The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

Contributors’ Notes

Richard Burgin is the author of eleven books, including the novel Ghost Quartet and the recent story collections Fear of Blue Skies and The Spirit Returns. Four of his stories have won Pushcart Prizes and thirteen others have been listed by the prestigious Pushcart Prize anthology as being among the year’s best. His forthcoming New and Selected Stones will also include a CD of his musical compositions. He is a professor of communication and English at Saint Louis University, where he edits the nationally distributed and award-winning literary journal Boulevard.

“The Identity Club” grew out of my thinking about how enamored so many people are with celebrities. I imaged a secret club of people so obsessed with various famous dead writers or artists, etc., that they literally attempted to live their lives and die their deaths. To justify what they do, they devise a theory of reincarnation suited to their needs. New York City seemed a logical place for the Identity Club to exist. I also thought it important to make the protagonist an outsider from New England who innocently and enthusiastically, at first, becomes involved with this bizarre organization.

Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota and is enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is the author of ten novels, including Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also published children’s books, poetry, and a memoir of early motherhood, The BlueJay’s Dance. Her short fiction has won the National Magazine Award and appeared in the O. Henry and Best American short story collections. She lives in Minnesota with her children and runs a small independent bookstore, the Birchbark.

Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth, and serves as the legal, literary, and social representative of Lemony Snicket, whose sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series of Unfortunate Events, have been alleged international bestsellers. He has worked intermittently and inexplicably in film and journalism, and has been commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony to create a piece in collaboration with the composer Nathaniel Stookey. An adjunct accordionist for the pop group The Magnetic Fields, Mr. Handler lives in San Francisco with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, and a baby.

On March 14, 2003, the novelist and short story writer Amanda Davis died in a plane crash. She was a friend of mine. We used to meet up at my local bar from time to time to chew over problems both literary and personal. When I was asked to contribute to an anthology of genre writing, I thought it would be a kick to try a locked-room mystery, and as my religious beliefs do not contain much in the way of an afterlife, I had the idea to place Davis somewhere she might enjoy. Discerning readers may also note some references to Davis’s fiction within the story. I have an enthusiasm for complicated cocktails and perhaps there’ll be some more rounds at the Slow Night, but among the lessons of Davis’s death is that I ought not to make reckless promises about the future.

George V. Higgins (1939–1999) was the author of more than twenty novels, most notably his first, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, published in 1972 and filmed the following year. The short story collection from which “Jack Duggan’s Law” was taken, The Easiest Thing in the World, was published posthumously.

Edward P. Jones is the author of the novel The Known World, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and of Lost in the City: Stories.

“Old Boys, Old Girls” began with the main character in “Young Lions,” a story in Lost in the City. In the latter story, Caesar is a thief, not quite twenty-five, and growing into a not very nice man. Now, with “Old Boys,” we have that fully formed man — a prisoner who has murdered two human beings.

Stuart M. Kaminsky is the author of more than sixty published novels and forty short stories; he has also produced screenplays, television episodes, two plays, and even a book of poetry and a graphic novel. He writes four different series, featuring the 1940s private eye to the stars Toby Peters; the depressed Sarasota process server Lew Fonesca; the put-upon Chicago police detective Abe Leiberman and his partner, Bill Hanrahan; and the one-legged Russian police inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov.

“The Shooting of John Roy Worth” was written in two sittings. I had no idea what I was writing or what was going to happen. That’s not the way it usually works for me, but I tried it successfully once before, enjoyed the ride, and decided to take another one. My hope was that this tale would surprise the reader just as it surprised me when I wrote it. I just let my central character come alive and followed him down the street.

Dennis Lehane is the author of Mystic River and Shutter Island, as well as five novels featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. He lives in Boston, where he is currently writing a novel about, among other things, World War I, the great influenza outbreak of 1918, the Boston police strike of 1919, and the Tulsa race riot of 1921. The only thing he’s sure of is that it won’t be short.

