The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Contributors’ notes

Gary Alexander has written nine novels, including Disappeared, which will be in print this year. He’s also written more than 150 short stories, most for mystery magazines. Back in the good old days (five to ten years ago) when newspapers were buying freelance travel, he sold articles to six major dailies, including the Chicago Tribune and the Dallas Morning News. He lives in Kent, Washington, with his wife Shari and teaches creative writing at the Kent Senior Activities Center. Please visit him at www.garyralexander.com.

We visited Campeche City, Mexico, in 1997. It was a wonderful city full of colonial history, nice people, and thanks to lousy beaches, very few gringo tourists, I sold a travel piece on Campeche City to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which was a lot of fun as well as a tax write-off for the trip. It’s gratifying to finally get this terrific place into a mystery yarn.

R. A. Allen has published fiction in the Barcelona Review (64), SinisterCity, PANK, Sniplits, Calliope, and other publications, and poetry in Boston Literary Magazine, The Recusant (U.K.), Word Riot, Pear Noir! and elsewhere. Nominated by LITnIMAGE for Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010, he lives in Memphis. For more information, visit www.nyqpoets.net/poet/raallen.

This story explores the relationship between two career criminals who have been friends since their impoverished childhoods in an area of the United States known more as a leisure destination for its spectacular beaches. As they enter their thirties, they are faced with choices made unique by their status as ex-convicts. One of them wants to go straight, the other wishes to become a more efficient criminal. While fleeing a violent confrontation in a stolen car, they accidentally stumble into a horrific incident being perpetrated on one of those spectacular beaches. I tried to write a story about the same things that fascinate me on a day-to-day basis: human relationships, human motivations, and the role the unexpected plays in rearranging our lives.

Award-winning author Doug Allyn has been published in English, German, French, and Japanese, and more than two dozen of his tales have been optioned for development as feature films and television. The author of eight novels and more than a hundred short stories, his first story won the Robert L. Fish Award for Best First from Mystery Writers of America, and subsequent critical response has been equally enthusiastic. He has won the coveted Edgar Allan Poe Award (plus six nominations), three Derringer Awards for novellas, and the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award an unprecedented nine times, including this year.

Mr. Allyn studied creative writing and criminal psychology at the University of Michigan while moonlighting as a guitarist in the rock group Devil’s Triangle and reviewing books for the Flint Journal. Career highlights are sipping champagne with Mickey Spillane and waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark.

“An Early Christmas” touches on two of my favorite themes: the beauty of the lake country, and the social turmoil seething just beneath the surface.

Mary Stewart Atwell lives in Springfield, Missouri. Her short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2004, Epoch, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and she recently completed her first novel.

Having “Maynard” included in this anthology feels appropriate, since the story and its protagonist are still in many ways a mystery to me. I woke up one morning with the image in my head of a baby floated down the river on a cheap plastic raft, and though I don’t usually use dreams as source material, I decided to see where it led. Originally that image began the story, but as I went on, I found that the narrator’s voice had taken over. I was going through a period of worrying that all my first-person narrators sounded a little bit too much like me, so I was thrilled to find myself hearing this new voice — naive, bold, and capable of saying almost anything.

The reason that I was able to let the story take its own course, guided by the strangeness of that confident voice, is that I wrote it on a deadline. At the time, I was part of an unofficial writing workshop with some friends from the University of Virginia. It had been several years since I’d been part of an official writing community, so I was, and am, hugely grateful for the discipline and camaraderie that the group provided. I’d like to thank those friends here, excellent writers all: Will Boast, Erin Brown, Drew Johnson, and Emma Rathbone. Thanks also to Ronald Spatz for publishing the story in Alaska Quarterly Review.

Matt Bell is the author of the fiction collection How They Were Found, published in October 2010 by Keyhole Press. He is also the editor of the literary magazine The Collagist and can be found online atwww.mdbell.com.

