as murky melodrama. They occasionally log in as literature — vibrant and vulgarized.

The crime and mystery novel is that extraordinary world captured large. The mystery short story is that world microscopically magnified.

A writer’s skill skirts that orbit of excess. Righteous writers wrangle with murky melodrama and writhe their way out alive. Crime and mystery fiction dissects and extols larger-than-life events. It’s a trap and an option to fly.

Bad crime and mystery novels meander in murk. Their depictions of large events play preposterous and make minimalism look good. Bad mystery short stories are contrivances undermined by their size. They waft wickedly worse as wastes of the watchmaker’s trade.

Yeah — but when they’re good, you get everything.

Bam — deft psychology meets a crystallized time and place. Bam — you’re someplace all new. Pop — there’s the surface of lives in stasis. Pop — they’re not what they seem.

You get a mystery. It may or may not pertain to a crime. You get that time and place laid out in layers. You get suspense and surprise. You watch characters ascend and deep-six. Fear fillets you. Heartbreak and hurt hammer home. The story is short. It may be densely packed for its size. It may hinge on a simple conceit or premise. You’re wrapped up rapidemente.

The good short story is a reader’s sprint and a knocked-back cocktail. It hits strong, it’s over quick, it induces heat and lingers when it’s done. The abbreviated form makes the reader’s role more interactive. There’s a crime to be solved or a mystery plumbed. There’s a revelation within rapid reach. The scant page count itself creates tension. You can read short stories in one sitting. You should read them that way. Whap — you circumnavigate quicksville. You get the big jolt, the instantaneous assimilation. Then it’s yours to savor and mentally mess with over time.

Reading sprints will sap you, drain you, jazz you, move you, scare you. The mystery short story will astound you with its diversity and range. Many fine writers work the watchmaker’s craft in this book. Read, sprint, and fall prey.

James Ellroy