The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

Contributors’ Notes

Tom Barlow is the author of the story collection Welcome to the Goat Rodeo. Other stories of his have appeared in anthologies, including Best New Writing 2011, and magazines and journals, including Redivider, Temenos, Apalachee Review, Hobart, Needle, the William and Mary Review, and the Hiss Quarterly. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop for fantasy and science fiction. He has also written about personal finance for websites, including Forbes.com, DailyFinance.com and Dealnews.com. He writes because conversation involves a lot of give-and-take, and he’s always thought of himself as more of a giver.

• “Smothered and Covered” started, not surprisingly, with a visit to one of my favorite restaurants, Waffle House. At the time I was working a pressured job, which caused me often to be awake in the middle of the night. Knowing that I wouldn’t fall back to sleep, I would occasionally head over to the Waffle House and dawdle over a 4 A.M. breakfast. Looking at the other clientele, I realized that WH is one of the few places where those who desperately need to get out of the house in the middle of the night can nurse their demons for the price of a cup of coffee.

Knowing that one of those people was destined to become my main character, I searched for a conflict that could account for his malaise. I’d been thinking about the awful preponderance of fatal car accidents caused by drunk drivers and the guilt that must, or at least should, haunt those who survive, especially if the fatality is a loved one. How could he carry on with such a burden? How could a marriage survive?

That darkness led me to a noir style and voice, which seemed to capture a sense of inevitability. After agonizing for weeks over a proper ending, I spent one day trimming the fat from the story (for me, a crucial step in the process), only to discover that I already had an ending that worked well. I just hadn’t recognized it as such. Older, wiser, and a devotee of Lunesta, I now trawl for characters during the daylight hours, usually at coffeehouses. I’m not sure, however, that the pickings are quite as rich.

Michael Connelly is a crime-beat reporter turned novelist. He has written twenty-five novels in twenty years, most of which center on the pursuits of Detective Harry Bosch of the Los Angeles Police Department. He also has written several novels about Bosch’s half-brother Mickey Haller, a criminal defense attorney, thus pursuing an exploration of crime and justice from both sides of the aisle, so to speak. Connelly is married and the father of a teenage daughter. He lives in Florida but spends a lot of his time in Los Angeles, the city he writes about.

• The subject of the Vengeance anthology naturally lent itself to explorations of the fine line between punishment and retribution. When people take matters into their own hands, is it always vengeance, or can there be justice? It’s a theme I have played with before, and I was happy to be asked to contribute to the collection edited by Lee Child. When I was a reporter I wrote about a major gold fraud in which hundreds of people lost their savings in a gold-buying scheme. There were many threats against the perpetrators’ lives and I started with that, thinking, What if a victim made good on the threat or hired someone to make good on the threat? Would it be justice or vengeance? I remember these guys had really been callous in the extent they went to rip people off. They would crawl under their desks while on the phone with a customer and say they had just entered the gold vault to pick out their gold bars. The slight echo made under the desk sounded like they could actually be in a vault, and it helped them sell the fraud. Of course, there was no gold. They were just taking people’s money. So that was the starting point of this story, and of course I wanted to bring Harry Bosch into it. It had been quite a while since I had written about Harry in the short form. It is always fun to do that.

O’Neil De Noux’s crime fiction has garnered several awards: the Shamus for best short story, the Derringer for best novelette, and the 2011 Police Book of the Year. His recurring characters include New Orleans Police detectives Dino LaStanza (1980s), Jacques Dugas (1890s), and John Raven Beau (twenty-first century) as well as private eye Lucien Caye (1940s). In 2013, De Noux was elected vice president of the Private Eye Writers of America. He also writes in other genres, including historical fiction, fantasy, horror, western, science fiction, and erotica.

