The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

Contributors’ Notes

Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of seven novels, including The Fever and Dare Me. Her stories have appeared in collections including Detroit Noir, Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, Queens Noir, Wall Street Noir, and The Speed Chronicles. She is also the author of The Street Was Mine, a study of hardboiled fiction and film noir, and A Hell of a Woman, a female crime fiction anthology. She has been nominated for awards including the Crime Writers Association’s Steel Dagger, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Hammett Prize. She lives in Queens, New York.

• The idea for “My Heart Is Either Broken” came straight from the front page of the New York Daily News. The headline of the day was the acquittal of Casey Anthony, the Florida woman charged in the death of her two-year-old daughter. For months the tabloids had been writhing over the case, painting Anthony as a demonic party girl or a down-market femme fatale. The front-page photo that day depicted Anthony, hair pulled back in a prim ponytail, donning the pale pink buttoned-up shirt of a devout schoolgirl. The News editors, however, had clearly chosen the image for a reason, because for all the demure restraint of the outfit, Anthony had been snapped smiling in a way that, given the paper’s coverage of her, can only be described as witchy. Dangerous. The actual facts of the case are complicated, the trial was troubled-but what interested me was how Anthony’s behavior was the media focus. She did not “act” as a distraught mother should after her daughter’s disappearance, and she wasn’t performing the role of “unjustly accused” now. I began to think about how much our expectations of how grief, trauma, and maternal love are expressed rule the way we view guilt or innocence. And about the special fear we have of mothers who don’t seem to love their children the way we want them to, or at least don’t know how to play the part for us.

Daniel Alarcón’s books include War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. He is executive producer of Radio Ambulante.org, a Spanish-language narrative journalism podcast. In 2010 The New Yorker named him one of the twenty best writers under forty, and his most recent novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award.

• This story came together after years visiting the prison known as Lurigancho, on the outskirts of Lima. I went inside for the first time in 2007 and have been returning ever since, never quite knowing what I am doing there or what keeps drawing me back to that place. In 2009 I taught a writing workshop there, and eventually, in 2011, I pitched a piece to Harper’s about life in the drug trafficking block. “Collectors” is based on the material gathered on that reporting trip. In this case, the spark was an offhand comment by an inmate, who began musing about the prison’s collection of terrible odors. He said it half jokingly, and then mentioned the worst smell of all: the smell of sex when you weren’t having any. I asked him to explain, and he did. The story was eye-opening. I knew I had to do something with that.

Jim Allyn is a graduate of Alpena Community College and the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in journalism. While at Michigan he won a Hopwood Creative Writing Award, Major Novel Division, and the Detroit Press Club Foundation Student Grant Award for the best writing in a college newspaper or periodical. Upon graduation he pursued a career in health-care marketing and communication. He recently retired as vice president of marketing and community relations at Elkhart General Healthcare System in Elkhart, Indiana. His first short story, “The Tree Hugger,” appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1995, and four others have been published by EQMM since then. He is a U.S. Naval Air Force veteran, having served aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Intrepid.

• About 250 miles north of Detroit, on the shores of Lake Huron, sits the tiny village of Black River, Michigan. The mouth of the river, not a major artery but a narrow trout stream, is right there in the village. My family’s 200-acre wilderness retreat in the Great North Woods-known to us simply as “Camp”-is situated about 2 miles upstream on the Black. On the western edge of our property, on the river’s highest bank, is a cemetery, a rustic spot under a tall jack pine fenced off by cedar poles. It is the place where for the past sixty years we have buried creatures with nobler hearts than ours.

An odd assortment of aging small wood and stone markers carry the names of the buried friends, companions, and fellow hunters who made the journey with us. Donda, the matriarch of a clan of blooded German shorthair pointers that we grew up with… Misty, Daisy Mae, Tiger Jones, Lady Mike. And other wonderful shorthairs… Zipper, Shoshone, Roadie, Bonnie Brown, Max. And there’s Little Dog, aka Sweet Pea, a wonderfully affectionate Manchester toy terrier with a warrior’s heart who waded among the giant shorthairs absolutely unafraid. There’s Jeremy, a little mixed-breed who fiercely defended my son Brodie even if I was just trying to kiss him goodnight. The cemetery’s patriarch is Smokey Joe, a Labrador retriever who romped with us in the big lake on the summer side of life.