In “Dredge,” I wanted to write a failed detective story, one in which the person acting as the detective could not carry out the duties of his assumed position: Punter is incapable of solving the “crime” he sets out to solve, mostly due to his mental and social limitations. He tries to act as he believes a detective should act, but because he fails to completely process what he experiences, he isn’t able to draw the appropriate connections between the few clues he manages to uncover. Partly, this is because he has been isolated for so long. He has no family, no friends, and everyone else in his life — his counselors, his coworkers — have all been removed from his life by the time the story begins. What happened to the drowned girl in this story is something that Punter can only understand if he understands the people around him, and since that’s impossible, the story becomes about what he chooses to do in the absence of that understanding. I’ve always thought about what happens at the very end of “Dredge” as a positive thing for Punter, as dark as it seemingly is. For me, it’s a hopeful ending, even though an outside observer would think that much about his life is now going to be worse than it was before (and even though he’s inflicted misery upon others to get there). When looking at the story purely from Punter’s perspective, his getting to release his awful history has got to be a triumph, no matter what it eventually costs him. That kind of “hard win” interests me a lot — what if the best we can hope for from our efforts is still a bad outcome? We still have to try, right?

Jay Brandon is the author of fifteen novels, from Deadbolt (1985), which won Booklist’s Editor’s Choice Award, to Milagro Lane (2009). Five of his novels feature district attorney Chris Sinclair and child psychiatrist Anne Greenwald, the most recent being Running with the Dead (“a brilliant entry in a series that just keeps getting better” — Kirkus). His novel Fade the Heat was nominated for an Edgar Award and has been published in more than a dozen foreign countries. Jay holds a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins and is a practicing lawyer in San Antonio.

My only nonfiction book is a history of practicing law in San Antonio. While doing research for that book, I came across this incident from 1842, when a Mexican general and his troops marched into San Antonio (Texas was not at war with Mexico at the time), went straight to the courthouse, and captured nearly every lawyer in town. What a time it must have been when an enemy thought he could strike a crippling blow by taking away the lawyers. The lawyers were all eventually released, but some were gone for nearly two years. I was fascinated both by the idea of a city without lawyers and by what their captivity must have done to those prisoners. Other than that historical event, the story is entirely fiction.

I want to mention two other things: “A Jury of His Peers” is written in a slightly archaic style to fit the time period. And yes, this attack on our own soil that San Antonians remembered for the rest of their lives did happen on September 11. You couldn’t make that up. Real life is shameless.

Phyllis Cohen was a resident of Manhattan. After retiring from a thirty-five-year career in the New York City school system, she undertook a mini second career as a freelance writer, writing nonfiction at first, mostly science reporting; when that petered out, she moved on to fiction. About her fiction, she said: “My short stories are of many genres — crime, science fiction, relationships — but there is a common element throughout of character and human interest.” Phyllis Cohen died on January 26, 2009. (Note: This brief bio and the note that follows were written by the author’s widower, Herbert Cohen.)

When Phyllis first heard of the call for stories for the Mystery Writers of America anthology, she pulled “Designer Justice” out of the trunk and swore this would be her last attempt to get a story published before absolutely quitting. She’d sold only one story, some twenty years earlier, to Buffalo Spree. Whenever she submitted stories, they were returned with the usual rejection wallpaper. Many times she’d get an editor’s letter praising her style but requesting that she remove some pointed political opinion or rewrite a section. Ripping the letter up, she’d sneer, “I don’t do surgery on my babies!”

“Designer Justice” presented a different problem, however: it was more than 1,500 words over the MWA anthology word allowance. It took over a month to bring the story down to size. She called the editing her “literary liposuction.” When she was finally finished, she lifted the story out of the printer tray and thrust it at me: “Read the crap!” Then she stared out the window trying to look nonchalant, but once or twice I caught a furtively anxious glance. Ten minutes later I looked up at her. “Kiddo! This stuff you think is crap is ten times better than the original.” She didn’t believe me until she received the acceptance letter.

In May 2008, Phyllis was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The first words out of her mouth were, “Shit, I knew I’d never see that damn story in print!” Unfortunately, she never did. I received the preproduction copy on January 27, the day after Phyllis died.

John Dufresne is the author of two story collections, two books on writing fiction, and four novels, most recently, Requiem, Mass. His story “The Timing of Unfelt Smiles” appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2007. He teaches creative writing at Florida International University in Miami.

