The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

Contributors’ Notes

Jeff Abbott has written seven novels of mystery and suspense. He is a three-time nominee for the Edgar Allan Poe Award (including a Best Short Story nomination for “Bet on Red”) and a two-time nominee for the Anthony Award. His first novel, Do Unto Others, won both the Agatha and the Macavity Award for Best First Novel. He is the author of the Whit Mosley suspense series (A Kiss Gone Bad and Black Jack Point): his latest novel is Cut and Run. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two sons.

• When I was approached to write a gambling-themed short story, I wanted to draw on the hip mythos of Las Vegas: cool criminals, beautiful and world-wise women, and enormous stakes that go way beyond what’s being wagered at the tables. I also wanted to bring that feeling of high-stakes staredown to the relationship between Scan and Red, to lead up to a moment between them where one of them must blink and change a life forever. From the opening line, I wanted to create the feeling for the reader of watching a roulette ball in an extended spin: anticipating that delicious yet awful moment when the ball tumbles to rest and someone wins and someone loses. Sudden reversals in fortune are the engine for both gambling addictions and suspense stories. That was the central idea I wanted to explore in “Bet on Red” — what happens if an unexpected downturn in our fortunes creates a new and dangerous opportunity. And mostly, I wanted to entertain the reader. I had a great deal of fun writing “Bet on Red,” and I’m adapting it into a screenplay for a short film.

Jeffrey Robert Bowman was born in 1979 and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. After attending Tufts University for three years, he graduated with a B.A. in literature and history. Currently, he divides his time between the United States and South America, where he works as a freelance writer and English teacher.

“Stonewalls” has remained a favorite of mine ever since I first conceived of the idea ages ago. While I do not consider the story a classic mystery story in the tradition of Chesterton or Doyle, there is a certain element to the lone I associate with my having read far too much Poe in too short a period of time. Poe was, to a great degree, the creator of the mystery genre, and it is his influence to which I am indebted for “Stonewalls.”

William J. Carroll, Jr., was born in Marlboro, Massachusetts, in 1947. He served in the army in Vietnam, Thailand, and Korea, and settled in Hawaii. He has a B.S. from Chaminade University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii. He lives and works in Honolulu.

• The Virginiak stories, of which “Height Advantage” is one, were born of my military service, a love of the northwest, where many of the stories are situated, and a lifelong need to write. They also emerge from a desire to emulate the styles of the American greats of mystery fiction. Hammett and Chandler in particular; but, as Ross Macdonald accomplished in his long, wonderful Archer series, they are also born of a need to project what I consider the best of us — qualities of value — into a character who faces stressful, trying, and desperate circumstances. Which makes Virginiak not me by any means, despite the first-person narrative, but he is the best of me, mirroring qualities I like about myself and others; and seeing those qualities personified and under challenge is the real kick of this whole thing.

Benjamin Cavell was born in Boston and is a graduate of Harvard College, where he was a boxer and an editor for the Crimson. His first book, Rumble, Young Man, Rumble, a collection of stories in which “Evolution” appears, was published by Knopf and named an Esquire Magazine Best Book of 2003.

• I don’t like to tell stories. I’m sure this is not a proper thing for a writer to admit, but I’m annoyed when I read interviews with novelists in which they say, “I write because I want to tell stories,” or (worse). “I just had a story that needed to be told.” I resent feeling obligated to make something happen. I’d rather just have my characters yap at each other.

I’ve always been attracted to the idea of writing mysteries, in part because a mystery supplies its own momentum. I think part of the reason I’ve never really been able to write a mystery is that I can’t figure out how to do it without forcing my characters into situations they would never put themselves in, which in turn shakes my conviction in the reality of the story and makes everything feel false. My first attempts at writing (when I was eleven, twelve years old) were super-hardboiled detective stories that featured hip, wisecracking, Marlowe-style narrators who talked out of the sides of their mouths. My problem, even then, was that I couldn’t quite make myself believe in the world I was creating.

While I was writing “Evolution,” I never thought of it as a mystery (in fact, I’m still not sure that it is). I wrote it from beginning to end, without jumping around, without ever really knowing what was going to happen until it happened. Looking at it now, three years after I wrote it, I see a few things that bother me, things I might do differently if I were writing the story today. But I’m happy to see that the writing is not safe or polite, is in fact right where I want it — on the brink of out-of-control, pulling the story behind it toward the edge of the cliff.