• Writing about New Orleans AK (After Katrina) is difficult, as the city changes just about every day. Some areas have come back faster than others; some will never return, buildings still gutted, slabs where houses once stood, restaurants torn from the piling. The only constant is the crime rate, which returned with a vengeance. This inspired me to write a story about a citizenry that acts as if its police department is an occupying army. New Orleans has always been the hardest city in America to police. It’s a city of great promise and great disappointment, where the good times roll and crime is always around the corner. The New Orleans Police Department is understaffed, underpaid, undertrained, and held up to standards few humans can achieve. And most of the time the men and women in blue feel alone.

The New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Eileen Dreyer has published thirty-eight novels and ten short stories in multiple genres, ranging from historical romance to medical-forensic thrillers. Living in St. Louis with her husband and children, she has turned in the nurse’s whites she wore during a career in trauma medicine and made writing, travel, and St. Louis Cardinals baseball her full-time hobbies. She has animals but refuses to submit them to the glare of the spotlight.

• I was invited to submit a short story for the Crime Square Anthology, in which all the crimes took place in Times Square. Each story was set in a different decade. When asked which decade I wanted, there was no question. I picked the 1940s because immediately I saw in my head that iconic photo of the sailor kissing the nurse on VJ Day. It has always really spoken to me. There had to be a story there somewhere.

I studied the photo. I researched it and found that Alfred Eisenstadt, who took the photo, had followed the sailor down the length of Times Square as he kissed every woman he passed. Then I learned that there was more than one photo and in each different people are seen in the background. What of those people? What is going on that day that we’re missing because we’re watching the performance put on by an exuberant sailor? My story is about two of those other persons, another sailor and the wife who has waited for him to come home. It’s about not assuming that you know what you see.

David Edgerley Gates lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and many of his stories take place in the West-period pieces like the Placido Geist bounty hunter stories, and others more contemporary, dealing with the meth plague in Indian country, say, or the border war, drugs and human traffic moving north, guns and money going south, and the corrosive influence of the Mexican cartels. “The Devil to Pay,” although it’s set in present-day New York, nods in passing to the long reach of cartel money and the increased Latino gang presence in the American prison system.

Gates is a past Shamus and Edgar Award nominee. His stories appear regularly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. His website is www.davidedgerleygates.com.

• Tommy Meadows is small-time, a pilot fish swimming in an ocean of larger predators. He’s not as ruthless as some, but neither is he that nice a person. I think the character’s influenced, to some degree, by the guys Donald Westlake used to write about, grifters and also-rans, who never quite make it into the heavy or the big score. And Tommy is more of a catalyst than a major player. He just finds himself in the wrong place at the right time. The ending of this story is one of my few ventures into what might be called metafiction. The fairy tale Tommy tells his gramma is, of course, the story you’ve just read.

Although best known for his true crime books, notably the Edgar-nominated Six Against the Rock, about Alcatraz, and Zebra, also nominated, which examined the infamous San Francisco murders of the early 1970s, Clark Howard has developed a great following for his short stories, five of which have been nominated for Edgar Allan Poe Awards; one, “Horn Man,” was picked as the best of the year for 1980. He has also won the Derringer Award and in 2009 was voted the Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement in the mystery genre. Other nominations have been for Shamus and Spur Awards, and five times he was named as the favorite for the Ellery Queen Readers Award by that popular magazine.

Andre Kocsis lives in the West Chilcotin, a remote area of British Columbia, Canada. His work has been published in the Dalhousie Review, the New Orphic Review, Skyline Magazine, The Oak, and Couloir Magazine as well as a number of online publications. Currently he’s working on the fifth and, he fervently hopes, final draft of a novel entitled Canyon Marathon.

• It has been my lifelong ambition to use the name Sierra for a protagonist. However, this was not the sole impetus for “Crossing.” Marijuana is a $6 billion industry in British Columbia, with an estimated 95 percent of this cash crop destined for the United States. A news story about the capture of some smugglers started me thinking that the mountains along the Canada-U.S. border could provide an interesting way to move drugs. I felt, however, that it was prudent to try out this idea in fiction rather than in real life.