My job was to write a story set in South Boston. I grew up in an Irish neighborhood, attended Irish Catholic schools for twelve years, and was an altar boy in an Irish parish church much like St. Cormac’s in the story. I wanted to be a priest. I wanted to write about sin and evil in the context of a sacred place. The epidemic of priestly abuse of children seemed like a natural place to begin. When I started the story, I didn’t know if the sin was abuse or if the sin was false accusation. Or both. I remembered the McMartin preschool abuse trials and was aware of false memory syndrome. So I began writing the story during the first week of the fall semester. I wrote five or six pages that week and stopped when I got to a point in Father Mulcahy’s dream where Jesus won’t stop tickling him. I wasn’t expecting that to happen. I brought the pages to school and read them to my undergrad class. I told the students I’d appreciate any feedback, any thoughts. They began to e-mail questions and suggestions. Every couple of weeks I’d read some more. When I found myself unexpectedly in Mrs. Walsh’s head in the opening act, I knew I could now go into anyone’s head that I wanted. Maybe even Jesus’s. When a representative from the cardinal’s office stopped by the rectory, I knew there would be plenty of sin — and crime — to go around. I promised the students that I’d finish the story by the end of the semester. I e-mailed them copies with their grades.

Lyndsay Faye spent years working in musical theater (she is a soprano and a proud member of the Actors’ Equity Association) before her meatpacking district day job was razed by bulldozers and she seized the opportunity to finish her first novel: Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. Her latest short story appears in the 2009 holiday issue of The Strand magazine. She is an avid lover of food culture, Sherlockiana, and historical fiction and lives in Manhattan with her husband (Gabriel) and cat (Grendel). Visitwww.lyndsayfaye.com for more information.

When I was asked to contribute a story for the anthology Sherlock Holmes in America, I was thrilled to say yes, and to volunteer to use my Bay Area birthplace as a setting. I was equally as confused regarding how to get both Holmes and Watson all the way across America from London. That’s a long trip, and I didn’t care to lose Watson’s narrative voice by recounting Holmes’s days in America alone. And then I recalled that during an unfinished play called Angels of Darkness, Conan Doyle made mention of a young Dr. Watson practicing medicine in San Francisco. That solved half my problem. The challenge of writing a case narrated by Watson that Holmes is able to solve from his armchair a la Poe’s Dupin was very daunting; no investigation could happen, of course, and none of the dangers were immediate. But Conan Doyle himself used the format of Holmes retelling an old case by the fireside at Baker Street in two tales, which bolstered my confidence, and I simply added two new twists: Watson is doing the storytelling on this occasion, and the case is solved in real time instead of being a relic of Holmes’s college days.

Gar Anthony Haywood is the Shamus and Anthony Award-winning author of eleven crime novels, including six in the Aaron Gunner series, two in the Joe and Dottie Loudermilk series, and three stand-alone thrillers. Haywood’s first Gunner mystery, Fear of the Dark, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for Best First Novel of 1989, and his first Aaron Gunner short story, “And Pray Nobody Sees You,” won both the PEWA’s Shamus Award and the World Mystery Convention’s Anthony Award for Best Short Story of 1995. Haywood has written for both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, has penned such television dramas as New York Undercover and The District, and twice has coauthored a “Movie of the Week” for ABC Television. His latest novel is the urban crime drama Cemetery Road.

I am a monster fan of the Showtime-era Los Angeles Lakers, and Earvin “Magic” Johnson remains my favorite player of all time. A superstar first in sports and now in business, I don’t think there’s a sinister bone in Magic’s body, but he grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, so it’s probably safe to say there’s more edge to the man than his disarming smile would otherwise indicate.

This story came out of my curiosity about just how much “edge” there might be. As so dramatically illustrated by the Tiger Woods scandal, at the time of this writing, we never really know the people we elevate to celebrity status. What we see of them is only what they choose to expose to the light. The men and women who reside beneath the skin — the real people behind the public facades they project — are a complete unknown. And, I would venture to guess, some of them are killers you wouldn’t want to cross.