Christopher Coake was born in Indiana, and raised there and in Colorado. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he has just finished an M.F.A. at the Ohio State University; prior to that he received an М.A. in creative writing at Miami University of Ohio. Chris’s short fiction has appeared in the Journal; the late, lamented Central Ohio Writing; the Gettysburg Review; and Epoch. His first book, a collection of stories entitled We’re in Trouble, is forthcoming from Harcourt in the spring of 2005. In January 2005 Chris will begin teaching creative writing at the University of Nevada-Reno; in the meantime he’s hard at work on a novel.

• I’ve always been attracted to, and at the same lime appalled by, true crime books and television shows — a conflict I let Patricia and Larry argue for me in “All Through the House.” A couple of years ago I read two books that affected me particularly. The first — which has left my possession, and whose title I can’t recall — was a biography of Charles Whitman, the University of Texas sniper. Whitman killed his wife and mother the night before his shooting spree, and the book included photos of these murder scenes with the bodies entirely blacked out — an odd touch that disturbed me more deeply than other books’ lurid gore. Not long afterward I read a book called Shadowed Ground, by Kenneth E. Foote (a professor at UT; his book examines Whitman too), which is about the ways people either memorialize or erase the sites of murders and tragedies. From it I learned that the vacant farmhouse of serial killer Ed Gein had become, after his arrest, a twisted kind of tourist attraction, and that it was destroyed by an anonymous arsonist just before it was to be sold at auction. The idea of telling a story that melded both image and vignette — a story that was at once the history of a place and of the people who had been deleted from it — seemed pretty potent to me. I knew from the start I wanted to move backward; the metaphor I used for this process, which I realize is not 100 percent accurate, was that of an archaeological excavation. If I kept digging in the same place, what would I find?

I finished a draft of the story during my first year at Ohio State, and I was sure it was an incomprehensible failure. But Lee K. Abbott, who is (don t tell anyone) not quite the curmudgeon he claims to be, explained its worth to me during his workshop. Then he spent months badgering me to finish my revisions and submit the story to journals. Finally he grabbed it out of my hands and gave it to the good people at the Gettysburg Review himself. That a writer of his caliber could champion any work of mine continues to awe me... so my deepest thanks, Lee, yet again.

Patrick Michael Finn was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1973, and was raised there and in rural southern California. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Riverside, and completed his M.F.A. at the University of Arizona, where he was a Dean Charles Tatum Teaching Fellow. A winner of many fiction prizes, including the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Award and the 2004 Third Coast Fiction Award, his stories have appeared in Quarterly West, Ploughshares, the Richmond Review, and Third Coast.

I wrote “Where Beautiful Ladies Dance for You” during my last semester of graduate school, when I was studying with Elizabeth Evans and Jonathan Penner, two terrific writing teachers who cultivated my imagination and productivity. The story began with only a vague sense of Ray Dwyer. I pictured a big Joliet guy who worked in the quarries, but I didn’t really know what to do with him, which obviously meant I didn’t know what to do with the story. And then one night while I was pacing and biting my nails, I remembered a young man I went to high school with — I hadn’t thought of him for years — who was the son of Greek immigrants who owned a restaurant in nearby Tinley Park. His father actually had hired a belly dancer once or twice to entertain the customers: the city told him to stop, and that was the end of it. At the high school, we joked with his son about it. “Hey, Sam,” we’d say. “How are your dad’s belly dancers?” Anyway, once my memory dug up that information. I knew exactly where Ray Dwyer belonged. Thank you, Susan Straight, for believing that my story belonged somewhere as well.

Rob Kantner (www.RobKantner.com) has published, in addition to nine mystery novels featuring ex-union enforcer Ben Perkina, some four dozen short stories and novellas in the realms of crime, suspense, and the supernatural (and, in a single instance, romance), plus three nonfiction books and many articles and essays. He lives with his wife, Deanna, on their rural Michigan farm.

• As a writer I’ve always loved to tinker with point of view. As a person I’m intrigued by the idea that seemingly random events may be, unbeknownst to the participants, linked in a domino-game chain of cause and effect. In a sense, “Wendy” is a merger of these interests. The point of view is handed off like a baton from one mini-protagonist to the next, and the story is really a chain of vignettes depicting busy, messy lives linking for brief moments in a dance of cause and effect, ending with a positive outcome for the title character, whom we never really meet. I began it as an experiment and finished it because it refused to let me go. It was fun to write, and also about drove me nuts.