The southeast of British Columbia, where the Rocky Mountains cross the border, has a history of serving as a haven for dissidents. The Doukhobors, a pacifist religious sect with strong antigovernment beliefs, escaped persecution in Russia with the aid of Leo Tolstoy and settled here in the early 1900s. As well, a community of polygamous Mormons have made this area their home since 1946. And during the Vietnam War many American youths escaped the draft by settling here. They’ve had a noticeable impact on the culture of the region.

During the late sixties, I was a Canadian student in Berkeley and observed an American social fabric rent by the war. Ever since, I have been fascinated by characters like Sierra, who had to decide between risking their lives in a war with which they disagreed and leaving their homes, their families, and the country they loved. No doubt many have never resolved internal conflicts that reflect the larger drama that was played out on the national stage during the Vietnam War.

The wilderness has always drawn me, and mountainous terrain has a special fascination. There’s an inherent drama in the harsh conditions, with the abruptly changing weather, which tends toward the extreme. It’s an environment that tests the spirit, and many of my short stories take place with this backdrop. Consequently, skiing in the backcountry has become a passion that I indulge at every opportunity. In this context, I have met a number of mountain guides, and without exception, they have been fascinating, if often flawed, characters.

Sierra strives to escape the complications, the frustrations, the ambiguities of civilization. In the wilderness, decisions are without ambiguity because they are about survival. Ironically, his desire to escape is what traps Sierra in a situation in which he must again make a choice, a choice that he thought he had made once and for all in his youth.

Kevin Leahy’s stories have appeared in the Briar Cliff Review, Slice Magazine, and Opium Magazine. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son and is working on a novel.

• Years ago I read a statistic that stuck with me: there are now more prisoners than farmers in the United States. I found myself thinking about what that might mean, so I started writing about a farm community that became a prison town. The seed of the story was the sentence “No one recalls who built the prison.” While that exact phrase didn’t make it into the final version, the sense of anonymity and communal amnesia behind it helped me find a way into the story. It sounds orderly and analytical when I explain it like that. But the truth is, it was trial and error the whole way, and I didn’t get anywhere until I put my own fears on the page-of being jobless, having a sick child, losing my son.

I’d like to acknowledge a debt to Tracy Huling for her excellent paper “Building a Prison Economy in Rural America,” which was invaluable in my research. When I reread my story now, I also hear the influence of fiction I read and loved in the years before I wrote it-Chris Bachelder’s U.S.!, Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Year of Silence,” and especially Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Whatever defects my story has are mine, and whatever resonance it has, the echoes of those earlier pieces helped me find it.

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels in the fantasy and horror genres, including the Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground and the crime fantasy Bullettime. His shift to crime fiction will be nearly complete with the publication of the mostly noir Love Is the Law in late 2013. His short fiction has been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, and the New Haven Review and in anthologies, including West Coast Crime Wave, Psychos, and Lovecraft Unbound. Nick’s fiction and editorial work have been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award five times, and also for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards.

• My influences have always been broad-science fiction, “cult” fiction of all types, including the Beats, horror, and crime. I’m also a Long Island boy, and years ago was sent out to Northport, where Jack Kerouac had made his home, to cover a marathon reading of Big Sur for an online magazine. I had found Akashic Books through my interest in punk/cult stuff and eagerly read the volumes of its fill-in-the-blank Noir Series as they came out. When Akashic announced Long Island Noir, I queried editor Kaylie Jones with a story idea about my hometown, Port Jefferson, but another writer had already called dibs on the location. I immediately thought back to Kerouac and my trip to Northport and quickly suggested an idea about that town. Kerouac isn’t the only thing Northport is famous for; the “acid king” Ricky Kasso’s murder of Gary Lauwers ranks high as well, especially for any 1980s LI kid who had long hair and liked horror and fantasy. (Guilty.) Obviously I had to combine the two and add other bits and pieces of Long Island: fears of breast cancer clusters, Mobbed-up waste management firms, and the tourism industry. In proper Beat fashion, the story came out in a mad rush. Luckily, Jones was there with her red pen to make it more comprehensible. I’ve grown to like writing crime fiction. I think I’ll stick around.

