The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Contributors’ Notes

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-six novels and two short-story collections. The stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, the Southern Review, the Antioch Review, and the 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 novel of the year. He is also a Breadloaf fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and has been the recipient of an NEA grant. He and his wife of forty-eight years, Pearl Burke, have four children and divide their time between Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia. Louisiana.

• I wrote two short stories in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The first was titled “Jesus Out to Sea.” It dealt with events leading up to the storm and the catastrophe that occurred when the levees broke. Later, I began an account of the evacuees who had fled the Lower Ninth Ward and had ended up in places like my family’s hometown. New Iberia, two hours west of New Orleans. But as I worked on the second narrative, I believed that it should deal with more than the storm itself.

In one day, six soldiers from a local National Guard outfit were killed in Iraq. I had come to believe that the events in New Orleans and the events in Iraq were related, part of the same piece, involving the same players. The politicians who were not in New Orleans while their countrymen drowned were the same ones who had taken their country to war in the

Middle East. In my opinion, the victims of the breached levees were in many ways similar to the victims of the war. The protagonist in “Mist” is made a victim twice and finds herself carrying a burden that no human being should have to bear. I believe that Golgotha is an ongoing story, and I believe it is daily acted out somewhere in the world, whether in a desert or in neighborhoods that were largely Afro-American before they went under the waves.

In the story, New Orleans became a pewter chalice filled with dark water and the luminosity of broken Communion wafers that represent those who are broken and rejected by the world. I think that what occurred in New Orleans will remain the greatest shame and scandal in our history. And that’s what I tried to convey in “Mist.”

Michael Connelly is the author of nineteen novels, many featuring Detective Harry Bosch, and one collection of true crime stories. He is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in Florida with his family.

• Like probably anybody in the game I am a big fan of the film Double Indemnity. I have watched it several times and always wanted to write a story that might have a bit of the same twist. Having lived in L.A. for fourteen years, I was also familiar with Mulholland Drive and its almost mythical lore in the city. I lived nearby it most of my years there and on many occasions came around a curve at night and encountered a coyote in my headlights. If L.A. is a place where anything can happen, then Mulholland Drive is certainly a road that it can happen on. I tried to take these interests and elements and put them into this story about an accident investigator.

Robert Ferrigno played poker professionally before an eight-year stint as a feature writer at the Orange County Register. Ten novels later, he plays poker only to clear his head, usually at the Indian casino twenty-three minutes away. His writing has gotten better over the years, but his poker skills have atrophied. Most days it seems like a good tradeoff.

• “The Hour When the Ship Comes In” was one of those beautiful writing experiences where I just tapped into the character’s consciousness and let my fingers do the walking. It’s about a bad man who does an inexplicable good deed and pays the price for it, spending the arc of the story trying to understand why he would have done such a foolish thing. The story contains the distillation of all my moral thinking: it’s the little kindnesses that kill us, but what else can we do and still stay human?

Chuck Hogan’s crime novels include The Standoff; The Killing Moon; Prince of Thieves, which was awarded the Hammett Prize: and the forthcoming Sugar Bandits. “One Good One” was his first published short story.

• Like many writers, I have files crammed with newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and story ideas — stuff from all over. The oldest clipping is dated November 12, 1984, an article from the Boston Globe on the new phenomenon of serial killers, entitled: “They’re ‘Intelligent’ and ‘Pleasant’... and They Kill for the ‘Fun’ of It.” Entire paragraphs are underscored with red pen. I was seventeen years old. My parents were concerned.

These things pile up over the years, and I use them in my novels when I can. After I met Ed Hoch, the prolific short-story author, at an award luncheon in 2005, it occurred to me that the short format would be a great way to explore these scraps and notions which otherwise might not find their way to print. “One Good One” sprang from an index card (dated 10/13/05, 1:00 P.M. — yes, I time-code them) on which I scribbled this idea for a novel:

I initially saw it bigger, bringing in the main character’s innocent family (UC being shorthand for “under cover”) and other interesting lowlifes, and putting everybody in great jeopardy — all this chaos springing from one indolent loser’s mendacity. It felt like the setup for an Elmore Leonard novel, which was what I liked about it. The short story included here, of course, has none of that promised craziness, none of the patented Leonard zing. It’s a different animal entirely. But what I like about it now, reading it one year later, is that each character has a simple and reasonable motivation for his or her action, and it is the overlapping progression of these actions that drives the story. Each section folds neatly into the next, until what you’re left with in the end is a little piece of origami in the shape of a coffin.

