The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Contributors’ Notes

Chris Adrian is a pediatrician and divinity student in Boston. McSweeney’s published his second novel, The Children’s Hospital, last year, and Farrar Straus & Giroux will bring out a collection of stories called Why Antichrist? in May of 2008.

• I wrote this story back in 1996, not very long after my brother died, and at the same time that I was working on a rather goofy master’s thesis about conjoined twins. As part of the research for the thesis I read interviews with some survivors of separation surgeries in which one twin had died. It was not surprising to read that the survivors all missed their siblings, even though they had been separated as toddlers or infants and did not remember them very clearly. And one person in particular described his life as being shaped more than anything by the subsequent absence of his twin.

At about the same time I had a terrible nightmare in which I was Karen Black being chased around by that little fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror (except it had straggly blond hair instead of scraggly black hair, and was wearing a fancy dress). And somehow the bad dream and the sad testimony became the inspiration for an odd story.

Robert Andrews is a former Green Beret and CIA officer whose first four novels dealt with the spy business. His last three novels, however (Marian Wood, G.P. Putnam’s Sons), feature homicide detective Frank Kearney and Jose Phelps. Andrews and his wife BJ live in Washington, D.C.

• I was noodling around, thinking about a plot for a fifth spy novel, when Chuck and I had lunch. Chuck was one of the Washington Posts best investigative reporters. An acolyte of Bob Woodward, Chuck specialized in prying the tops off well-guarded cans of worms Washington’s political elite hoped to hide from their constituents.

“Story on the wire,” Chuck tells me one day at Stoney’s. “Hit-run kills a Catholic priest in Boston. He’s got eighty thousand bucks… cash… in shoeboxes in his closet.”

Chuck smiled. “They trace it to a Brinks holdup.”

The Soviet Union had gone belly-up almost ten years before. And terrorists hadn’t yet driven into the Trade Center. BJ and I had just moved into D.C. from a quiet Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood. That year, the district earned the honor of becoming the nation’s murder capital.

And so my first crime novel, A Murder of Honor: A drive-by shooting, and Father Robert J. O’Brien sprawls dead on Pennsylvania Avenue. The more detectives Kearney and Phelps work the case, the more fingers point to the good priest’s involvement in a nasty drug operation. At the same time, more comes out that paints O’Brien as a man of honor.

Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon’s attorney general, described Washington as “too small to be a state, too big to be an insane asylum.” In writing A Murder of Honor and its sequels, I realized that Washington’s swamp-fever looniness offered more permutations for intrigue and mischief than did international espionage.

And so Kearney and Phelps show up in the draft of the fourth D.C. cop novel: On the same morning that an advertising executive kills himself in the upper-class Northwest, a student in ragged Anacostia murders a beloved high-school teacher. And there’s a connection… some three hundred pages from now.

Back to “Solomon’s Alley”: Kearney and Phelps have cameos. But the protagonist is Solomon, who tends to his Georgetown alley and argues with his Voices.

Peter Blauner is the author of six novels, including Slow Motion Riot, which won the 1992 Edgar Award for best first novel of the year, and The Intruder, a New York Times bestseller as well as an international bestseller. His most recent novel is Slipping into Darkness. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, author Peg Tyre, and their two children.

• I have only one firm rule about writing: Don’t do it about the kids. Any so-called grownups I run into are fair game; I tell them I’m a writer and they take their chances when they talk to me. Children don’t have that choice. Still. “Going. Going, Gone” might be an indirect tribute to the fact that they sometimes understand the world around them better than the adults who are supposed to be looking after them. The story was also intended as an homage to Morris Engel’s wonderful 1953 film, Tittle Fugitive — a seminal influence on New Wave directors like François Truffaut and John Cassavetes. Not that many people have seen it, though it used to pop up occasionally on the late, late movie back in the sixties and seventies. It’s about a little kid who runs away to Coney Island after he thinks he’s killed his older brother. Though my story obviously goes in a different direction, it’s a debt I’ve been meaning to make good on. So I’m glad for the opportunity to settle up here.