Jonathon King was horn in Lansing, Michigan. His first novel, The Blue Edge of Midnight, introduced P. I. Max Freeman and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author in 2002. He has been a street reporter for newspapers since 1980 and has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists (the Green Eyeshade award), the National Association of Black Journalists, and the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors. His third Max Freeman novel. Shadow Men, was published this year. He has lived in Florida for the past twenty years and continues to work as a senior writer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

I’d been spinning the storyline of “Snake Eyes” since 1999 when I wrote a series for my newspaper on the last one hundred years of South Florida. The foundations are historical. Men were hired in the 1920s to clear diamondback rattlesnakes from the scrubland where Hialeah Race Track was eventually built. Colonel E. R. Bradley ran an illegal casino for the rich and famous visitors to the City of Palm Beach for forty-eight years, starting in early 1898, and bragged that he had never been robbed. When a friend of mine first read the story, he commented that he thought it well written “but the hero is a thief!” To which I replied: “Yes?”

Stephen King was born in Portland. Maine, and raised in Durham, a no-stoplight town twenty miles north of that city. He graduated cum laude from the University of Maine (known by some New England wits as the University of Cow) in 1970. He’s written a lot of novels and short stories since then. Some aren’t too bad, and a couple really kick ass.

• One night in early 2003, I woke from a terrible nightmare. In it, my wife and I were in our kitchen and I was making our breakfast while she read the newspaper. The telephone rang. She answered it, then held it out and said, “It’s for you.” But I didn’t want to answer it, because I knew — positively knew, the way you sometimes do in dreams — that someone wanted to tell me one of our children was dead. I went directly from my bed to the word processor and wrote “Harvey’s Dream” at a single go. All I really needed to do to make it work was to subtract the love that still powers the marriage I share with my wife, and change the point of view from the man to the woman. There’s no explaining why these things work: you just know they will, and you do them.

Michael Knight is the author of a novel, Divining Rod, and two collections of short fiction, Dogfight and Other Stories and Goodnight, Nobody. His stories have appeared, among other places, in Esquire, The New Yorker, StoryQuarterly, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee.

• Every semester I assign my students some variety of an exercise on writing dialogue and scene. Often they ask for sample scenarios to help get them started. I borrowed this one, years ago, from Josip Novakovich: Write a probing dialogue between a police officer and a burglar who pretends to live in the apartment from which he’s stealing. I mixed it in with a few others, some cribbed from teaching texts, others of my own devising. To my surprise, the vast majority of the class picked the cop/burglar scene to write. So did the next class. And the next one. And so on, with mixed results, until I quit using it. I included this particular scenario to allow for some room for comedy, but it always struck me as too ridiculous to generate anything of substance. Anyway, I decided, at last, to have a go at it myself. The final draft of “Smash and Grab” veers pretty far from the original source, but it does prove that my students are right about most things and I’m usually well served if I shut up and pay attention.

Richard Lange’s stories have appeared in the Sun, the Southern Review, the Iowa Review, and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently working on a novel.

• Things weren’t going so well for me when I wrote “Bank of America.” I was angry and broke. I had a bad job and felt humiliated everyday. I began to fantasize about ways out of my situation, and, living in the bank robbery capital of the world and all, those fantasies look on criminal overtones. The first drafts of this piece were too full of fire and ranting. I had to step back and let the characters do their stuff. It was a good lesson in corralling raw emotion. I’m doing okay now. I got a new job, a better one; I quit smoking. But I’m still angry.

It’s important that I thank Marie Hayes and the other good people at StoryQuarterly for originally printing this piece. Without them, I wouldn’t be here.

Tom Larsen lives in Lambertville, New Jersey, with his wife, Andree, and Langley the cat. His work has appeared in Newsday, Cottonwood, Mixed Bag, and Christopher Street Magazine. “Lids” first appeared in New Millennium Writing in the spring of 2003. “Straight Life,” his latest story, is included in the current issue of New Millennium Writing, and his short story “What’s Marvin Gave Got to Do with It?” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Lynx Eye magazine in Los Angeles.

