The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Contributors’ Notes

Born and raised in northern Michigan, Doug Allyn studied the Chinese language at Indiana University and served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

Returning to school on the GI Bill, Allyn studied creative writing and criminal psychology at the University of Michigan while moonlighting as a guitarist and a poet and lyricist in the rock group Devil’s Triangle. He later taught creative writing at Mott Community College and presently reviews books for the Flint Journal while maintaining a full writing schedule.

From the beginning, critical response to Mr. Allyn’s work has been remarkable. His first published story won the Robert L. Fish award from the Mystery Writers of America. Subsequent works have won the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the American Mystery Award, the Derringer Award for best novella, and the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award five times. His career highlights include drinking champagne with Mickey Spillane and waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark. The Allyns live in frenetic bliss in Montrose, Michigan.

“The Jukebox King” is based on the reality of the Detroit nightclub scene. Rap didn’t introduce gangsters to the music business; the Mob has been in the game since Prohibition. Drawn to the nightlife and easy money, hoods had financial interests in dance clubs, jukeboxes, and even recording studios.

This wasn’t necessarily a negative. Some very bad guys had very good taste. But as rhythm and blues began evolving into rock ‘n’ roll, even the Mafia developed a generation gap.

Christopher Chambers was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and has since lived in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. He received a degree in English at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls in 1984, and over the following ten years worked as a salesman, bus driver, meat cutter, farmhand, carpenter, journalist, photographer, bartender, dockworker, lifeguard, screenwriter, and editor. He taught martial arts in Minneapolis, high school physical education in South Florida, and writing at the University of Alabama, where he received an M.F.A. degree. His work has appeared in such journals as the Gettysburg Review, Washington Square, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarter After Eight, Notre Dame Review, Exquisite Corpse, Controlled Burn, Quarterly West, and the Carolina Quarterly. His short story collection, Aardvark to Aztec, was short-listed for the Mary McCarthy Prize. His short fiction has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Literary Award for Short Fiction, and is included in the recent anthology French Quarter Fiction: The Newest Stories from America’s Oldest Bohemia. He lives in New Orleans, where he teaches at Loyola University.

“Aardvark to Aztec” was written on an old Royal portable, in the summer, as I recall. I was living in a cabin outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I dragged a wooden table onto the porch that overlooked a ravine that was overgrown and unremarkable most of the time, but became unexpectedly beautiful each spring with an abundance of dogwood blossoms, and on those summer nights when fireflies lit up like a distant metropolis. It was on one of these nights, on that porch, sitting at my typewriter, to a chorus of nocturnal insects, that I tapped out the first sentence. The writing began with the character of Miranda and her vague discontent, so I guess it should have been no surprise for me to discover in the end that it is indeed her story. The clown, like much of the story, came out of nowhere. There may have been a small glass of whiskey, and an inexpensive cigar on the table as well. Perhaps strains of Hank Williams drifting out through the screen door, the drone of the firefly beyond the ravine. I realized quickly that someone was going to die in this story. I didn’t know who, but it saddened me, because I was already coming to grow fond of each of these characters.

Christopher Cook lives in Prague, Czech Republic. He previously lived in France and Mexico but grew up in East Texas, the Bible-thumping South. The persistent pounding spurred escape and his incurable nomadism.

Cook decided early to become a writer but soon discovered he didn’t know how. To learn, he became a daily newspaper reporter in several southern states of disrepair. Odious bosses caused him to pursue subsequent work as a trade union activist. He later fell into a U.S. think tank, where he thought a lot and recognized that smart public policy is difficult to incite, almost impossible. Writing became his private refuge. Otherwise his life has been ordinary. There are unaccountable gaps in his biography.

Cook’s award-winning novel, Robbers (2000), was published in the United States and abroad, as was his second book, Screen Door Jesus & Other Stones (2001). He is completing a third book.

While living in Paris, and commuting on the underground Métro, I often wished for something interesting to happen, anything at all. Having my pocket picked, for example. Even better, seeing another’s pocket picked. Best yet, what if I became a pickpocket? I noodled the idea. But a jail cell is more boring than the subway. So I decided to become one in a story instead.

“The Pickpocket,” quickly completed, was eagerly rejected without comment by numerous magazines and literary journals in the U.S.A. In France, however, it won first prize in a literary contest sponsored by the Sorbonne University and Transcontinental Paris. That was 1995. It was finally published stateside in the Dennis McMillan anthology Measures of Poison (2002) after a biblical period in exile.