Jon Land is the author of twenty-eight books, seventeen of which have been national best-sellers. RT Reviews magazine honored him in 2009 with a special achievement award for being a “Pioneer in Genre Fiction.” The Seven Sins was named one of the Top Five Thrillers of 2008 by Library Journal and was optioned for film by Moritz Borman (Terminator: Salvation). Jon’s latest series, commencing with Strong Enough to Die in 2009 and followed by Strong Justice in 2010, features female Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong. Strong Enough to Die has been optioned as a film property by Hand Picked Films, with Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress, Out of Time, One False Move) attached to direct and Jon writing the screenplay himself.

Jon graduated from Brown University in 1979 Phi Beta Kappa and Magna cum Laude. He serves as vice president of marketing for the International Thriller Writers (ITW) and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Killing Time” offered me an opportunity to write a story that harks back to the days of hardboiled noir. I’d always wanted to write from the viewpoint of a dark hero, and the fish-out-of-water concept of a professional killer hiding out in the guise of a middle school teacher grabbed hold of me from the start. The real fun of the story for me was watching Fallon come to embrace his role and the moral dilemma he faces when the school is taken hostage by terrorists. I got the idea from the real-life tragedy a few years ago in Chechnya. But that’s the great thing about writing fiction: you can reinvent reality with any ending you want.

Dennis Lehane is the author of eight novels, including The Given Day; Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Shutter Island. He is currently writing a screen adaptation of “Animal Rescue” for 20th Century Fox. He lives with his wife and daughter in Boston and west central Florida.

“Animal Rescue” originated, like a lot of my work, from a central obsession with loneliness. Every day we interact with people who go home to empty apartments and numbing isolation from which there is no reasonable expectation of escape. On any number of levels, this is heartbreaking, and I wanted to write about it. I started with Bob, and that led me to Nadia and even Cousin Marv — three people lost in their aloneness. And then along comes this dog...

Lynda Leidiger’s short stories have appeared in magazines ranging from Playboy to Prairie Schooner. She is a recipient of an NEA grant and was the first woman to win the International Imitation Hemingway Award. She lives in Iowa.

I wrote “Tell Me” after my sister-in-law became a victim of a random shooting by two teenage boys in rural Wisconsin. The true story took a twist far more amazing and powerful than anything I could have invented. Although the shooting left her legally blind and permanently disabled, she not only has forgiven the boys — now men — but visits them in prison. Her new career is traveling to schools and correctional facilities around the country, talking in her soft, halting voice about the consequences of violence. She changes lives. Knowing her is a gift. I’d like to dedicate this story to Jackie Millar.

During a twenty-five-year career as a criminal defense attorney, Phillip Margolin appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and represented approximately thirty people charged with homicide, including a dozen who faced the death penalty. All fourteen of his novels have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. Heartstone, his first novel, was nominated for an Edgar. Executive Privilege won the Spotted Owl Award for the Best Mystery in the Pacific Northwest. The Last Innocent Man and Gone, But Not Forgotten have been made into movies.

Never throw away anything you write. You never know when it might come in handy. About a year ago, I was going through some very old files in a metal filing cabinet in my laundry room, when I came across a folder with scraps of short stories I had started and never finished. To give you an idea how old these stories were, the one that eventually became The House on Pine Terrace was written on a typewriter. I had forgotten about the story in the intervening years. The scrap I read was only a few pages long, but it sounded interesting. I took it down to my office and spent a few days expanding it into a whole story, and now it’s in this anthology. As soon as I finish writing this note, I’m going back to that ancient file. Who knows?

Chris Muessig and his wife Susanne left an emptied nest on Long Island several years ago to resettle in Cary, North Carolina. During the day he performs editorial work at North Carolina State University, and in the odd hours he writes to fill the vacuum created by the diaspora of their three children. “Bias” was his first published piece of fiction, chosen by Janet Hutchings for Ellery Queen’s Department of First Stories. Such blatant encouragement, after many decades of polite but firm rejection, has led to the sale of two more tales, including another of Creegan’s encounters with the spirit of the ‘80s.

“Bias” gestated for at least twenty years. It originated in the confluence of a number of nagging contemplations: a series of senseless and unsolved killings of Long Island gas station attendants, the loosening of anarchy upon the world, and the use of violence as a means of expression reaching everywhere. Of course, these conditions are not unique to the early 1980s. As Frank muses, every generation seems to have its Barbary shore.