Lawrence Block is a devout New Yorker and enthusiastic world traveler. He has won Life Achievement awards from writers’ organizations here and abroad, and characterizes them as “a way for your colleagues to tell you that your future lies largely in the past.” Like Keller, he’s a passionate philatelist; unlike any of his heroes, he’s an apparently deranged participant in marathons and ultramarathons.

• Keller first saw the light of day in a short story, and the three books about him (Hit Man, Hit List, and Hit Parade) are either short-story collections or episodic novels, as you prefer. The guy seems to be a true guilty pleasure for readers, who tell me they don’t want to like him, but they can’t help themselves. This particular story came about because an editor wanted something for a collection of basketball stories; I told him I couldn’t think of anything, and then, curiously, I thought of something.

John Bond is a raconteur living in Dania Beach, Florida. A licensed pilot and boat captain, he has been a lawyer, realtor, adjunct professor of journalism and creative writing, tour group leader, scuba instructor, columnist, newspaper editor, political campaign manager, lobbyist, developer, and more. He is the coauthor (with Roy Cooke) of six books about poker, including 2007’s Home Poker Handbook. His day job is to love his wife, Jeannie, who is too good for him.

• I’m still trying to explain to both my wife and mother why I gave up practicing law to write and play poker. And that poker really isn’t gambling. Some fifteen years later they remain skeptical.

I am a true newbie in the short-story world. “T-bird,” from the anthology Miami Noir, is not only my first published fiction, it is the first short story I have ever submitted anywhere. I have some 5,000 pages of unfinished novels, failed screenplays, character sketches, and plot notes. But no short stories.

I got lucky when I quit lawyering that Florida International University’s Creative Writing Program was just a few miles from my home. It’s a small program counting among its alumni the likes of Dennis Lehane and Barbara Packer, and lesser-known but stellar writers like Vicki Hendricks, Sandra Rodriguez Barron, and Christine Kling. Thanks eternally to the FIU faculty: Les Sandiford (Miami Noir editor), John Dufresne (also represented in this anthology), Lynne Barrett (Edgar winner), Campbell McGrath (Guggenheim genius grant winner), and Jim Hall (kick-ass thriller writer) for molding me into something of a writer. To the extent my work has any merit I owe it to them; to the extent I suck that’s my own damn fault.

Writing a short story, especially one with defined themes (Miami and Noir) is something like writing a sonnet. Form can dictate content, force you to be creative in ways you would not normally have considered. When I think Noir, I think night, I think betrayal, I think lust trampling over reason. My femme fatale Rebel is surnamed O’Shaunessy, a tip of the hat to Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, which for me epitomizes Noir. And then there’s the delightful irony of setting darkness amid the palms and banyans in the sun-dappled tropical paradise, perfected by the editor of this collection, Carl Hiaasen. The form indeed dictated much of the story.

I used to run a game like McKool’s — the statute of limitations has run, so I can admit it. I loved how the day and night worlds collided there, the incredible variety of people one meets at the poker table. It seemed a suitable place to set something dark. It was there I met a girl who ran a scam not unlike that described in the story, though rather than die at the end she hit pay dirt.

My FIU mentors say I should take another shot at the short story. As their advice so far has been nothing but dead-on right, I may just do that.

James Lee Burke was born in 1936 in Houston, Texas, and grew up on the Louisiana-Texas coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and later the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he received a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature.

Over the years he has published twenty-five novels and one collection of short stories. The stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, the Southern Review, Antioch Review, and Kenyon Review. His novels Heaven’s Prisoners and Two for Texas were adapted as motion pictures.

Burke’s work has received two Edgar Awards for best crime novel of the year. He is also a Breadloaf fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and has been a recipient of an NEA grant. He and his wife of forty-six years, Pearl Burke, have four children and divide their time between Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.