• I first got the idea for “Lids” while living in an apartment in the Berkeley flatlands. The tenant next door ran a small-time drug operation and his customers included several local rockers who were poised on, but would never quite topple over, the brink of stardom. Mike, the tenant, never slept and rarely left the apartment. Traffic was horrendous and I was initially torn between calling the cops and stealing his stash. I settled, instead, on becoming his most reliable customer.

The character “Lids” came from thirty years of watching Robert Mitchum movies.

The location is an amalgam of every place I have ever lived.

The rest I made up.

New Orleans-born Dick Lochte worked for a detective agency, managed a travel company, and promoted and wrote film reviews for a world-famous magazine for men before moving to southern California and a career as a journalist, screenwriter, and author. His first novel, Sleeping Dog, a New York Times Notable Book, was nominated for the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Anthony Awards and won the Nero Wolfe Award. Lochte is the author of a short story collection, Lиску Dog, and eight novels, the most recent being the legal thriller Lawless, written with attorney Christopher Darden.

• It was inevitable that I write a story about bank robbers. Not only do I live in what the FBI considers to be the bank robbery capital of the world, I was able to do my research for “Low Tide” at the dinner table. My wife is the president of a nationwide organization of licensed psychologists specializing in caring for the victims of workplace trauma. The trauma is usually the result of bank robberies. My robber, who’d probably be nicknamed the Movie Star Bandit, is a direct descendant of a long line of genuine perps such as the Yankee Bandit, the Plaid Shirt Bandit, and (because he carried his gun in his tummy-pack) the Kangaroo Bandit. The other characters — bank employees, customers, lawmen, et al. — are pure fiction. As are the details of the robber’s modus operandi, which, readers with larceny in their hearts should note, may not work as smoothly in real life.

Richard A. Lupoff has written more than fifty books spanning the worlds of crime, science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction. He is best known in the mystery field for his eight-volume are of novels about insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey and homicide detective Marvia Plum. The series stalled, unfortunately, after seven entries, but Lupoff has sworn to complete the as-yet fragmentary eighth volume in the pretty-near future.

• When I was a schoolboy we were taught history as a memorization exercise: the names of kings, generals, politicians, and inventors; the dates of battles and elections. Such dry stuff was horribly boring and turned me away from history for many years. Then I discovered, chiefly through observing the world around me, that history is, in fact, a story, and a fascinating one. This realization has informed my novels, short stories, and works of nonfiction.

Writers of crime, suspense, and mystery are best described as haunted by the genre, and Joyce Carol Oates is one of these. Born and raised in upstate New York, she received degrees at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin, and has been a professor of humanities at Princeton University since 1978. She is a recipient of the National Book Award and, in 2003, the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Achievement in Literature. She is the author most recently of the novella Rape: A Love Story and I Am No One You Know, a collection of short stories on crime-related themes.

• “Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi” is about a subject that has always fascinated me: the conjunction of the familial and the murderous. That individuals who are devoted to blood relatives can be utterly heartless to nonrelatives; that individuals whom we might find attractive, even charismatic, if encountered in the right circumstances, can be monstrous in other circumstances where to encounter them would be lethal.

In what we call real life, as distinct from fiction, there are very few girls like Doll Early, who prey upon sexual predators. Young girls exploiter! in the flourishing sex trade are not likely to be empowered to avenge themselves upon their clients. But “Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi” is a romance, and Doll and her father, Mr. Early, are figures of romance. I meant them to have an American mythic aura, outlaws who in another era might be the subjects of ballad.

Jack O’Connell is the author of the novels Box Nine, Wireless, The Skin Palace, and Word Made Flesh. He lives with his wife and children in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he is currently at work on a new “Quinsigamond” book.

• In general, and from the start, I’ve preferred the long form. But every now and then, a notion for a short story arrives unexpectedly anti pecks away at me until I heed it. “The Swag from Doc Hawthorne’s” is a good example of this occasional ambush. The story began with an image from my misspent youth: I once lasted a week doing Darcey’s job — driving a shuttle van from early morning until late afternoon around the same brief and circular route of a research institute. Such employment will breed stories or psychosis. In this instance, I bloomed a story about impossible stories. And though the future looks ambiguous, at best, for our two ill-suited partners in crime, I’m not at all convinced we’ve seen the last of Yuk Tang and Darcey.