Emily St. John Mandel is from the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. Her most recent novel is The Lola Quartet; her previous novels are Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun. She is a staff writer for The Millions, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies. She is married and lives in Brooklyn; her website is www.emilymandel.com.

• My second novel, The Singer’s Gun, involved a man who finds himself drawn unwillingly into a criminal transaction, and an associate of his ends up getting shot. Although the associate, David, was a relatively minor character in the book, I found myself thinking of him a great deal. He was a young widower who’d been drifting across Europe, trying to avoid the ghost of his wife, and at the moment of death I had him see her again.

Murder your darlings, writers are told, but sometimes those darlings refuse to stay dead. I cut most of David’s backstory from The Singer’s Gun because it slowed the pace of the book at exactly the point where I needed the narrative to pick up speed. In the final version of the book, not only is David’s backstory mostly gone, but his death takes place offstage. But that deleted backstory stayed with me in the ensuing years, and eventually I developed it into “Drifter.” I remained fascinated by the idea of a brokenhearted traveler trying to disappear, running from the memory of a lost beloved but at the same time secretly longing to see that person again.

Leaving home is a formative experience in anyone’s life, and when I left home, I did so in a somewhat extreme fashion-I moved alone from rural British Columbia to downtown Toronto (a distance of some three thousand miles) when I was eighteen years old-and it was like flying into an entirely different life. I’ve been thinking ever since about the power and joy and hazard of relocation and travel, the way we can reinvent or lose ourselves through movement over the landscape. “Drifter” is about one of the very darkest possibilities of travel, which is to say, traveling in an effort to erase yourself.

Dennis McFadden lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, New England Review, the Missouri Review, the Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Fiction, PRISM international, and the South Carolina Review. A story from his 2010 collection, Hart’s Grove, was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2011.

• Okay, I admit it, I love Lafferty best. I’ve written a hundred stories, made up a hundred heroes, but Lafferty’s my favorite by far. I spoil him half to death. I treat him better than his brothers and sisters. I indulge him more (five stories of his own and counting), let him have his own way more, let him get away with bloody murder. I just don’t have it in me to scold him, to try to keep him in line. Who could blame me? He makes my writing life a hell of a lot easier than any of the others (most of whom, ungrateful bastards, don’t even try). All I have to do is imagine an inkling of something a little bit Laffertyesque, and wham, bam, here we go, Lafferty off to the races, barreling gangways here and there, this way and that, rambling on and on in that pseudo-rogue-brogue of his. I pretty much just sit back and listen, along for the ride. What can I say? I love this guy.

Micah Nathan is a bestselling author, short story writer, and essayist. He has written several novels, some ignored, most well received. He received his MFA from Boston University, where he was awarded the 2010 Saul Bellow Prize for fiction.

• “Quarry” was one of those rare pieces that emerged fully formed. An isolated farmhouse, a body in the woods, two children left alone with a murderous thief-if I couldn’t make that scenario work, I have no business writing.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of novels of mystery and suspense, including most recently The Accursed, Daddy Love, and Mudwoman, as well as collections of stories, including Give Me Your Heart, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, and Black Dahlia & White Rose. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was the 2011 recipient of the President’s Medal in the Humanities. “So Near Any Time Always” will be included in Evil Eye: Four Tales of Love Gone Wrong.

• Stories about stalkers always fascinate me. Years ago, a man whom I’d known in Detroit, who had tried to exploit me as a means of advancing his literary career, set out to stalk me-but through the mail, not literally. Thank God, this was an era long before the Internet-what devastation he might have wrought in the twenty-first century, under aliases, attacking “Joyce Carol Oates,” who would have been helpless to combat a many-pronged online attack.

