The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Introduction

Everyone seems to know what a short story is, but there is very little in the way of theoretical discussion of the form. A tentative definition is often approached from two directions simultaneously: first, Edgar Allan Poe is quoted as being suspicious of the novel, preferring instead that which can be consumed at a single sitting; and then Mark Twain is quoted as saying — of a letter, not a story — “I’m sorry this is so long; I had no time to make it shorter.”

Some people attribute the second quotation to Pascal, but Twain is always a safe bet for quotes, and in either case the counterintuitive meaning is clear: it takes more time and greater effort to hone a narrative into a short form than to let it run a longer course. Combined with Poe’s concept of the “single sitting,” the short story is therefore seen as a delightfully well-crafted jewel, to be enjoyed by the connoisseur in the same way as a great meal or a glass of fine wine is enjoyed by a gourmet.

I’m not so sure.

To take issue with Poe first: his quote is full of self-interest. No one form has an inherent superiority over any other. All writers are scufflers at heart. We’re all trying to earn our daily bread, and we’ll do whatever sells. Poe’s “single-sitting-as-a-virtue” trope was driven by what the market wanted. He was trying to keep the wolf from the door by writing for periodicals, of which there was a huge and increasing number during his lifetime. Believe me, if he could have sold thousand-page novels, he would have, and today he would be remembered for extolling their manifest superiority over shorter fiction. But the market wanted bite-size pieces, so bite size pieces were what he wrote. Charles Dickens was in the same boat, but Dickens just broke up his (thousand-page) novels into chunks, and they were printed sequentially, to great acclaim, not least because the desire to know what happened next proved so powerful. Arthur Conan Doyle was somewhere between the two; the Sherlock Holmes canon is certainly mainly a series of short stories, but “Sherlock Holmes” is also a single, massive entity, loved and enjoyed for its totality rather than its episodic nature, as if the whole arc exists independently of its disjointed publication history, as one giant mega-novel.

And to take issue with the assumption behind the Twain quote: I absolutely guarantee that none of the stories in this anthology took longer to write than their authors’ various novels. Not even remotely close. Yes, each sentence is crafted and polished; yes, each story was read and revised and then reread and revised again — but so is every sentence and chapter in a novel, and novels are much longer than short stories, and the effort expended is entirely proportional.

So, are the short stories in this collection not delightfully well-crafted jewels to be enjoyed by the connoisseur in the same way as a great meal or a glass of fine wine? Well, yes, they are, but not for the reasons given by conventional wisdom, but for a whole bunch of different reasons.

Short stories allow a little freedom. In their careers as novelists, the authors presented here are all, to some degree, locked into what they write, by economics and expectations. But in today’s market, short stories have neither a real economic upside or downside; nor are they constrained to any real degree by reader expectation. So authors can write about different things, and more especially they can write in different ways.

Novels are assembled like necklaces, from a long sequence of ideas that combine like gemstones and knots; short stories can contain only one idea. Novels must take aim at the center mass of their amalgam of issues; short stories can strike glancing blows, even to the point of defining the idea only by implication. (As in Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word story: “For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”) To some degree the slightness of — or the partial knowledge of — the central issue or idea becomes a virtue. For instance, I was once in an expensive boutique on Madison Avenue in New York City. It sold pens and notebooks and things like that. A woman asked to see some Filofaxes — small leather ring-binders designed for personal clerical use. She was shown two. She dialed her cell phone and said, “They have blue and green.” She listened to the reply and said, “I am not being passive-aggressive!”

Now, there is no way that eavesdropping incident could inspire a novel. There’s not enough there. But it could inspire a short story. Every writer has a mental file labeled “Great Ideas, Can’t Use Them in My Novels,” and short stories are where those ideas can find release.

Equally, every writer has mental files labeled “Great Voices, Can’t...” and “Great Characters, Can’t...” and “Great Scenarios, Can’t...” and so on. Noir writers might want to try a sweeter setup at some point, and “PG” writers might hanker after a real “R” rating — or even an “XXX.” The short story market is where those wings can be spread. The result is often a between-the-lines feeling of freshness, enthusiasm, experimentation, and enjoyment on the author’s part. That’s the feeling you’ll find in this collection, and perhaps that feeling brings us to a better definition of exactly what a short story is — in today’s culture, at least: short stories are a home run derby... the pressures of the long baseball season are put to one side, and everyone smiles and relaxes and swings for the fences.

Lee Child