Ed Hoch passed away the day before I learned of this story’s selection for inclusion in this anthology, and I would be remiss in not tipping my cap, however humbly, from the author of one short story to the author of nearly one thousand.

Rupert Holmes has twice won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as several Tony and Drama Desk awards as a playwright, lyricist, and composer. In 2008 his Broadway mystery musical comedy Curtains celebrated its first anniversary on the Great White Way. He also created and wrote the television series Remember WENN. He is the author of the mystery novels Where the Truth Lies (made into a motion picture by Atom Egoyan), Swing, and the forthcoming The McMasters Guide to Homicide.

It’s difficult to say much about “The Monks of the Abbey Victoria” without spoiling its outcome for the reader. However, I can certainly disclose how much I enjoy re-creating other times in America, some of which I witnessed wide-eyed as a boy, others of which I try to reconstruct via immensely pleasurable research. With “Monks,” I drop in on the television industry circa 1960, in that “gray flannel Brooks Brothers three-martooni Executive Coloring Book THINK let’s run it up the flagpole” era of uneasy camaraderie and unbridled chauvinism. It’s a time whose time has gone, which is probably a very good thing, but you can visit it in total comfort and safety simply by turning a few pages of this volume. This story was also inspired by — if in no way patterned after — the Gamesmen, a group of extremely honorable and memorable fellows who’ve allowed me into their midst, and whose activities bear no resemblance to those practiced by the Monks of the Abbey Victoria.

Holly Goddard Jones was a 2007 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. Her fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Hudson Review, and Epoch and has been reprinted in two volumes of New Stories from the South. A graduate of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Ohio State University, she now teaches at Murray Slate University, in her home state of Kentucky.

• “Proof of God” was initially inspired by a crime that took place several years ago on a college campus near my hometown in Kentucky, though of course I’ve altered events so much that I have to remind myself now where the real horror leaves off and my fictionalized version begins. I recall that I was so haunted and disturbed by what happened to the young woman upon whom Felicia is loosely based that I couldn’t get her out of my mind, and I knew that I had to try to write myself toward an understanding, or at least an acceptance, of the crime. So I did write about it, and my first attempt was a story called “Parts” (the Hudson Review), told from the perspective of the dead girl’s mother. My writing professor at the time, Lee K. Abbott, mentioned in an offhand way to me that the hardest story to tell is the bad guy’s, and so I decided, okay: I’d accept the challenge. Getting into Simon’s head — making him on some level sympathetic — was one of the hardest things I’ve done as a writer. I want to thank Lee for encouraging me to try it and for believing, more than I did, that I’d be able to pull it off.

Peter LaSalle is the author of a novel, Strange Sunlight, and three short-story collections, most recently Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism. His fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and in 2005 he received the Award for Distinguished Prose from the Antioch Review. He currently divides his time between Austin, Texas, and Narragansett in his native Rhode Island.

• Well, to be honest, I’m always hesitant about offering outright explanatory comment on a story. I guess I’m dead scared of undermining the fragile magic that a writer has to hope for in any narrative. But I am willing — and happy — to note that the setting of “Tunis and Time” stemmed from an ongoing project I’ve embarked on in recent years — writing essays for literary magazines about going on trips to places where literature I love is set, as I try to see if anything different happens while reading the work “on the premises,” so to speak. I’ve packed a bag and headed off to reread Borges’s stories in Argentina; and the twin essential documents of French surrealism — Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant and Andre Breton’s Nadja — in Paris; and Flaubert’s Salammbô, a novel about ancient Carthage, in Tunisia. The last of these excursions, of course, is almost exactly what I have my melancholy, Harvard-educated ex-FBI agent, Layton, use as a cover while on assignment there in this story. When I was in Tunis in mid-2003, it wasn’t long after the unfortunate U.S. invasion of Iraq, and believe me, in the train stations and in the cafés, wherever people talked, political matters were certainly in the air, as would be expected in an Arab World country at a time like that. I do hope such edginess comes through here, along with the sheer, undeniable beauty of that wonderful city and environs, a place of so much startling history. As for the created character of Layton himself, immersed in both soul-searching and labyrinthine international intrigue, I’ll spare explanatory comment entirely and simply let the man lead his own life somewhat in the shadows — the way anybody in his line of risky work, for better or worse, maybe should.

Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil’s Territory, the collection of stories and novellas in which “A Day Meant to Do Less” appears, and coeditor (with Okla Elliott) of The Other Chekhov, a selection of Anton Chekhov’s lesser-known and more lurid stories. His work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Southern Review, Surreal South, and Random House’s Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. He is at work on a novel, a graphic novel, and a screenplay and corresponds with readers at http:// www. myspace.com/kvleminor.

