The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

Introduction

THE TIME: edging past midnight.

The place: a suburban neighborhood where a quarter moon casts pale light across sleepy trees, tailored lawns, and darkened houses; the camera that is our mind’s eye floats past these houses until it comes to rest on a window lit from within… which happens to be your window.

We now drift closer, where we find… me (aka Robert Crais, the coeditor of this book, along with the esteemed Otto Penzler) and author of this introduction), giggling like a goblin in the midnight shadows beneath the eaves of your roof, hanging in the darkness as I peer with cat-slit eyes into your bedroom. (Creepy, yeah, but not for deviant criminal purposes!)

I am watching you read this book.

I am giggling because you have plunked down hard cash for this book (maybe because my name is attached!), and I am having a blast and a half watching you enjoy this wonderful collection of short stories.

Because, good readers, this book is all about you enjoying yourselves and finding new authors to love, else my name would not be on it.

Short stories were my first love. Though I have published eighteen novels at this point in time, I began as a writer of short fiction and dearly love the form. For one, short stories are short. Poe famously defined a short story as a story one could read in a single sitting. I’m not sure that that is necessarily the case, but most of us can suck up a three-thousand-word short story in a sitting, and do, and that is part of the fun. You get the beginning, the middle, and the payoff all in a single gulp, and because of this, short stories are like peanuts-you probably won’t eat just one.

A good reader might be able to plow through a novel in three or four nights, relishing the immersion in the novel’s reality for a sustained period, but short stories allow the reader to sample many realities in that same period of time. I love checking out a contents page for the familiar names of writers I know I’ll enjoy, and also the exploratory adventure of discovering new writers whose names are unknown to me, which is the joy of an anthology such as this. Here you’ll get quick hits of superstars such as Peter Beagle and Thomas McGuane and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, as well as of writers whose work you might not yet have discovered.

With a collection like this, you get it all, and if you are like me, friends, you want it all!

Now that I’ve said this, make no mistake: short fiction should not be dismissed as a literary quickie, having no more importance than, say, stopping by McD’s for a burger to go. The best short stories can linger. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and Chandler’s “Red Wind” all haunt me years after I first read them. In fact, the brevity of a short story often lends to its power.

Mr. Penzler and I have tried to provide something for everyone, from surprising amusements to complex character studies to noir pieces as desperate as a death row inmate’s heart. The key to a great short story collection is diversity. These stories do not all feature private investigators or college professors or retired FBI agents or criminals doing crime. They are not all grim noir etchings, not all laugh-out-loud giggles, and do not all have snappy twist endings. This is by design, but regardless of your personal preferences and tastes, these stories all have one thing in common-they are the best of their American kind yer ’umble editors could find, and personally, I am most excited for you to sample the type of story you ordinarily don’t read.

So explore. Taste new flavors, smell new aromas, and run your fingers across the textures of authors you haven’t known before. Let Mr. Penzler and me be your guides.

The place: this book.

The time: now.

The mission: lose yourself in these dark dreams, and enjoy.

I am outside your window. Watching.

ROBERT CRAIS