• “A Season of Regret” was my literary attempt to show that a good man remains in conflict with the world regardless of the era in which he lives. The story is naturalistic in theme and indicates that criminals, political and otherwise, usually find banners and uniforms to hide behind. Albert Hollister carries a stone bruise in the soul, one that was visited upon him because of his humanity. Ultimately he is set free from the past, but in ways he will never be able to share with others.

His tragedy becomes ours. The wisdom he acquires cannot be passed on. This may seem a dismal thought, but I suspect that’s just the way it is.

John Dufresne is the author of three novels, two collections of stories, a book on fiction writing, and the forthcoming novel Requiem, Mass. He lives in South Florida.

• I decided to write about the direst crime I could imagine. A man kills his children. His wife and children. My job, then, was to try to figure out how and why a person would or could commit such an unspeakable act. I didn’t want to spend all my time in the murderer’s head, so I invented my hero, a man with the same interest in the crime as I had. And then the murderer killed his parents. What now? I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, while I was writing the story. My friend David Beaty was also in St. Petersburg and was also writing a story for the same anthology, Miami Noir. We wrote separately during the day, got together at night over vodka and shashlyk, or vodka and blinis, or vodka and vodka, and read our stories to each other. We walked in the steps of Raskolnikov, along the Gribodeva canal through Sennaya Ploschad, up to his apartment, and on to the unfortunate moneylenders’ apartment. We wrote some more. We read some more. And in this entertaining way, we helped each other tell the stories of some disturbed people possessed by demons. As it were.

Louise Erdrich, the critically acclaimed Native American writer, has written such best-selling novels as The Antelope Wife, Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace. She also collaborated on The Crown of Columbus with Michael Dorris, her late husband.

• Gleason’s description matches a former boyfriend of one of my teenage daughters. I imagined that he was just the sort of person whose meek and soulful demeanor masks his dark tendencies. Fictionalizing him helped give a shape to my paranoia, but as far as I know he went on to be a decent citizen.

Jim Fusilli is the author of four novels, including Hard, Hard City, which was named Best Novel of 2004 by Mystery Ink magazine. A journalist and critic, Jim writes about rock and pop music for the Wall Street Journal, and his reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His Pet Sounds, a highly personal look at Brian Wilson and the classic Beach Boys album, was published in 2005.

• My private-eye novels are written in the first person, set largely in the present New York City, and revolve around contemporary social issues. “Chellini’s Solution” is one of several short stories I wrote recently to open my fiction writing style. It’s set in 1953 in a small town in New Jersey, and it’s a third-person narrative. The protagonist isn’t a robust private investigator out to right wrongs. He’s quiet and deeply felt, an immigrant seemingly out of step here, and he’s driven to take action in defense of his family.

In the end, “Chellini’s Solution” wasn’t a radical deviation from what I had been doing — I can’t seem to write about anything but families on the verge of collapse — but it did allow me to see a new way to tell my stories. It was anchored in my experiences: I was born in Hoboken. New Jersey, in 1953, and Chellini is based on my grandfather, a barger who had a one-eyed bulldog named Mickey. Thinking of him infused the story with the sentimentality it needed. I love to write dialogue in that sort of hyperventilated half-English, half-Italian dialect I used to hear as a kid. Those voices, and Chellini’s walk, reconnected me to my childhood, and that’s where I found that unadorned purposefulness that’s at the heart of Chellini’s character.

William Gay’s most recent novel, Twilight, was published in the fall of 2006. He is the author of two other novels and a collection of stories. He lives in rural Tennessee, where he is at work on a novel.

• A friend of mine who’d lost someone was talking to me about the difficulty he was having dealing with loss. This got me thinking about the depth and nature of grief. Around the same time I saw a documentary about crystal meth. These two elements fused into The Jeepster’s adventures in the drug trade.