Frederick Waterman is a former journalist and sportswriter who worked for newspapers in Connecticut and New Hampshire and for United Press International. His assignments included coverage of murder trials, presidential campaigns, the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and Wimbledon. He also worked as a drama critic in New York and Boston. “Best Man Wins” is the sixteenth story in the “Row 22, Seats A & B” short-story series, which appears in United Air Lines’ in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, and at Row22.com.

• When I read a short story, I want it to be compelling from the start, so that I must know what happens. I want the writing to be clean and clear, I want the writer to have a voice that is so distinct I can almost hear the words being spoken out loud, and those words should have a rhythm and cadence that seem to carry the reader along. I want the story to have themes that I will find myself thinking about later and characters I’d recognize if they walked into the room — not because of their appearance, but because I’d understand who they are and why. Those are the things I admire in a good short story, and that is what I sought in “Best Man Wins.”

Timothy Williams is a native Kentuckian and a graduate of the M.F.A. program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His fiction has appeared in the Greensboro, Colorado, Cimarron, and Texas Reviews and in several other literary quarterlies. A short story collection and a crime novel are now with his agent and should be landing on editorial desks soon. He currently lives in Murray, Kentucky, with his wife, Sherraine, and two children, Carson and Madelyn, and teaches creative writing and humanities at Murray State University.

• “Something About Teddy” was inspired by a long, monotonous drive on an interstate with my wife. During the trip, she decided to pass the time by analyzing my personality. Her diagnosis? Being married to me is like being married to two men — one who craves order and meaning, another who thrives on chaos. That was enough to spark my imagination, and I began to wonder what would happen if you locked the two into a car and put murder on their agenda. Somewhere along the line, I realized that theirs was a love story with an inevitable ending. I’d also like to thank Neil Smith at Plots with Guns both for publishing my story and for providing a place on the Web where hardboiled and noir fans like myself can indulge our passion.

Scott Wolven is the author of Controlled Burn, a collection of short stories published by Scribner. Wolven’s appearance in the 2004 edition marks the third consecutive year his stories have been selected for The Best American Mystery Stories series. He has taught creative writing at Binghamton University (SUNY) and attended graduate school at Columbia University.

• “El Rey” is about hard work, boxing, and murder — a real action story. I grew up in Catskill, New York, so boxing and boxers were all around, including the Champ, Mike Tyson. I read once that “action can be inscrutable... and desperately concealing. As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease,” but grows. Eudora Welty wrote that (along with her own fine stories), and she was a Ross Macdonald fan. So she knew about the increase of mystery through action, especially around dangerous characters like Tom Kennedy, and I thought about it as I wrote the story. In fairness to the setting, if you’re ever in the real St. Johnsbury, Vermont, visit the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, on Main Street. A true American treasure.

This story is dedicated to Tom Sahagian, the straight shooter. To all the men and women in our armed forces. Special thanks to Randy Duax at lostinfront.com, Denise Baton at Mystcrical-E, Susan Strehle, Ruth Stanek, Stefanie Czebiniak, Jaimee Wriston Colbert, Colin Harrison, Sloan Harris, Ray Morrison, Alex Cussen, M & DW, and the super team at WSBW.

Angela Zeman was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, where her widowed mother brought her up mostly within the public library. She attended various colleges, the most distinguished being the Heron School of Art in Indiana. Having loved books all her life, she decided to learn to write at the age of thirty-five. Since then, as per the exasperated observation of her beloved friend and writing mentor, the late Gary Provost — “Like me, you want to write everything” — she began writing her first short story to distract her mind during a two-day car trip home from a Florida vacation. The car was full of children, some not her own. The car’s driver was an unstable and violent man who had just discovered her secret: that she intended to divorce him. Potboiler indeed.

• Years later, Cathleen Jordan phoned from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to buy that story. “The Witch and the Fishmonger’s Wife.” My first sale! That story, however, was not my first attempt at writing. My earliest effort had been a novel about a female assassin-for-hire who only murdered husbands. (Are you detecting something here?) Although my protagonist did a superior job of eliminating nine, for some reason no one would buy that book. Thankfully, I’ve since sold many short stories and a different novel. That unsold book, however, began my fascination with a theme I seem compelled to explore in all my fiction, including this anthology’s “Green Heat.” Not that husbands are evil; I adore my current one. But that any relationship — among family or with the most vile stranger — can lead to terror, unexpected tenderness, or even a laugh. We humans, the planet’s most imaginative connivers, endlessly validate my theory that we had no business living in the Garden of Eden in the first place.