But in this quiet resting place on Black River all are not here who should be here. Two are missing: Jenny Wren and McGill. I buried them on a restored farm near Ann Arbor about forty years ago. Sometimes life grabs you by the throat and it’s all you can do just to hold on. McGill and Jenny died during such a time, and I just wasn’t able to make the trip north to Camp. A white-collar nomad, I sold the house and was long gone to Illinois and then Indiana. Over the years I resolved that at some point I would return for Jenny Wren and McGill. That would involve knocking on the door, trying to explain myself to strangers, and, if allowed, seeing if I could even find the graves after all this time. As I contemplated this, it struck me that it was an unusual thing to do and could be a story. But if a beloved pet is really in the grave, it’s not a mystery. So what if something else was buried there, something dark and sinister? What would it be and who would bury it?

The story I will eventually tell to the current occupants of my old farmhouse will resonate very strongly with the story that serial killer Lyle Collins spins out to Derek and Parveen Lane. The motives Collins lies about will be my real motives.

The story’s title, emerging as it does at the end, is how it emerged in real life. I was doing my final edit-the story was done and entitled “Princess Jenny”-when I applied the standard of criminal behavior, which holds that you always look for patterns. Hence a second grave-“Princess Anne.” The story for Jim Howard ends as he’s walking back to his Jeep, parked at the church. The nonfiction story will end when Jenny Wren and McGill come home to Camp.

Jodi Angel is the author of two collections of short stories. Her first collection, The History of Vegas, was published in 2005 and was named a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005 as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Review Discovery. Her second collection, You Only Get Letters from Jail, which includes “Snuff,” was named a Best Book of 2013 by Esquire and a Notable New Release by the New York Times. Angel’s work has appeared in Esquire, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Byliner, among other publications and anthologies. Her stories have received several Pushcart Prize nominations, and “A Good Deuce” was named as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories 2012. Angel grew up in northern California-in a family of girls.

• I have always romanticized the 1970s, and one aspect of that decade that fascinated me was the urban legend that developed around snuff films and whether they are real. I wanted to write a story about a snuff film, but what came out was not really a story about a snuff film but a story about a brother and sister who are involved in a car accident on a deserted back-country road. Because my stories are from the point of view of teenage narrators, the journey from innocence to experience often takes place under the surface of everything else that goes on, but in “Snuff” I deviate from that a little bit by having the narrator come to the story as having already lost his innocence by watching the “could be” snuff film at his buddy Billy’s house, so the character who actually makes the journey to experience during the story is the narrator’s sister, Charlotte. “Snuff” is a story about sex and violence and appearances versus realities-much of what drives the snuff-film myth-and about how who Charlotte wants to be isn’t who she is. It’s going to take more than a pocket knife and a bad situation to change that fact, but in her innocence, she believes it could be just that easy. Charlotte loses her innocence by the end of the story, but like most losses, it’s a painful process.

Russell Banks is the prizewinning author of seventeen books of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, have been made into critically acclaimed, award-winning films. He has published six collections of short stories, most recently A Permanent Member of the Family (2013), which includes “Former Marine.” His work is widely translated, and in 2010 he was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the minister of culture of France. He is the former president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was the New York State Author from 2004 to 2008 and in 2014 was inducted into the New York Writers’ Hall of Fame. He resides in upstate New York and Miami Beach, Florida.

• In the fall of 2011, after having written three novels in a row and no short stories, I decided to take a break from the long form while the well refilled (with the hope that it would indeed refill) and return to the short form for a while. I went back over my notebooks and culled a dozen sketches, ideas, notions, scraps, and yellowing newspaper articles I’d saved during the previous decade. Then I sat down and over the next year wrote the twelve stories that became A Permanent Member of the Family, which opens with “Former Marine.” Among the notes and clippings that generated the stories was a one-paragraph news account of a man in his seventies who had gone on a bank-robbing spree in Illinois and had been caught and turned in by his son, who happened to be a police officer. There was nothing about why an old man would suddenly become a bank robber, and nothing about the moral crisis his son the cop must have faced on discovering that his dad had a secret life as a criminal. I wrote the story as a way of penetrating those twinned mysteries-maybe the only way I could penetrate them. Of course, it’s in the nature of fiction, perhaps all art, that when you gain access to a mystery, you are inevitably led beyond it to a still deeper mystery. In this case, perhaps it’s the mystery of a father’s complex need for his sons’ love and respect, something I’ve never experienced directly, having fathered only daughters (four of them). One of the many reasons we write and read stories and novels, I believe, is to experience what the narrow, happenstance circumstances of our lives have denied us. Though I’ve never robbed a bank, I’ve had secrets and been found out, like Connie, and I’ve accidentally uncovered a few of my parents’ secrets, like Connie’s sons, Jack and his two law-enforcement brothers. But I’ve never had to arrange my life so that it could be both forgiven by my sons and respected by them. Except in fiction.