I’d had the first line of “Until Gwen” bouncing around in my head for a few years when John Harvey asked me to write a story for a British anthology called Men from Boys. The only requirement was that it have something to do with fathers and sons. The deadline was maybe a week off, at best, when I finally tried writing it. I was going through a lot of personal turmoil at the time and I’ve never been the kind of writer who can write directly about my own life, but I think I do OK when I approach it obliquely. So I took a notepad out onto my front porch, which is surrounded by a hundred-year-old wisteria, and this rainstorm hit, a huge one, bending trees, clattering all over the street and the roof. But the wisteria kept anything from hitting me. I wrote the first draft that night on my porch in this crazy storm. It was supposed to be a comic story — that first line, hell, the whole first scene, is pretty absurd — but page by page it kept getting darker and darker until it ended up being arguably the darkest thing I’ve ever written. The writing of it, though — that whole storm-within/storm-without, mad-scientist vibe — was one of my favorite creative experiences.

Since publishing her first Tess Monaghan mystery in 1997, Laura Lippman has won virtually every major American crime-writing prize including the Edgar, Nero Wolfe, Anthony, Agatha, and Shamus. She lives in Baltimore.

“The Shoeshine Man’s Regrets” came about through the usual combination of solicitation and serendipity that guides most of my short stories into print. Bob Randisi asked me to contribute to his jazz-themed anthology, and I gave my usual conditional reply: “Sure, if I can think of something.” A few nights later, a strange white gob appeared on my boyfriend’s shoe as we left a restaurant — and a shoeshine man appeared providentially from the shadows to clean it up. But the most important aspect of the story, in my opinion, is that it describes the local sartorial flourish known in these parts as the “full Towson” — white shoes, white belt, and white tie.

My laptop died, taking this story with it, and I became so frustrated in my attempts to find and salvage it that I almost reneged on my promise to Bob. I’m glad I persevered and finally recovered it.

Tim McLoughlin was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he still resides. His first novel, Heart of the Old Country, was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program and won Italy’s Premio Penne award. He is the editor of the crime-fiction anthology series Brooklyn Noir.

I began writing a novel about a white graffiti artist growing up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, and the story got away from me. It became a complicated tale about fathers and sons, one I was not yet prepared to write. “When All This Was Bay Ridge” is taken from the core of that novel, and I think it scratches the surface of the emotional landscape I found myself navigating. I hope to return to it on the broader canvas one day, older, wiser, and better girded.

Lou Manfredo was born in Brooklyn and holds a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from St. John’s University in New York. A former New York City schoolteacher and legal investigator, he has recently completed a novel in which “Case Closed” appears as the first chapter. He is the father of one daughter, Nicole, and currently lives in Manalapan, New Jersey, with his wife, Joanne, and their long-haired dachshund.

I always strive for a realistic character-driven flavor in my fiction, with strong attention to dialogue. That is what I attempted in “Case Closed.” When I read fiction, or, for that matter, view a film or television show, I need to believe that the “who” and “what” being portrayed reflect reality. I feel that if a writer can successfully develop believable characters and dialogue, the plot will often develop on its own.

David Means’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2001. His second collection of stories, Assorted Fire Events, won the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His third book, The Secret Goldfish, has just been published by HarperCollins.

As I wrote this story, my characters moved according to their own wishes, and I watched as they became locked into the mystery of their relationship with each other, but also with the hard realities of postindustrial Michigan where they were venturing and the fact that erotic energies are most often best served between two people, not three. When I was doing the final edits on this story, I was staying in West Cork, Ireland, living for a few weeks in a small town called Durrus, working at a little table on the back patio. One day I looked up from the pages to watch a cow graze in the field just behind our cottage. As I watched, a farmer came out and began to pat the side of his cow, talking softly into her ear, and I thought: Man, I’m a long way from the world of Michigan and the place where these characters reside. I was happy to be away from all of that violence and chaos, but then I got back to work and was perfectly content to be amid the darker forces I’d set in motion.