Robert Knightly was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 1940. He’s never resided outside New York City except for two years in the army. He was institutionalized at an early age: Catholic schools, the army, then the New York City Police Department in 1967. He worked in Brooklyn and Manhattan precincts as patrol officer and sergeant for most of the next twenty years. Having earned a law degree from Fordham University Law School at night, he joined the Legal Aid Society of New York in 1989 as a criminal defense lawyer, where he remains. In 2002, Aaron Spelling-TV Productions bought his script for an NBC pilot. He published his first short story in Brooklyn Noir in 2004 and is editor of Queens Noir, due from Akashic Books in 2007.

• “Take the Man’s Pay” came from my twenty years of watching NYPD detectives ply their trade. Every partner I had made detective eventually. (Me? I was not ruthless or pushy enough, I guess. They gave me lieutenant instead.) There are no better interrogators than NYPD detectives (not even Jack Bauer’s torturers on 24). I’ve verified this fact with my clients/ defendants. No matter how hardened the “perp,” how often incarcerated, invariably he spills his guts. If I ask why, my client will often reply, “They said if I told them what really happened, I could go home.” The interrogator plays on the fears of the arrestee, who may be held incommunicado in a precinct squad room for several days (unlike TV, no lawyers or visitors allowed). I call him “arrestee” rather than “suspect” to underscore the fact that once in, he’s not walking out. It’s quite unnecessary (and problematic) to subject the arrestee to the old “third degree.” Lies, half-truths, a physical manhandling no more severe than Detective Vera Katakura’s slapping the face of Hoshi Taiku work just fine. Once extracted by the detective, a confession is as fragile as an objet d’art. Never to be examined too roughly by a judge at a future suppression hearing into its legality or voluntariness. No servant of the System — cop, prosecutor, judge — wants to mess with a fait accompli.

Detective Morrie Goldstein’s interrogation of Hoshi Taiku, on the other hand, is about as legally correct as any arrestee will ever encounter. The character of Hoshi is based partially on my long-ago reading of Edwin O. Reischauer’s scholarly work The Japanese. But mostly on my childhood viewing of World War II movies like The Purple Heart (1944). Dana Andrews, a downed bomber pilot, and his crew, despite torture, have refused to confess to war crimes at their Tokyo show trial. And as they march in step from the courtroom to the strains of the U.S. Air Force song — “Off we go into the wild blue yonder,/Climbing high into the sun…” — the Jap general keels over at the prosecution table, having committed hara-kiri in expiation for his failure as an interrogator. Ergo, Hoshi, although the shoe here is on the other foot.

This is Laura Lippman’s third appearance in The Best American Mystery Stories. A former newspaper reporter, she is the author of nine novels in the award-winning Tess Monaghan series and three standalone crime novels. She lives in Baltimore.

• The character in “One True Love” began rattling around in my brain in 2001; I remember the date because it was only two months after 9/11 and I was at a conference in Washington, D.C., where I kept trying to explain the concept to anyone who would listen. “Wouldn’t prostitution, under certain conditions, be a great job for a single mother? Wouldn’t it be funny if a prostitute lived in a pricey suburb and turned out to be its most principled resident?” Everyone thought I was crazy. Then Desperate House wives showed up on ABC, and people thought I was merely derivative. It was only when Harlan Coben invited me to write a story for Death Do Us Part that I saw how melancholy the story would have to be. But I don’t think I’m done with Heloise, not by a long shot.

David Means’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Zoetrope, and in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He is the author of three short story collections, including the award-winning Assorted Fire Events (just published in a new edition by Harper/Perennial) and The Secret Goldfish. He teaches at Vassar College.