• “A Day Meant to Do Less” owes a few things to writers I admire, among them Katherine Anne Porter, Christopher Coake, and Donald Ray Pollock. I wanted to explore a consciousness altered by illness, as Porter does in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and I wanted to play with structure and point of view as Coake does in almost all his stories, and I wanted to give breath and dignity to a kind of character I know in life but rarely find in literature, which is what I’ve learned from Pollock. I’m grateful to those who read sketchy early drafts and encouraged me to continue, among them Debbie Oesch-Minor, Joe Oestreich, Doug Watson, Bart Skarzynski, Maureen Traverse, and most of all Lee Abbott, and to Mark Drew, Peter Sitt, and Kim Dana Kupperman at the Gettysburg Review, for giving my story a good home.

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven new collections of stories — Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship. Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; The View from Castle Rock; and a volume of Selected Stories — as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro divides her time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

• The story grew out of my memories of summer camp, and the almost casual yet ritualistic brutality of children. An irresistible, terrible act, to be carried through life by two decent, normal women. How do they manage it? Two mysteries, really: Why do they do it? And how do they live with it?

Thisbe Nissen is the author of the novels Osprey Island and The Good People of New York and the story collection Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night. She’s also the coauthor/illustrator of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook. A graduate of Oberlin College and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she’s taught in the M.F.A. programs at Iowa and Columbia, at numerous conferences including Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise, and is currently the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. She’s at work on a novel. The Screen Doors of Discretion, and a story collection, How Other People Make Love, in which “Win’s Girl” will appear.

• I wrote “Win’s Girl” out of a desperate yearning for some sort of revenge against the electrician who (ostensibly) rewired my house when I was a brand-new first-time homeowner. He told me practically every one of the stories Rich Randall tells Doreen and then, five thousand dollars later, disappeared. Feeling like a moron, I thought of something my mother always says when my life isn’t going the way I’d like it to and I’m heartbroken or otherwise miserable. She says, “Thiz, you’ll write this. You’ll write this.” It doesn’t usually make me feel much better, but this time I thought: I’ll write this. I’ll show you, you mean nasty electrician. And so it is with no small amount of smirking, gloating self-satisfaction that I express my honor and thrill at seeing “Win’s Girl” included in this anthology. I revel in my tiny vindication!

Joyce Carol Oates is a winner and six-time nominee of the National Book Award and has thirty-five books selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Among her most recent books are The Gravedigger’s Daughter and the first volume of her Journals, both nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• “The Blind Man’s Sighted Daughters” is a nightmare mix of memory, invention, and that air of haunting mystery we feel in hearing of a smalltown crime that has never been “solved” — though clearly individuals associated with the crime, survivors and perpetrators and their families, have a very good idea what the solution should have been, if local police had been capable of discovering it. Specifically, the genesis of the story sprang to mind during a trip — by car, our usual mode of travel to upstate New York — when we were staying overnight in a small town near the Mohawk River. Vividly it came to me: what is life like, for the unmarried sister who stays behind in one of these forlorn upstate cities, now a caretaker for her once-murderous father, who has become an ailing blind man? What does she feel for the married sister who moved away, and who lives a very different life? It seemed to me that both sisters, in complicity with their once-murderous father, have been involved in criminal acts that will never be defined or resolved. The caretaker sister has in effect sacrificed her own life and is her father’s most unwitting victim.

Nathan Oates’s stories have appeared in the Antioch Review, Juked, Mississippi Review, Fugue, the Louisville Review, and elsewhere. He earned his M.A. from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. He is an assistant professor at Seton Hall University and lives in New York with his wife, the writer Amy Day Wilkinson, and their daughter, Sylvie.

• As is true of much of my work, “The Empty House” developed out of a story my father heard while traveling abroad. I knew immediately I wanted to write this story, but I wasn’t sure how to do so. At first I thought maybe it was the start of a novel, then imagined it to be the first in a linked collection, and over the course of a year I wrote subsequent chapters, then stories that connected, but it never felt right. My attempts were either too slight for the subject, or so bloated that the narrative energy was diffused. Through these failures, I figured out it was a short story, but how to make it feel complete remained a problem. I’d traveled twice to Guatemala in my early twenties and one night in a bar in Paris a Swedish woman told me that, for her. General America was like Disneyland: exotic little people running around in bright clothes. I was appalled, but of course I’d also been just a tourist, sitting in a bar full of Americans, with my camera and cash. Ever since I’ve been trying to write about my interest in Guatemala, particularly about America’s complicated role in the decades of civil war. When I began writing the narrator’s contemporary line I saw that “The Empty House” is about what happens to Ryan and the way that mystery, and the emptiness surrounding it, affects those who are left behind. From there it was only a matter of tears of revision, of swelling and shrinking the story until it found the right shape. I’d like to thank the following people for their support: my parents, my brothers, Robert Fogarty, and, of course, Amy.