John Peyton Cooke was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in Laramie, Wyoming. He is the author of five novels and several short stories and has collected the typical writer’s resume of odd jobs: literary book shelver, data entry operator, office assistant at the American Institute of History of Pharmacy, and police report typist with the Madison (Wisc.) Police Department. His current, and oddest, job is as editorial director of a medical communications agency in New York City. He lives in Ketonah, New York, with his partner, Keng, and their two dogs: Ricky, a toy poodle and petty thief; and Quilty, a whippet and occasional poet.

I would like to dedicate this appearance of “After You’ve Gone” to the memory of my father, William Peyton Cooke, author of mystery novels The Nemesis Conjecture and Orion’s Shroud, who died on January 16, 2003, in Amarillo, Texas. When I asked him what he thought of this story, he said, “I liked it. But of course I knew all along how it was going to end.” There is nothing like a father to keep egging you on to do better.

This story may be thematically similar to my novel The Chimney Sweeper, in that both deal with violence that erupts when their young male protagonists face sudden, unexpected sexual confusion. I would like to think that sex and violence in my stories are inextricably linked, so that you could not remove one without the other. Since I am not a violent person by nature, it is a mystery to me where this impetus comes from in my stories. However, it is almost certainly related to my own identity as a gay man, which developed during my adolescence, during which I was simultaneously indulging my interest in horror, fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries.

I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, where the only information I could find about gay people like me was in the Albany County Public Library (where I worked as a book shelver) and at the Coe Library on the campus of the University of Wyoming. Laramie, as everyone knows, is the town where Matt Shepard was murdered because he was gay. Although I was out of the closet to my closest friends from the age of fifteen, I never felt personally threatened by my environment. Still, it gives me pause to consider that Matt’s murderers are fellow graduates of Laramie Senior High School. The violence they perpetrated on Matt was certainly gratuitous, and it is ironic to me that it is also representative of what I’ve written about — the unreasonable, unwarranted, and sadistic violence that can easily manifest itself when certain young men feel threatened by the very existence of someone who is sexually different from them.

“After You’ve Gone” is the result of numerous inputs, including those aforementioned. The initial spark was a passage in a story by Robert W. Chambers, “The Repairer of Reputations,” written in the 1890s but set in a future New York of 1920:

In the following winter began the agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 20, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.

I wanted to write a tale in which a government agent of that weird future goes around helping people commit suicide. I was going to call it “The GAS Man,” with GAS standing for government-assisted suicide. This evolved into the rogue agent of “After You’ve Gone,” to whom I now needed to supply some kind of motivation. I got to thinking, naturally, about Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the death-obsessed pathologist who creatively assisted a number of suicides of the terminally ill and is currently in prison on murder charges. What if his own motives were not so altruistic? What if he, quite simply, got off on it? The many disturbing newspaper accounts of inexplicable police suicides (in New York City), usually by male officers who had not quite measured up, helped me develop the “victim” of my assisted-suicide fiend. Given my usual bent, sexual confusion (in one form or another) was bound to enter the story, and it serves here as a trigger for the violence (or whatever) is to come.

Born in New Orleans, O’Neil De Noux is a former homicide detective and organized-crime investigator. He has also worked as a private investigator, U.S. Army combat photographer, criminal intelligence analyst, journalist, magazine editor, and computer graphics designer. As a police officer, De Noux received seven commendations for solving difficult murder cases. In 1981 he was named Homicide Detective of the Year for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office. In 1989 he was proclaimed an expert witness on the homicide crime scene by the Criminal District Court in New Orleans.

Mr. De Noux’s published novels include Grim Reaper, The Big Kiss, Blue Orleans, Crescent City Kills, The Big Show and Hollow Point / The Mystery of Rochelle Marais.

O’Neil De Noux has also had over 150 short stories published in the United States, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy, Scotland, and Sweden. He teaches mystery writing at the University of New Orleans. He is the founding editor of two fiction magazines, Mystery Street and New Orleans Stories.

The inspiration for “Death on Denial” came when my wife, Debra Gray De Noux (editor of Erotic New Orleans anthology), peeked into the living room and said, “Are you watching Death on the Nile again?” It occurred to me that a play on words was called for. So I came up with a title first, which I’ve done often, then filled in the blanks, including a character who likes to watch Death on the Nile over and over again.

Pete Dexter lives on an island in Puget Sound with his dogs, Pansy and Fred, and his wife, Dian. He has just finished his sixth novel, Train. The Dexters have a daughter, Casey, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with a kid named Tate, and they have a cat named George, who is originally from Tucson. Due to bad behavior, he is not let out of the house (George, not Mr. Dexter).