• It’s hard — for me at least — to tweeze apart a story and to find exact links to specific points of inspiration, hut I can say that on the way through Cleveland — at least once a year for the past few years — I’ve stayed at the Holiday Inn along the shore of Lake Erie, not far from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Out in front of the hotel, near the entrance to the parking lot, is a plaque commemorating the first water intake pipe — not far offshore — for the Cleveland water supply. Each year, I stood and looked out at the lake and thought to myself: when the time’s right, I’ll make use of this spot in some kind of story. Something struck me about the idea — more than the actual, physical reality — of a large pipe, not far from shore, sucking in the water supply for an entire city. That image sat in my mind and fermented until, one day, after I read a devastating essay by Peter Landesman (in Best American Crime Writing 2005) on sex trafficking, my imagination took over, and, drawing from a long personal history in the Midwest, I began writing a story that is, in part, about a young woman caught in a different kind of torrential flow, one of unforgiving, raging violence.

Kent Meyers is the author of four books. The River Warren and Eight in the Crossing were New York Times Notable Books, and The Work of Wolves won a Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association Award. Meyers is a writer-in-residence at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota.

• Shane Valen began as a minor character in The Work of Wolves, whose sole role was to move a particular piece of plot along. During the third draft of the book, I had him driving his pickup across a hay field toward a major character. Carson Fieldling, when I became interested in Shane himself. I gave in to my interest and to the rhythms of language and suddenly had seven or eight pages describing Shane’s family background, his poaching, his father’s trip to Minneapolis, the shooting of the wind-vane rooster, and even Sarah’s life after she abandoned Shane and Rodney. None of this made it into the final draft of The Works of Wolves, but I decided to try to salvage it as a short story. Several versions of this story are told from Sarah’s point of view and are focused on her relationship with her father instead of her husband and son. In fact, the story was originally titled “The Patron Saint of Travelers,” in reference to duplicate St. Christopher medals Sarah and her father kept in their cars. The story never quite worked, however, until I decided to make it part of a novel-in-stories and tell it in Greggy Longwell’s voice. Greggy quotes one of Shane’s letters referring to the murder of a girl. This murder — of Hayley Jo Zimmerman — ties the various stories in the collection together. I suspect it was the overall mood of the collection — and of course Greggy’s voice — that brought out the qualities of “mystery” in the story: the attempts to understand events and the feeling that the real mystery lies not in the events themselves but in the paradoxes of the human heart and mind.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of The Museum of Dr. Moses, a gathering of mystery-suspense stories, and the novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the 2005 recipient of the Prix Famina for her novel The Falls and the 2006 recipient of the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Achievement.

• Like most of my fiction, “Meadowlands” springs from both personal experience and invention. My idea of setting a story at the famed Meadowlands racetrack springs from an intense, almost unbearably suspenseful visit to the track in the late 1980s, when my husband and I watched a beautiful Standardbred mare (Impish Lobell — so named for the Lobell Horse Farm in New Jersey), whom we part owned, win her first race. My writing is nearly always generated by a powerful sense of place, and so the Meadowlands stables, the track, the prerace suspense among the horse owners and spectators, provided the impetus for a story that came to be written only years later, with characters who both are, but are not, “real”: a story of missed love, winning and losing, heartbreak.

Jason Ockert has won several National Fiction Awards and is the author of the short-story collection Rabbit Punches. His stories have appeared in many journals, including Oxford American, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and McSweeney’s. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University.

• The very first idea I had for this story was to create two men (one in handcuffs) who were telling lies to each other. Eventually, I wanted the reader to understand that the cuffed man was the victim while the free man was the villain. But as I began to investigate these characters I quickly realized that my initial concept was too reductive. After spending more and more time with Therm and Cole, I started to hammer out their sensibilities and concerns. The intangibles of these characters led me to Jakob’s story and that sense of menace we often overlook when we romanticize childhood as a time of uncomplicated innocence. Perhaps the hardest part of writing this story was letting Jakob disappear.

Ridley Pearson is the author of twenty-three crime/suspense novels, and the coauthor, with Dave Barry, of a trilogy of award-winning books for young readers exploring the origins of Peter Pan: Peter and the Starcatchers. He presently divides his time writing both crime and young adult novels. In 1991, Ridley was the first American awarded the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction Writing at Wadham College in Oxford. England.