Jas. R. Petrin was born in Saskatchewan in 1947. He began his working life as a busboy, a tailor shop gofer, a truck driver, and once, briefly, “a guy in a bakery who poked the stones out of cherries with a pair of giant tweezers.” He went on to become a sheet-metal worker, then spent many years as a musician in various lounge acts and traveling bands before settling in as a telephone network job engineer and planner. Throughout much of this time he flirted with writing. In 1985 he sold a story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and has placed some sixty stories in those pages since then. He has won the Canadian Arthur Ellis Award and his work appears in many anthologies. His story “Mama’s Boys” was produced as a TV drama. He now lives in Mavillette, Nova Scotia, with his wife, Colleen, and is hard at work on a novel featuring Leo Skorzeny.

• When I thought up the aging moneylender Leo (Skig) Skorzeny, I worked hard, as a writer will, to imbue him with a credible nature. Not a sympathetic nature, especially, just a credible one. I wonder now if I overdid it. I say this because I’m alarmed at the number of people who tell me they have come to like him. I like him, but that’s permissible. A writer must empathize with his or her characters, or at the very least gull those characters into believing as much, or they may refuse to cooperate, become wooden and unresponsive and lurch around the pages like zombies. But Skig is not a nice guy. He doesn’t play well with others. In his first appearance (“Juice,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) he commits a grave breach of social etiquette which he carries with him throughout his subsequent escapades. He is capable of warm feelings, but to him regret and remorse are something weaker people are afflicted with. Skig’s world, the world he has always known, bristles with treachery, deceit, and violence.

As a reader I find a well-crafted tale akin to visiting the zoo. Here are all these creatures, some of them vicious, going about their day just beyond that sheet of safety glass. As a writer I like to show people my own collection of dangerous creatures. I thank Eleanor Sullivan, Cathleen Jordan, and Linda Landrigan for making it possible for almost twenty-five years. I thank Otto Penzler and George Pelecanos for this fresh and unique (to me) opportunity.

Scott Phillips lives in Missouri, after stays in Paris and Los Angeles and Wichita, where he was born. He is the author of three novels: The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway, and Cottonwood.

“The Emerson, 1950” started life as a series of unconnected vignettes that were intended to form the backbone of a novel about a newspaper crime photographer/smutmonger in postwar Wichita. The novel never quite came together, but I was sufficiently fond of the characters and incidents that I tore the book apart by the spine and put them into this story. (The business with the candlesticks is very loosely based on something that happened after my great-great-uncle Fred died in Wichita in 1965.)

Stephen Rhodes is the pen name for Keith Styrcula, a novelist and fourteen-year derivatives executive on Wall Street. A 1991 graduate of Fordham Law School, he is the author of two suspense thrillers, including the critically acclaimed financial doomsday thriller The Velocity of Money (William Morrow and Avon Books), which was translated into four languages (http://www.thevelocityofmoney.com). “At the Top of His Game” is an excerpt from his forthcoming thriller of the same name. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.

• The inspiration for “At the Top of His Game” was a career-long observation that the big gears of the Wall Street machine are engineered to enrich the morally corrupt while destroying the good-hearted — which is not to say that the good-hearted ever escape their dog years on the Street with a soul unscathed. Mark Barston is emblematic of this premise, and the seeming disintegration of his entire world over the course of a single weekend reflects the perils of a life devoted to high finance and its glistening, seductive suburbanite trappings. The core elements of “Game” are based on true events — accordingly, the first draft came quickly: just over ten days. Soon thereafter, though, a positive critique from Esquire’s fiction editor, Adrienne Miller, sent me tearing through several drafts over the course of the next year, working to create the pitch-perfect final version. The elusive ambition for me was to create a work of short fiction that was as satisfying as William Hauptman’s classic “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (published in The Best American Short Stories 1982), a story about an insurance-salesman-turned-Elvis-impersonator immediately following the King’s untimely death. (Hauptman’s story was jam-packed with enough plot, characters, and narrative to be the basis for a full book, yet it instead achieved its brilliant results in one-twentieth the length of a novel — a shining example of the magnificence of the short-story form.) Eventually, the breakthrough for “Game” was the privilege of working with Wall Street Noir editor Peter Spiegelman (Black Maps), who preserved Barston’s voice while perfecting the pace of the narrative and the convergence of plot twists that become his final redemption — well, kind of a redemption, sort of...