Kent Nelson has published four novels and four collections of short fiction. His most recent novel, Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still, published in 2003, won the Colorado Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. In addition, with his daughter, Dylan, he has edited Birds in the Hand, a collection of stories and poems about birds. Nelson has run the Imogene Pass Run three times and the Pikes Peak Marathon twice, most recently in 2001. He is also an avid birder, with 739 North American species on his life list.

When my son was four or five, my older daughters got him into a dress and put lipstick and eyeliner on him, and he looked as beautiful as any girl possibly could. This was a fleeting image that stayed with me, and I meant to merge it somehow with some of my brutal experiences playing ice hockey in college. It was originally to be called “Girly Boy,” but what emerged in the writing of it was a much darker story than I’d ever intended.

The point of view became important, too. I experimented with a perspective I’d never tried before — the general viewpoint of a town, as Faulkner uses in “A Rose for Emily.” “Public Trouble” is not Faulkner, but at least the point of view worked well enough to get the story published.

Daniel Orozco was a Scowcroft and L’Heureux Fiction Fellow at Stanford University, then a Jones Lecturer in Fiction in the creative writing program there. His stories have appeared in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and in Harper’s Magazine, Zoetrope All-Story, and others. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Idaho.

When I taught classes at Stanford, I commuted there by train. It was a short walk to the station, a short wait for the train, and a ten-minute ride after that, so I never had the space I needed to really read anything. I killed time thumbing through the free local dailies. The police blotters caught my eye, and I started clipping them:

I thought about the officers who would respond to such incidents on this metaphorical day, and I thought about what their story might be as they attended to all these other stories. And I thought, How could I not at least try to write this?

David Rachel has worked as a factory laborer, forest fire fighter, hospital chaplain, massage therapist, letter carrier, teacher, professor, and professional storyteller. Author of several technical works, he now concentrates on fiction and poetry and divides his time between Europe and North America. His work has been broadcast on public radio stations and published in more than eighty literary journals in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia, including Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Indiana Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Pangolin Papers, Prism International, and South Carolina Review.

“The Last Man I Killed” had its origins in two widely separated experiences. One was many years of observation of corporate decision-making in universities. In this process evidence and logic, the stock-in-trade of academics, are seldom employed. In public, arguments tend to the personal and anecdotal, while the important decisions are usually made behind closed doors.

The second experience was as a child growing up in wartime Britain in a village all of whose men of military age were away in the armed forces. For a prolonged period, the village was hit almost every night by high explosive and incendiary bombs jettisoned by German planes returning from bombing raids on London. This experience, exhilarating at that age, led to a lifelong interest in the Second World War, and with the innumerable moral fables it engendered.

Joseph Raiche was born in 1979 in Faribault, Minnesota. He currently is an obituary writer for a local newspaper in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where he lives with his wife, Amanda. He graduated with a B.A. in creative writing from Saint Cloud State University and is soon to begin work on his M.A. at any school that will take him. Works of his have been published in Upper Mississippi Harvest, and the story “One Mississippi” originally appeared in The Baltimore Review.

The idea for “One Mississippi” came from a report I had heard of people trying to buy tickets to witness a real-life execution. Space was limited, so they held a lottery for what space there was. It struck me as odd that watching someone die was an enviable situation and not something you would want to distance yourself from. I bounced the idea for the story off Ryan Hanson, a friend and fellow writer in Saint Cloud. He thought it was a good one and the story was born. With the character Drew Larkun I hoped to create someone who was both realistic with the pain that he feels, yet believable with the understanding he arrives at. I believe the character is unlike most people, but I hope not so unlike the person we wish we could be.

My mom thinks the story is a complete downer. I thought there was hope in it, if you looked for it. Maybe she was right. I hope that I am.

John Sayles wrote the screenplays for and directed Return of the Secaucus 7, The Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, Passion Fish, and other groundbreaking films. Twice nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay, Sayles has also written two short story collections, Dillinger in Hollywood and The Anarchists’ Convention, and several novels, including Los Gusanos.