James Lee Burke was born in 1936 and has published thirty-three novels and two collections of short stories. His most recent work is the novel Wayfaring Stranger, a story of the Great Depression and Bonnie and Clyde and Benny Siegel and the Battle of the Ardennes and the postwar oil boom along the Gulf Coast. He and his wife of fifty-four years, Pearl Burke, live on a ranch in western Montana. They have four children, one of whom is the novelist Alafair Burke.

• I wrote this story as a tribute to the migrant workers and drifters and roustabouts I knew many years ago in the Deep South and the American West. High school and college history books contain little if any information about bindlestiffs and the IWW and individuals such as Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston and Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Flynn and Joe Hill and all those who fought the good fight for working people everywhere. The story was also meant as an allegory, and calls to mind Jesus’ last statement to his followers, namely, to love one another. The story is set in a magical land, one where the stars look like a snow shower arching over the mountains and where rocks creak and murmur to one another under the water. I hope my story measures up. The story of the American West is an epic one. Kerouac caught it better than anyone I can think of. I’d like to think I caught at least a small piece of it.

Patricia Engel is the author of It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris and Vida, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and Young Lions fiction awards. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, A Public Space, Boston Review, Harvard Review, and numerous other publications and anthologies and has received various honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Miami.

• I was watching a documentary-style crime show on television about a girl who was kidnapped on her way home from a rock concert when I got the idea for “Aida.” I was touched in particular by the expressions on the parents’ faces as they spoke of their daughter, whose remains were eventually found. I was haunted by their words for a long time, and a series of images came to me, of a girl who’d been sheltered and protected from the world by her loving family, only to be stolen from her life forever. I was especially interested in showing how the brutal interruption of a tragedy, like an abduction, can affect a family whose emotional life already hangs in the balance, and how this particular family, which considered themselves a culture unto themselves, would respond to the loss. The voice of Salma, Aida’s twin, came to me early on, and I knew that their bond would be crucial to the telling. For me, the focus was less on the details of Aida’s disappearance and more on how the loss of a child can cause the family unit to disintegrate, and also how a small-town community responds or absolves itself of the crimes experienced by one of its own, or in this case by a family who were always considered outsiders.

Ernest Finney writes stories and novels. His short fiction has received a number of awards, among them an O. Henry first prize for “Peacocks.” His books include four novels, Winterchill, Lady with the Alligator Purse, Words of My Roaring, and California Time, and three story collections, Birds Landing, Flights in the Heavenlies, and Sequoia Gardens: California Stories. He has just finished a novel with Dwight Smith of “The Wrecker” as its main character.

• I had nothing better to do, so when a friend asked if I wanted to take a ride, I got into the cab of his wrecker. For the next five hours I watched Jack work down some bank’s list, repossessing eight cars, three pickup trucks, and one powerboat despite various attempts to thwart him: one guy with a machete but most with fists or fingernails. My story “The Wrecker” grew out of that afternoon. Jamie, the babe, was part fantasy, part good luck.

Roxane Gay is the author of three books, Ayiti, An Untamed State, and Bad Feminist. Her work has also appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2012, the New York Times Book Review, Oxford American, West Branch, and others. She lives and writes in the Midwest.

• My first novel, An Untamed State, is about a kidnapping, and when I wrote “I Will Follow You,” the idea of people being stolen from their lives was still very much on my mind. This story began with thinking about two sisters with an uncanny bond, and as I imagined their relationship, I wanted to know more about how that bond had developed, what they had seen and endured together, and how they were trying to move forward. I live in a small town with a courthouse at the center of the town square. One afternoon I found myself standing in front of the courthouse, watching people trickle in and out of the building, and I knew that one of the sisters had been married in a courthouse like that, surrounded by such a strange swath of humanity. I’m also a movie buff, so I knew the other sister would be involved with a guy who was so obsessed with movies he couldn’t really interact normally with anyone. I kept imagining the various elements of the story and the characters, and finally I put it all together.

Michelle Butler Hallett is the author of the novels Deluded Your Sailors, Sky Waves, Double-blind, and the short story collection The Shadow Side of Grace. Her short stories have been anthologized in The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Hard Ol’ Spot, Everything Is So Political, and Running the Whale’s Back. Her novel Double-blind, a study of complicity and love narrated by an American psychiatrist working under MK-Ultra protocol during the Cold War, was shortlisted for the 2007 Sunburst Award.