As it was, the Detroit stalker sent hundreds of letters to me and to others, bitterly denigrating me, over a period of ten to twelve years. He managed to publish, in a small literary magazine, a story with the ominous title “How I Murdered Joyce Carol Oates.” (No, I didn’t read the story!) His threats were clever, elliptical, and taunting-the kind of vague threat that wasn’t clear enough to be actionable, even if I’d wanted to appeal to the police.

“So Near Any Time Always” is about a teenage stalker and his naively complicit victim. It has two distinct origins: the first, a blurred memory of adolescent yearning, misunderstanding, anxiety, and unease; the second, a more adult perception of the terrible harm people can inflict upon others, in their failure to take responsibility for, even to acknowledge, a potentially dangerous family member.

Fundamentally, the story is about a young girl’s wish to believe that she is “special”-that a boy could be attracted to her, and feel emotion for her, on her own terms. So badly the narrator wants to believe, she overlooks clues in the boy’s bizarre behavior that would alert most of us to the possibility of danger. Foolish as the girl is, she is after all young-she is inexperienced, naive, intelligent, but not skeptical like her sister.

It’s the unconscionable behavior of the boy’s parents that generates the story: their pretense that their son, who killed his young sister years before, was “cured” and “harmless”-and would not harm anyone ever again. This moral blindness is outrageous-yet a commonplace-as families protect relatives who are a danger to others and themselves.

Of course, the great irony of the story is that the girl will never forget her “first love”-though the boy was insanely fixated on her as a reincarnation of his (murdered) sister. Never will she be pursued again in such an impassioned way. It is the girl who recalls the boy-the stalker-in darkly romantic terms; always she will remember him-“So Near Any Time Always.”

Nancy Pickard is the winner of Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, Shamus, and Barry Awards for her novels and short stories. She is a four-time Edgar Award finalist. Her novel The Virgin of Small Plains was the Kansas book of the year in 2007. Her most recent novel, The Scent of Rain and Lightning, was a finalist for the Great Plains Fiction Award in 2011. Her next novel, set in Kansas, will be published in 2014.

• “Light Bulb” is based more on my own life than any other story I’ve ever written. I was the child who walked home alone from church school and was frightened by a man who tried to lure me into a church. I am the woman who had an epiphany many years later that shocked me with the realization that although he had failed to molest me, he had surely also tried with other children and had probably succeeded with some of them. Like my protagonist, I visited the police to report him, knowing he could still be alive, he might be a grandfather, he could still be doing damage. In real life, I never found a way to stop him, so I invented one.

A full-time professional writer since 1969, Bill Pronzini has published seventy-seven novels, including five in collaboration with his wife, mystery novelist Marcia Muller, and thirty-seven in his iconic “Nameless Detective” series. He is also the author of four hundred short stories, articles, essays, and book reviews and four nonfiction books, and he has edited or coedited numerous anthologies. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries.

In 2008 he was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, the organization’s highest award. He has received three Shamus Awards, two for best novel; the Lifetime Achievement Award (presented in 1987) from the Private Eye Writers of America; and six nominations for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award. His suspense novel Snowbound was the recipient of the Grand Prix de la Litterature Policière as the best crime novel published in France in 1988. Two other suspense novels, A Wasteland of Strangers and The Crimes of Jordan Wise, were nominated for the Hammett Prize for best crime novels of 1997 and 2006, respectively, by the International Crime Writers Association.

• John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter are characters I created for the novel Quincannon (1985). In that book they were not as yet a detective team. Sabina was then employed as an operative for the Denver office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency (her character is loosely based on Kate Warne, the first female PI, who worked for Allan Pinkerton in his Baltimore agency during and after the Civil War); Quincannon was a field agent attached to the San Francisco branch of the U.S. Secret Service. They joined forces to open their San Francisco-based detective agency shortly after the events described in Quincannon and have since appeared in more than a score of short stories, including one, “The Chatelaine Bag” (2010), that my wife, Marcia Muller, and I wrote together on a whim. The story turned out so well that we decided to do a series of collaborative novels featuring the duo, with Marcia writing the scenes told from Sabina’s point of view and me writing those from Quincannon’s. The first of these, The Bughouse Affair, was published in 2012; the second, The Spook Lights Affair, is due out in December of this year. “Gunpowder Alley” is the most recent Carpenter and Quincannon short story, and the last to be published under my solo byline.

Winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his first book, a collection of literary short stories, Randall Silvis is also the author of eleven critically acclaimed novels in various genres and a book of narrative nonfiction about the exploration of Labrador. He has written feature and cover stories for the Discovery Channel magazines, has won two NEA literature fellowships plus several national playwriting and screenwriting competitions, and is a published poet, an unpublished songwriter, an unreliable blogger, and a primary source of profanity on his local golf courses.

• I can’t remember the genesis of “The Indian” or, for that matter, the genesis of most of my other work. This is probably because I typically work on three or four projects simultaneously. And by “work on” I don’t mean that I write them simultaneously, but that while I am writing one I have a few others knocking around in my head and clamoring for attention. (See reference to Uncle Dave, below, for suspicious parallels.) Sometimes one of them will clamor so loudly that I have to stop writing, grab a different notebook, and write something else for the rest of the morning. I hate it when that happens. But I love it, too. Better to have too many ideas than to have too few. Or, worse yet, none at all.

What I do remember about “The Indian” is that it used to be longer. So did my hair. I cut most of it back in the ’90s, I think, when it started falling out on top faster than it was growing on the sides. I just didn’t want to end up looking like my Uncle Dave, who covered his naked dome with aluminum foil and also made foil plugs for his ears. The foil plugs stuck out like stubby antennas through his scraggly hair. Now that I know about the government’s projects Bluebird and MKUltra, I wish I had taken Uncle Dave more seriously. He’d start talking about the crazy messages being beamed into his brain and I’d say, “Okay, yep, you mind if Cindy and me go out for a little ride?” Cindy was my second cousin, a few years younger than me but something of a sexual prodigy. Of the two of them, I miss her more.

(Side note: No matter how strong the urge, no matter how enticing the temptation, no matter how freaking nostalgic you get for your sweet young lover from the good old days, DO NOT search for current photos of that lover on Facebook. Ewwwwww!)

Anyway, “The Indian” used to run to nearly 30,000 words. Janet Hutchings told me she would publish it if I cut it to under 20,000, which I could probably do just by taking out the f-words. I spent a few more of those words cursing silently, then started cutting.

I had intended to use this space to say something about how much I love to write novellas and why don’t more places publish them, something about how “The Indian” is an elegy to small-town life, something about what an idiot my former dean of liberal arts is, and, finally, to direct a few hundred expletives at the pompous Magoos who continue to insist that genre fiction cannot be literary… but it looks like I’ve already used up my miserly ration of page space. F**k!

Patricia Smith is the author of six books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the National Book Award, and her latest, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Tin House, and both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She was the editor of Staten Island Noir, in which “When They Are Done with Us” appears; the story won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year. She is a 2012 fellow at both the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. A professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, Patricia is married to Edgar Award winner Bruce DeSilva, author of the Mulligan crime novels.

• “When They Are Done with Us” has at its center a true Staten Island story that dominated the news for days. After a fire, the bodies of a mother and her four children were discovered. The throats of the mother and three of her children were slit, and near her thirteen-year-old son’s body was a razor and a note with the scrawled words am sorry. The assumption was that he had killed his family and then committed suicide by sliding a blade across his own throat. People were horrified; hastily penned editorials screeched about young black boys and their frightening dysfunctions. Later it was discovered that it was the mother who had written the note and effectively framed her son for the killings.

As a writer with a fierce curiosity about all the ways the world goes awry, I couldn’t push the story from my head. When I decided to write a piece for Staten Island Noir, I saw my chance to process the horror.