I started thinking about “Cruisers” while working on a film in Alaska, meeting fishermen, charter captains, and other people who spent a lot of their lives on the water. It struck me that people’s boats reflected their personalities, and that the “marina hoppers,” especially the retirees, were always looking toward the next berth with a kind of eternal hopefulness, as if never staying put could ward off age and time. Humans have an innate yearning for community, even if it’s a floating one with a high turnover in members. And I got to do research in sunnier places than Juneau.

Sam Shaw was born and raised in New York City, where, as a minor, he spent a good deal of his allowance money on detective pulps at the Mysterious Bookshop. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently finishing his first novel.

Typically I work my way into a new short story like an old man entering a pool — slowly, and with gritted teeth. “Reconstruction” presented an exception. In the end, the story would require many revisions, additions, and subtractions, but I dispatched a first draft in three short insomniac weeks, around Thanksgiving of 2002. The difference, I think, was the narrative voice, which I heard clearly almost from the start.

If you credit George Herbert, living well is the best revenge. But I’ve known a few sad, conflicted types (usually sons of successful, overbearing fathers) who avenge themselves by living badly — by willfully failing in the world. Such is the case with Getty, who, when we meet him, subsists in a limbo of dope smoke and bad TV, despite the fact that the father who set him on his course has been dead for years. The key to the story, for me, consisted in allowing the totems of his failure — his father’s Civil War treasure — to play a role in his awakening.

Many thanks to Marylee Macdonald for improving this story, M. M. M. Hayes for publishing it, and Otto Penzler and Joyce Carol Oates for anthologizing it.

Oz Spies was born in 1978 in Kirkland, Washington, and raised in many places before settling in Colorado. Her work has been published in several literary journals, including the Ontario Review, as well as in a collection of short-short stories entitled Women Behaving Badly. She received an M.F.A. from Colorado State University and is currently at work on a novel. She lives in Denver with her husband.

I wrote “The Love of a Strong Man” during the summer before my last year in graduate school. Earlier that year, in the spring, a man had broken into several students’ apartments late at night, then assaulted the young women who lived there. Thanks to DNA evidence and a baseball cap, the man was finally caught. The only detail about this man that I can recall hearing on the news was that he was married. Though (or because) I knew nothing about her, I began to dream about this man’s wife and imagine the life of someone married to a rapist. Out of those dreams came this story.

A native Chicagoan, Scott Turow is the author of six novels, all bestsellers, and two books of nonfiction. His works include Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, and One L. He won the Heartland Prize in 2003 for his novel Reversible Errors, and the 2004 Robert F. Kennedy Prize for his book about the death penalty, Ultimate Punishment. Turow is a law partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, devoting much of his time in practice to public interest and pro bono projects. He lives near Chicago with his wife, Annette, a painter; they have three children.

I began “Loyalty” in 1993, when I finished my third novel, Pleading Guilty, and I continued to work on the story in the intervals after completing my subsequent novels. I made a little headway each time but never could get to the end, even though the theme, about the interaction between male friendships and love relationships, felt like an enduring one to me. I always think I want to write more stories, but my ideas don’t seem to fit the current mold. “Loyalty” solidified my conclusion that in my hands the short story is more de Maupassant than Joyce. I hope that recognition will allow me to write stories in the future at a faster pace than one every eleven years.

Scott Wolven is the author of Controlled Burn, a collection of short stories. For four years in a row, Wolven’s stories have been selected for the Best American Mystery Stories series. One of his stories will appear in a plotswithguns.com hardboiled anthology, available from Dennis McMillan Publications. Scott Wolven lives in upstate New York.

“Barracuda” is a violent story, filled with violent men. I once owned a Barracuda automobile; I once saw an abandoned concrete swimming pool in the woods. Part of the mystery here is small — for example, who is the man appearing inside the hospital TV? Some of the mystery is larger, because violence sometimes knows no path and has a before and after that is hard to trace.

This story is dedicated to my brother Will, a great brother and fantastic artist who draws pictures that inspire my fiction. Anthony Neil Smith of plotswithguns.com, in which “Barracuda” appeared, deserves big credit for all the fine stories he piloted to success. It’s a real honor to have my story published here. Thanks to D.W., M., A.J.C., S.H., and the team at WSBW.