“The Jeweler” was the first few pages of a novel, something I wrote to help myself make sense of a character. I was cutting it out of the manuscript later, which is what always happens in this kind of deal, when my brother Tom — who lives in Montana with his wife Jane and his daughters Molly, Annie, and the beautiful but eerie identical twins Phoebie and Elizabeth, and their dog, Gretta — when Tom called out of the clear, blue, Montana sky and said he thought I ought to write some short stories. So instead of throwing the pages away I sent them to my agent, Esther Newberg, who would like to have a dog but is allergic and has a cat instead, who obeys her instantly. But then, don’t we all?

A Southern California native, Tyler Dilts received his M.F.A. in fiction from California State University, Long Beach, where he now teaches writing in the English and Theater Arts Departments. He is a winner of the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Award, and his short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals, including RipRap, The Circle, and Puerto Del Sol. He recently completed his first novel, A King of Infinite Space, and is currently hard at work on his second, in which the nameless narrator of ‘Thug: Signification and the (De) Construction of Self’ makes a return appearance.

The protagonist of “Thug” is a character who circled around the edges of my writing consciousness for quite a while before finally finding his place. I had tried using him in a number of different ways, first as a supporting character in other people’s stories, then in his own. He never really seemed to fit, though. I just couldn’t find the right voice, the right tone, to give him his due. But he was always there, waiting patiently for his chance. I’d almost given up on him, when, during a particularly busy month in graduate school, in the course of which I found myself reading a profoundly odd juxtaposition of works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and a half-dozen or so postmodern literary theorists (the two new Jacques — Derrida and Lacan, and the rest of their gang), he bubbled back up to the surface of my awareness and asserted himself. Sitting down to write a critical essay on deconstruction for one of my classes, something else entirely emerged — the first lines of this story.

Mike Doogan is a third-generation Alaskan who lives in Anchorage with his wife of thirty-two years, Kathy. He writes a metro column for the Anchorage Daily News. He has won several journalism awards and shared in the newspaper’s 1989 Pulitzer Prize. Doogan is the author of two books of nonsense about Alaska and the editor of a collection of essays about living in the far north. ‘War Can Be Murder’ is his first mystery story.

I’ve been a Dashiell Hammett fan for as long as I can remember, and at one time did quite a bit of research into his service in Alaska with the U.S. Army during World War II. When Anchorage mystery writer Dana Stabenow asked me to write a story for her anthology The Mysterious North, which grew immediately out of the Left Coast Crime Conference, I thought immediately of Hammett.

Fortunately, my research had been summarized in an article for the Armchair Detective (“Dash-ing Through the Snow,” Winter 1989), so the material was readily to hand. The story that resulted is an amalgam of fact and fiction. The Hammett character is as true to life as I could make him, as is World War II Anchorage. The rest of it I made up.

I also did my best to be true to Hammett’s writing style and the ethos of his work. I am satisfied with the result, keeping in mind that he was Dashiell Hammett and I’m only me.

Brendan DuBois is the award-winning author of short stories and novels. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, and numerous other anthologies. He has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for his short fiction and has been nominated three times for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. This is his fourth appearance in the yearly Houghton Mifflin Best American Mystery Stories series edited by Otto Penzler; one of his short stories was also included in the Best American Mystery Stories of the Twentieth Century.

He’s also the author of the Lewis Cole mystery series — Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, and Killer Waves. His novel Resurrection Day, a suspense thriller that looked at what might have happened had the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 erupted into a nuclear war, received the Sidewise Award in 2000 for best alternative history novel, and it has been published in seven other countries.

His latest novel, a suspense thriller called Betrayed, was published this year in both the United States and Great Britain. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with his wife, Mona, where he is at work on a new novel. Please visit his new Web site, www.brendandubois.com.

“Richard’s Children” originally appeared in an anthology edited by Anne Perry, Murder by Shakespeare. When I was invited to contribute a story to this anthology by Marty Greenburg, I knew that most — if not all — of the stories would take place during the time of William Shakespeare. Being a contrary sort, I decided that my story, while inspired and influenced by Shakespeare’s Richard III, would take place in contemporary times. One of the aspects of Richard III that fascinates me is the back story of influential families, murdering and betraying each other and their rivals for power. Another fascination of mine, of course, is American history, and it’s fun — and sometimes unsettling — to realize just how many royal families this democratic nation boasts, from the Kennedys to the Gores to the Bushes and beyond. These two fascinations of mine became the basis of “Richard’s Children,” and the fact that I was able to use Shakespeare’s work to write a modern story is once again proof — as if any more demonstration were needed — of the Bard’s enduring genius.