Albert Tucher is the creator of prostitute Diana Andrews, who makes a cameo appearance in Bismarck Rules. Thirty short stories about her have been published in Lynx Eye, Thuglit, Out of the Gutter, Beat to a Pulp, and other print and online magazines and anthologies. He has also written a series of unpublished novels about his character.

The idea for ‘Bismarck Rules” came to me in 2003, when I went for my first colonoscopy. I discovered that my proctologist would not let me transport myself to and from my appointment. I had a friend who was available to drive me, but it occurred to me that some patients would not. Men hire prostitutes to do many things that are only distantly related to sex. Why not have a client pay my character Diana Andrews to pose as his girlfriend and take on the driving chore?

Two things happened. What I thought would be a comedy quickly turned very dark, and I realized that Diana Andrews has a biography that is incompatible with the plot developments in the story. I came up with a sidekick for Diana, another prostitute named Mary Alice Mercier, aka Crystal. She has since figured in my novels and several other short stories.

Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Known for his unique blend of satire, black comedy, and science fiction, he was the author of works such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. His first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” was published in Collier’s on February 11, 1950. Player Piano, his first novel, was published a year later. His writing career spanned fourteen novels and numerous collections of essays and short stories. The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut was named in his honor. Kurt Vonnegut died in Manhattan on April 11, 2007.

Joseph Wallace’s stories have appeared in Baltimore Noir, Hard Boiled Brooklyn, Bronx Noir, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and the Mystery Writers of America anthology The Prosecution Rests, where “Custom Sets” first appeared. His debut novel, Diamond Ruby (expanded from a story in EQMM), was published in May 2010. Set in 1920s New York City, it details the perilous life and times of a teenage girl with the unusual ability to throw a baseball as fast as any (male) pitcher alive.

A few years ago I wrote a thriller that attracted some interest, though no buyers. It had as a secondary character Zhenya, a Russian girl who travels to the United States under appalling circumstances. I’ve since come to believe that if I had placed her at the center of the story, I would have ended up with a far better novel. Having learned my lesson, I decided to make Zhenya the protagonist of “Custom Sets.” In several of my other stories and my novel Diamond Ruby, I’ve also chosen to write about teenage girls, whose strength, toughness, and resilience tend to be underestimated by villains and readers alike. I love writing the moments when the truth becomes known to all.

Mike Wiecek is the author of Exit Strategy, which was short-listed for a Thriller Award by the International Thriller Writers. His short stories have received wide recognition, including a Shamus Award. In his younger days Mike spent several years in Japan and traveled widely in Asia. He now lives outside Boston with his wife and two children. For more information, visit: www.mwiecek.com.

I’ve never been to Chittagong, but several years ago I saw an essay on the shipbreakers. One photo stood out: a long line of men ascending the beach, the cable on their shoulders stretching back and disappearing into mist. Their faces, worn by effort and pain, made a striking contrast to the colossus of rusted steel they were dismembering. And I thought, Story.

Though poverty grinds down those who suffer it, even the shantytowns have a certain dignity. People have dreams, make plans, and take pride in their achievements, however modest they might seem. There is always a future. Though it may be hard to believe, the Bangladesh shipbreaking yards have grown too expensive. The trade is now shifting to even cheaper, crueler, less safe countries: Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Vietnam. The stern logic of globalization dictates, but I hope we remember Mohit and his companions, who do the hard work.

Ryan Zimmerman attended the University of Florida, where he majored in wildlife ecology until he realized how much math he’d need to take. He ended up graduating three times from the University of South Florida (where he took no math classes), most recently with an MFA in fiction writing. Ryan lives in Tampa with his wife, his daughter, and his dog.

I believe that the original inspiration for this story came when I happened across a hunting show on TV in which a couple of guys were hunting hogs with nothing but dogs and knives. I have to say, I was a bit repulsed, but also fascinated. I have nothing against hunters, but when I tried to imagine the type of guy who would enjoy stabbing an animal to death, I came up with Ray, the domineering backwoods sociopath of “Blood and Dirt.” I gave him a nice kid brother, put the two in the steamy pressure cooker of a Florida summer, and this is the story that resulted.