• When Harlan Coben wrote me, asking if I would contribute to a short-story anthology, I agreed without hesitation. You don’t say no to Harlan. My wife had had an edgy experience while running in a park near where we live — the same male runner appeared by her side several days in a row — and I used this experience to leapfrog into writing “Queeny.” I’ve been basing my novels on extensive research for years, but this took it up a notch, as the threat to my wife fell palpable. There’s a voice at work in “Queeny” that is the most comfortable one in which I’ve ever written. I’ve spoken with my adult novel editor, Dan Conaway, about exploring this voice in a larger work. That’s still on hold, but it’s something I look forward to. In all the books I’ve written (over some twenty-five years now), I’ve never had a new voice just fall on the page as it did in “Queeny.” It was a gift, I think, that resulted from a total lack of pressure — I was doing Harlan a favor. And now, as it turns out, he did me one. Way of the world.

John Sandford is the pen name of John Camp, a former journalist who is the author of twenty-three best-selling thriller novels and two nonfiction books, one on art and the other on plastic surgery. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Long interested in history and archaeology, he is the primary backer of the Tel Rehov archaeological dig in Israel (rehov.org) and is a member of the board of directors of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He lives near St. Paul. Minnesota.

• In the writing of thrillers, there are two opposing worldviews: one that sees crime as the result of conspiratorial thinking, in which the hero destroys a clockwork process set up by the forces of evil; and one that sees a world of chaos, greed, lust, mistake, prejudice, stupidity, and impulse, in which the hero struggles to restore order and some sense of justice. I belong to the latter school, the product of having grown up covering crime in large metropolitan areas. Evil is in the small stuff: somebody tries to steal $50, or somebody wants somebody else’s spouse, and somebody gets killed; and that event sets off a chain reaction. I also tend to see cops as workaday guys who hustle on a murder eight hours a day, and then punch out and go home, eat a cheeseburger, watch the game on TV, chase the old lady around the bedroom, and don’t get all angst-up about the job. But that’s just me.

Brent Spencer is the author of a novel, The Last Son, and a collection of short stories, Are We Not Men?, chosen by the editors of the Village Voice Literary Supplement as one of the twenty-five best books of the year. His short fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the American Literary Review, Epoch, the Missouri Review, GQ and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Creighton University and is at work on a new novel.

• I had spent several weeks along the U.S.-Mexico border, trying to unravel the mystery of my father’s life and death, when I came upon one of the sites of the ill-fated Somervell and Mier expeditions, among the most notorious incidents of the Texas Revolution. Maybe it was frustration over my own expedition that drew me to the subject. The more I looked into it, the more I wanted to know. The story contained everything — from political intrigue to bravery to foolhardiness and racism. In the end I decided to write a short story that I hoped would embody the whole complex of ideas and incidents by focusing on the life of one unwilling foot soldier whose life is changed forever by what he witnesses and by his attempt to put it right. The story I wrote was so unlike anything else I had ever written that I couldn’t tell if it was good or bad. All I knew was that it was a story I had to tell.

Scott Wolven is the author of Controlled Burn (Scribner). Six years in a row, Wolven’s stories have been selected to appear in The Best American Mystery Stories series.

• “Pinwheel” started as a conversation with Otto Penzler — “What do you know about horseracing?” Otto said. My brother is a terrific artist and showed me a painting he had done of two Japanese carp with the words STAY TRUE written in shaded graphics between the two fish; his painting provided a lot of fuel for this story. The yakuza, the honorable outlaws, added a huge moving shadow. Maybe that’s part of the job of fiction — to arrest those various shadows for the reader.

It’s an honor to have my story appear in this volume. Special thanks to Cort McMeel and Mug Shot Press; Nick Mullendore and the very gracious Loretta Barrett of Loretta Barrett Books. Anthony Neil Smith, Victor Gischler, and Charlie Stella — Crimedogs never fail. Go Chelsea FC. Very special thanks to DW for Rummy, M, T&K, WSBW, and a big HBK thank-you to best brother Will.