Elmore Leonard, described by the New York Times Book Review as “the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever,” is the best-selling author of more than forty novels, including Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, Get Shorty, Be Cool, Maximum Bob, Stick, Bandits, and Hombre. He has also written many short stories and screenplays and has been named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife in Birmingham, Michigan.

I was watching a documentary on television about Russian mail-order brides, big, good-looking women, and wondered if I could use one of them in a book or story.

But wait a minute. Would I be able to make her talk? English, but with a hint of a Russian accent? I asked my researcher, Gregg Sutter, to get me some mail-order brides who weren’t Russian, and he came up with the Colombian girls in a stack of photos, all quite attractive and anxious to meet some nice gringos.

About the same time I happened to read about the astonishing number of Indian and Pakistani women who suffer severe accidental burns, their dupattas catching fire from the stove. They lose face, so to speak, and are discarded by their husbands, disfigured.

Could these story elements somehow be combined in a homicide situation?

Why not?

Robert McKee lives in Douglas, Wyoming, with his wife, Kathy, and their two children, Kent and Jessica. He works as a court reporter and reported the trial involving the murder of the gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard.

He has received a Wyoming Arts Council Literary Fellowship, has twice won first place in the National Writers’ Association’s short fiction contest, and has three times won the annual fiction contest held by Wyoming Writers, Inc. His short stories have appeared in more than twenty literary and commercial publications.

When not in the courtroom or at his computer, writing, he is rummaging through antiques stores in search of vintage fountain pens or on the back roads of Wyoming riding his BMW motorcycle at what he admits are “excessive rates of speed.”

About his story “The Confession,” McKee says, “These days it seems that life is cheap. The body count in fiction and movies is staggering, and the characters never seem to give this mayhem a second’s thought. In this story, I attempted to create a character, who, while a young man, kills another man and then struggles with the guilt of that act for the rest of his life. Perhaps I thought a character capable of shame might provide the story with an unaccustomed twist.”

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel The Tattooed Girl and the short story collection Small Avalanches. She has frequently written works of suspense and psychological horror, among them the novella Beasts and, under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, The Barrens, Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon, Double Delight, and Snake Eyes. Her short stories have been nominated for Edgar Awards, and one of her stories is included in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“The Skull” is one of those stories generated by an image. A man labors, rather like an artist, to recreate the facial features of a murder victim. He might tell himself, as an artist must tell himself, that he is the only living person who can achieve this particular goal. There is something magical in his mission, unless there is something obsessive, too. By degrees, the “personality” of the skull exerts its power over him, which is, of course, the irresistible power of the unconscious to seduce us, as we are all vulnerable to seduction by obsessions. In a longer version of the story, pragmatically edited out at Harper’s, the forensic scientist endangers his marriage in his pursuit of the skull’s identity. When he travels to the murder victim’s home, he learns who she “really” was — or does he? “The Skull” he pursues with such single-minded devotion is, in a sense, his own skull, his impending mortality.

George P. Pelecanos is an award-winning journalist, screenwriter, independent film producer, and the author of eleven highly regarded crime novels, the latest of which is Soul Circus. He is currently writing for the HBO television series The Wire and has recently completed his next novel, Hard Revolution, to be published in 2004. Esquire magazine called Pelecanos “the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world.”

“The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us” describes that time in our history when European immigrants flocked from their homelands to the American cities. Many were eased into the culture by seasoned relatives who had preceded them. Others found loneliness, prejudice, and confusion. My father’s family settled in D.C.’s Chinatown, which housed not only Chinese but poor immigrants of all backgrounds. These men and women typically worked as kitchen help, pushcart vendors, and day laborers. Like today’s immigrants, they did the kind of work that native-born Americans were no longer willing to do.

One night, a great-uncle of mine was walking through a pedestrian tunnel after coming home from his stint as a hotel busboy. A man attacked him from the shadows and attempted to rob him of his day’s wage. My uncle, a semiprofessional boxer, was in the habit of carrying a knife; what happened next haunted him for the rest of his life. The idea for this story comes, very loosely, out of that event.

Most Greeks came to this country with no formal education or knowledge of the English language; not only did they survive, they excelled. This is the story of one young man who slipped through the cracks. It is my attempt to get inside his head.