It happened in Port Richmond, a diverse but divided community, so this was initially a story about race: Jo, a white woman uncertain of her rooting, never quite sure how to respond or relate to her black and Latino neighbors, wrestles with feelings of disconnect and guilt when the tragedy occurs directly across the street from where she lives.

But once her teenage son, Charlie, walked in and opened his mouth, I immediately saw another direction for the story. He started as a bit player, a chalk outline, but he urged me to step back and see just how poisonous he could be. He allowed me to develop a tension created by those dueling levels of familiar violence and to make Jo’s options, her space in this world, smaller and smaller, until her horrible choice was inevitable. Charlie created the reason for the necessary bond between Jo and Leisa, the woman who’d murdered her children and killed herself.

Since I primarily identify as a poet and this was the first short story I’ve ever written, I chose poetry as Jo’s lifeline, her one shot at sanity and salvation. Having poetry be a part of the story linked the two genres and kept those voices (“Whatta ya think you’re doin’? You don’t know how to write a short story!”) at bay.

Ben Stroud is the author of the story collection Byzantium. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, One Story, Electric Literature, the Boston Review, and the anthology New Stories from the South 2010. He lives in Ohio and teaches at the University of Toledo.

• I drafted this story over a cold January weekend in Michigan in 2007. While researching another story, I came across a rumor in a history of Havana about vagabonds who came to the city and started selling “French sausage” in the market-sausage that was eventually discovered to be made of slaves who’d been kidnapped and murdered. Whether this truly happened, I don’t know, but the rumor stuck with me for a few months (it was too good, too rich with thematic and dramatic possibility), until that cold weekend. I wanted to get as far from Michigan as possible and so decided it was time to write about Havana. I started with the rumor about the sausage and built the story out from there. How would the truth be discovered? I’d need a detective. Who would be the ideal detective? Someone who could pass through the different racial worlds of nineteenth-century Cuba. This is how I came up with the character of Burke, who appears in another of my stories as well. That he is an American rather than a Cuban is a result of my own ignorance. I didn’t know enough about Cuba to pull off inhabiting a Cuban, so I made him a newcomer to the city. He would mirror me, also a newcomer.

In writing the story, I ended up doing far more research than reading that initial history. I even tracked down a tourist’s map from the 1850s with fold-out views of the city (this I found in the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections). The story became a novella. Then it became the first section of a novel. And then, after five years, it became a story again. I didn’t plan it that way-it was a blind search all the way through-but it took that long process of growing and cutting away and leaving the story aside and coming back to it for it to finally become what it needed to be.

Hannah Tinti’s story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award. Hannah is also cofounder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine and received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in magazine editing. Recently she joined the Public Radio program Selected Shorts as its literary commentator.

• I based “Bullet Number Two” on an experience I had while driving through the Four Corners. I got caught in a dust storm, just as Hawley does in the story, and had to pull over at a strange motel run by Navajos. There wasn’t a shootout, but my room did have a hole punched through the wall. The storm was wild, and the sand and the colors and the light of the desert in the morning stayed with me. I’m grateful to Tin House for taking a chance and running this story, and to Best American Mystery Stories for giving it a second life.

Maurine Dallas Watkins (1896 -1969) wrote the 1926 play Chicago, on which the musical is based. Winner of six Tonys and a Best Picture Oscar for the 2002 film, Watkins based her Broadway-bound play on the newspaper articles that she wrote as a young crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune while covering the sensationalist murder trials that rocked 1920s Chicago. Her tongue-in-cheek features on the “beautiful murderesses” turned media darlings were the inspiration for Chicago’s Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. Watkins wrote several other plays, including the long-lost Revelry, about the scandal-ridden White House of President Warren G. Harding, and the acidly cynical farce So Help Me God!, which received its first production in 2009, eighty years after its creation. She wrote or contributed to several films, including two Best Picture nominees, Libeled Lady and Up the River, as well as such screwball comedies as Professional Sweethearts, No Man of Her Own, and I Love You Again.