S. J. Rozan, a lifelong New Yorker, has won many major crime-writing awards, including the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony. She’s served on the national boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and as president of Private Eye Writers of America. In 2003 S. J. was a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and in 2005 she was guest of honor at Left Coast Crime in El Paso, Texas.

• When I wrote “Hothouse” I was aiming for old-school noir, a story in which a character’s earlier life reaches out and stops him from becoming the new person he wants to be. To echo that contrast, I wanted to work with the extreme contrasts of the conservatory in winter, the warm jungle damp, the smells and stillness inside, and the frigid, biting, roaring blizzard outside. And I had just gotten back from three weeks at an artists’ colony in Florida and I was pining for my cottage in the palms.

Hugh Sheehy’s short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Antioch Review, the Southwest Review, the New Orleans Review, and other magazines. He lives in Atlanta and teaches at Georgia State University.

• I hope it will amuse and excite readers from the Toledo area to find a story based on familiar landmarks, particularly a creepy skating rink parents have long trusted to preoccupy their children. And I hope the skating rink (and all the desolate places in Lucas County) will continue to drive the imaginations of myself and others. It’s difficult to say where the story comes from, or, you know, what it’s really about. I do remember conceiving of it, from beginning to end, in an instant. It was one of those epiphanies writers are always on the listen for, rarely getting. A striking order of characters, setting, plot, and phrase is revealed. So you sit and write the thing.

Elizabeth Strout’s most recent novel is Olive Kitteridge. Her previous novels are Abide with Me and Amy and Isabelle, which won two national awards and was nominated for others. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker and a number of other magazines. She is on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and makes her home in New York City.

• This story originated in my fascination with the Stockholm Syndrome, a condition deriving its name from a bank robbery that took place years ago in Sweden, where the women who were taken as hostages developed feelings of love for their captor. It is a situation that has long held my imagination and I knew someday I would use it in a story. As I began to write about the character Olive Kitteridge, I saw that she would be the one who could carry this off, and then it became a matter of finding the proper form for the story. Also, I am always interested in what people say and do in moments of great pressure, and so the idea of Olive being held in a hospital’s bathroom with her husband and two strangers was invigorating for me, and hopefully for the readers as well.

Melissa VanBeck was raised on a cattle-and-wheat ranch in Klickitat County, the dry side of the Washington Cascade Mountains. The struggle to live on land where rain is an unreliable landlord is never far from her fiction. Melissa and her husband live in Spokane, where she works as a psychotherapist. Her fiction has appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Phantasmagoria, Whiskey Island, the Red Rock Review, and Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine. She is currently working on a novel.

• “Given Her History” is a story I waited a long time to tell. In part, I wasn’t certain I had the maturity to follow the young April-May from the violent death of her family through her spiral into sociopathy and subsequent redemption through Vivian. Doing that while maintaining her voice seemed daunting. Jake the dog and I were loyal throughout. The town I describe as it was in my childhood. John Day Dam was built across the neck of the Columbia River in 1968, and the town is now submerged. Although I know different, I imagine things continuing as they were — the people, the buildings, growing up, growing old — all under the waters of the Columbia. It took four years and many drafts before I finally got it right.

Scott Wolven is the author of a short-story collection, Controlled Burn, and a forthcoming novel. False Hope. His stories have been selected seven years in a row for The Best American Mystery Stories series. Wolven teaches creative writing in the Professional Writing Program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.

• “St. Gabriel” allowed me to place a somewhat mysterious figure from the Bible into a story set against the background of the devastation of the Gulf Coast and more specifically, New Orleans, directly after the two hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. I worked in New Orleans for more than a year after the disaster and when I arrived, it seemed as if God had crushed things. The combination of devastated landscape and displaced people and death influenced my ideas of noir and how to weave that into storytelling. I’m sure I’ll write more stories about it in the future — and my heart goes out to the folks who lived there. They deserved much more help than they received. I felt lucky when Jen Jordan asked me to contribute a story to an anthology she was editing. Special thanks to Ben Leroy of Bleak House Books, DMC, M, and WSBW.