Scott Phillips was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1961. He is the author of The Ice Harvest and The Walkaway and the forthcoming Cottonwood. He has been nominated for, and lost, the Edgar Award, the Hammett Prize, the CWA Gold and Silver Daggers, the John Creasey Memorial Dagger, the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award. He won a California Book Award for Best First Fiction. He has a wife and daughter, with whom he lives somewhere west of the Mississippi River.

Wayne Ogden is a character from my second novel, The Walkaway, and his grandfather Bill Ogden narrates Cottonwood, the novel I’m finishing now. When Dennis McMillan asked me to contribute a story set in the 1930s to Measures of Poison, I was stumped until he suggested I use a teen-aged Wayne as a protagonist; I was delighted for the chance to get back to that depraved voice and persona, and to see Wayne as a much younger and unformed character. Other characters in the story walked out of my novels as well: Mildred Halliburton appears very briefly in The Walkaway at the age of ninety-five, and Gleason the elderly bartender shows up in Cottonwood as a twenty-year-old. Bar owner Stan Gerard is the father of Bill Gerard, the strip-joint owner from The Ice Harvest. The climactic event in “Sockdolager” is loosely based on a real firebombing that happened in Wichita in the late sixties, and I’m told the perpetrator’s motivations were much as I’ve described Wayne’s herein.

Daniel Stashower is the author of five mystery novels and two biographies. His most recent book is The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television, and he won an Edgar Award in 2000 for Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. Stashower is also a past recipient of the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction Writing. A freelance journalist since 1986, he has written articles for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic Traveller, and American History. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Alison, and his son, Sam.

When I was thirteen years old, I tried out for the part of Billy the Page in a revival of William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t get the part, so I went home and wrote a play of my own, entitled Sherlock Holmes Versus the Lizard People. It found Holmes and Watson struggling to fend off an invasion by a formidable army of lizard people, who, if memory serves, had the advantage of hovering spaceships and laser pistols. I was inordinately pleased with it, and in many ways “The Agitated Actress” is the same story again, only without the laser pistols.

Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Story, Epoch, Story Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sonora Review, and the anthology Lit Riffs (Simon and Schuster, 2003). She earned her M.A. from New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program and has been awarded residency fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook, and the New York State Writers Institute. She is currently the editor of One Story magazine and teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, is forthcoming from Dial Press in March 2004.

My parents are both huge mystery fans. When I started writing fiction they told me: If you want to make any money doing this you have to write a mystery. “Home Sweet Home” was my first attempt. I wanted my murderer to be sympathetic. I also wanted to see if I could drift from point of view to point of view while solving the crime. Michael Koch, the editor of Epoch, gave his great insight to finish the piece. It’s an honor to be included in this anthology, among such talented writers. Mom and Dad — you were right — about this, and so many things.

Scott Wolven is finishing an M.F.A. at Columbia University. He currently teaches creative writing at Binghamton University (SUNY) and lives in upstate New York with his wife. His story “The Copper Kings” was selected for The Best American Stories 2002. Other recent short fiction has appeared in the Crime Issue of the Mississippi Review and at Plotswithguns.com.

“Controlled Burn” started out just as the title (taken from a radio program on forestry and farm techniques) and some thoughts about the nature of fire. The story ended up being about a lot of things, a combination of the elements and various depths of mystery, of crime and the truth about lies. And the story is partially about working, especially at a woodlot or as a farmer, both of which I have heard described in typical New England Yankee fashion as “an easy way to make a hard living.” The story went through a lot of revision, and I’m grateful to Toiya Kirsten Finley, fiction editor at Harpur Palate, for her great editorial comments.

This story is dedicated to my grandfather. Special thanks to all the men and women serving in our armed forces. Very special thanks to Ray and Renate Morrison, Colin Harrison, Anthony Neil Smith of Plotswithguns.com, David Bartine, Sloan Harris, and the remarkable team at WSBW.

Monica Wood is the author of three novels, Secret Language, My Only Story, and the forthcoming Any Bitter Thing; a book of stories, Ernie’s Ark; and two books for aspiring writers, Description and The Pocket Muse: Ideas and Inspirations for Writing. Her short stories have been widely published and anthologized, most recently in Manoa, Glimmer Train, and Confrontation.

“That One Autumn” is part of Ernie’s Ark, a collection of linked stories. It is the only one in the book that takes place in the past. In the present, Ernie is nursing Marie through her cancer. They have a beautiful marriage, marred only, perhaps, by Ernie’s tendency to mythologize it. I decided to go back thirty years and find out where the myth began for them. That’s where the story was born. Tracey turns up later in the book, too, in case you’re curious about what happens to her.