The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

Introduction

ABRAHAM LINCOLN FAMOUSLY said, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.”

I understand exactly what Lincoln meant by that, and nothing illustrates his point better than a short story. I’ve written almost twenty-five novels in as many years, but I’ve written only three short stories for anthologies: one for breast cancer research, another to preserve open space, and the last for Otto Penzler.

Bottom line, I avoid the short form unless I’m saving the world or working for Otto Penzler.

Why?

Because I adore Otto, who knows more about crime fiction than anybody on the planet.

And also because it’s too much work to write something short. I don’t have the time.

Plus I’m Italian, and Italians need three thousand words just to say hello.

Hand gestures not included.

On top of that, I’m a woman, which means that at eight thousand words, I’m just warming up. A typical novel is ninety thousand words, but mine always run longer, and even my acknowledgments don’t get to the point anytime soon.

By the way, I’m divorced twice, and these things may be related.

Anyway, you get the idea. It’s harder to write something short than something long.

Why?

Because you have to know exactly what you’re doing before you do it. You have to know where you’re going before you get in the car. You have to think what to say before you open your mouth.

That’s not me.

People ask if I know how my book ends when I begin to write, and I have to tell the truth. Not only do I not know how it ends, I don’t even know how it middles.

I start with the idea and see where it takes me, then live by the motto “Great books aren’t written, they’re rewritten.”

Come to think of it, probably anybody who’s divorced twice isn’t the type of person who looks before they leap. In fact, I bet that all of the wonderful authors herein are happily married, or at least have not made as stupendously bad decisions as mine.

Their stories prove as much. Because without exception, each of these stories is perfect, and told in just a few pages. Each one plunges the reader into the plot with the very first sentence, and there are no wasted words, no excessive descriptions to establish setting, time of year, or barometric pressure. We aren’t told a lot of irrelevant backstory, all dialogue is pithy and pertinent, and, most important, once a point is established, it isn’t reestablished. The writing is lean, lacking cellulite and stomach flab.

These are stories with abs.

And to my mind, the great value of having them all in one collection is that when you read through them all, you, as the reader, will begin to see the similarities that construct a great story, and, equally important, though perhaps paradoxically, you’ll also see the great breadth of the stories and come to understand that though their settings, characters, plots, and voices are radically different, what makes them all great is exactly the same.

My point is illustrated by a comparison of two stories, Randall Silvis’s “The Indian” and Eileen Dreyer’s “The Sailor in the Picture.” These stories could not be more different in almost every respect, except that they’re both sensational stories, for exactly the same reasons.

Silvis’s story begins with a man walking into a bar, which in itself is kinda brilliant, and Silvis tells us, without missing a beat, that the man, an angry truck driver named Harvey, wants to kill his brother-in-law in a dispute over a motorcycle, an Indian. Silvis’s voice perfectly captures, if not epitomizes, a working-class taproom outside Pittsburgh, where the Pirates game is always on and the patrons drink Schlitz. The bar is tended by Harvey’s mild younger brother, named Will, who admits that he’s “nobody’s genius,” even in a world populated by handymen, ditch diggers, and trash haulers.

So the central conflict is established on page 1 of the story, and before we know it, Harvey will suck Will into a plot to ruin his brother-in-law, during the commission of which the story’s plot will twist in such a completely shocking manner that the blood is flowing only a few pages later, the motorcycle forgotten.

The story is not only lean, it’s positively muscular, and the prose so clean that it borders on poetry. Even as the plot charges toward its horrific conclusion, Will’s sleep is disrupted by a dream in which he’s hunting and comes upon a deer. The hunter confronts the hunted, “the two connected by the invisible thread of the bullet about to fly.”

The dialogue is equally pithy, as well as doing double duty to inform character and advance plot. For example, Silvis tells you everything you need to know about Will when he writes that Will asks a group of golfers if they’re ready for another pitcher “with the lift of his eyebrows.” The golfers answer, as they would, “We’re good.” That’s pitch-perfect dialogue, without a wasted word.

All this, plus two sex scenes in the first eleven pages!

What a story!

Now let’s compare Silvis’s story with “The Sailor in the Picture.” I am a huge fan of Eileen Dreyer’s mysteries, which feature strong and smart women, and the story is classic Dreyer, though it takes place in a different time period, during World War II. The story’s jumping-off point is the iconic picture of a sailor kissing a nurse on VJ Day, and Dreyer takes us into the world of that picture through the eyes of a bystander, one Peg O’Toole, who was “facing her own sailor” that very day in Times Square. He was her husband, Jimmy, home from the war, and Dreyer tells us that Peg now carries his memory “like a sharp shard of glass,” because that was the day he died.

Dreyer is skilled enough to make us feel instantly sympathetic for Peg’s loss, then take us back to a time before Jimmy died, and we’re happy at her upcoming reunion with him. In the process, Dreyer deftly brings to life wartime America, where women on the home front wear hairnets, “sturdy shoes and work pants,” and carry lunches, cigarettes, lipstick, and bus fare. They find a way to deal with the terrible grief when they lose a son or husband, and Dreyer describes the “quick stab of an envelope” when the dreaded Western Union telegrams are thrust into their shaking hands.

The war has taken Peg’s dreams as well as her husband. She had dreamed of becoming a nurse, of wearing a white cap and a “gleaming white dress” and always looking “clean and bright,” but instead she has to work in a butcher shop for the war’s duration, to support herself and her children. But Peg learns to enjoy the work, slicing meat, filling the parts bucket, and grinding hamburger until her back and arms ache. She’s a practical woman, not a complainer, and her self-esteem grows. In just a few sentences, Dreyer makes Peg instantly relatable to every working mother, transcending space and time.

Dreyer’s story moves to the day when Peg is going to Times Square to meet her returning husband, and the reader goes along as Peg makes the trip into New York City, with its “hard energy,” touching her savings-and-loan passbook as if it were a “talisman against temptation.” Once she gets there, she’s kissed, “standing there flat-footed,” by the sailor in the iconic photo, then left behind when he moves on, kissing other women while the photographer snaps away. But as soon as Peg sees Jimmy in the crowd, she freezes, with “the instinctive reaction of all hunted animals,” and in that moment Dreyer’s plot turns about-face and the unthinkable happens.

Dreyer’s prose is as heartfelt as Silvis’s is spare, but the voice of her Peg O’Toole resonates with such truth and power that the heroine’s plight, problem, and solution make absolute sense, and you’ll find yourself cheering her on. Both stories, Silvis’s and Dreyer’s, pack a dramatic wallop, and both explore families, relationships, and the deep hatred that can come only from the deepest love-the weightiest of themes, in mere pages.

Both stories are page-turners, and I think you’ll race through them and the other ones in the collection. Read them all in one sitting and your head will be spinning. Read them again, more slowly, to examine the skill, talent, and artistry it takes to write stories that fire with the speed of an automatic weapon and are over just as fast.

That’s what’s between these covers, pure explosive fiction.

Otto Penzler sure knows his stuff.

And so did Abe Lincoln.

Lisa Scottoline