• I write about power and morality, and I often write about captivities. “Bush-Hammer Finish” took spark from the terrible death of Canadian poet Pat Lowther in 1975. Married to an increasingly unstable man, Lowther was just getting serious critical attention for her work when her husband killed her as she slept. He beat in her skull with a hammer and then dumped her body in a creek that she liked. I knew and greatly admired Lowther’s work before I found out how she died. It haunts me. I’ve wanted to write about her somehow for years, but she was a real person who left behind children and friends who love and miss her. Writing about Pat Lowther as Pat Lowther felt like a terrible intrusion, something I had no right to do. Yet… yet the story did not free me. I know next to nothing about Vancouver in the early 1970s, but I do know a fair bit about present-day St. John’s, so I tried approaching a similar storyline in a context I better understood.

The beginning of evil is the moment when one person dehumanizes another. The misogyny at work in Lowther’s death, the idea that a woman can be a possession, something to be kept or thrown away, remains: a blight, a danger, a poison.

Charlaine Harris has been writing novels and short stories for thirty-five years. She has won numerous awards in several genres, but she considers mystery her home base. Her best-known work, the Sookie Stackhouse novels, were adapted by Alan Ball into the HBO series True Blood. Charlaine has one husband, three children, two grandchildren, and several dogs. She lives in a house on a cliff in Texas.

• When I was showering one morning, I noticed that I had developed a procedure for getting clean, without conscious planning. Left shoulder first, then face, then right shoulder, and so on. I became aware that my routine was so fixed that I’d never even recognized it. I began wondering what it would take to blast that routine to smithereens. Since I’m naturally prone to imagine the worst possible scenario, I thought, What if someone tried to kill me while I was trimming my hair? Of course I’d be totally thrown off base. But what if there was a woman who wasn’t? What if the interruption was more of an annoyance than a complete surprise? What if she expected someone to try to kill her and she was quite capable of dealing with the situation? Anne DeWitt began to take shape in my mind. What kind of job would such a woman take, a job where she could exercise her formidable skills? Why, she’d be a high school principal, of course…

Joseph Heller (1923-1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. He was neither a prolific nor a successful writer, with the notable exception of his satirical novel Catch-22 (1961), which was an international bestseller and a popular motion picture. Its title has become part of the English language, referring to a perplexing circle in which the most logical decision is still an absurd, no-win choice. It tells the story of Captain Joseph Yossarian and his attempt to avoid serving in World War II by pretending to be insane. His plan is thwarted by the doctor’s argument that if he were truly mad, he would risk his life and seek to fight additional missions. Alternatively, if he were sane, he would be able to follow orders, so he could be sent to fight more missions.

• A note from Andrew Gulli, editor of The Strand Magazine, which first published this story: Literary treasure hunts are glamorous and exciting-on the surface. I’ve gone on several, and whenever I’m asked what it’s like to find an unpublished gem, I often leave out the frustrations and disappointments. You start by searching the archives of a legendary-though now departed-writer, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find an undiscovered one. Then a few things might happen: the work will be unreadable, the manuscript incomplete, the handwriting hard to decipher, or, after you bypass these hurdles, the literary estate will decide it doesn’t want the gem (which you’ve dedicated weeks or months to searching for) ever to see the light of day. In the case of “Almost Like Christmas,” I was fortunate. I chose the story over seven other unpublished pieces by Heller that I found; the manuscript was typo-free; and Heller’s estate was so easygoing I thought I’d died and gone to editor’s heaven. On top of that, it’s classic Heller. Rich with the author’s trademark cynicism about the dark recesses of human nature, it also creates an atmosphere of tension and suspense that had me quickly turning pages to the tragic denouement.

David H. Ingram’s love of writing began early in his life in his hometown of Ontario, Canada, when he won two short story contests while still in high school. After a detour into the theater, where for a couple of decades he was an actor, director, and music composer for a touring company, he returned to writing. His first mystery story, “A Good Man of Business,” was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and won the Robert L. Fish Award for 2012. Since then he has had several short stories published, including one by the Journal of Legal Education in an online addition to its first fiction issue. Along with writing fiction, Ingram is a book reviewer for Suspense Magazine. He is currently marketing his first novel. He lives in Illinois with his wife, who is the minister of a church.

• I’m an eclectic history buff. My interests run from Alexander the Great and the Roman Caesars to current events. A subsection that has always fascinated me is how natural disasters and weather affect history. Having lived through a hurricane myself-a small one named David-I’ve read and researched historic storms, such as the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 and the Labor Day storm in the Florida Keys. The most devastating event was the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the deadliest storm in U.S. history. The death estimates vary widely, but the lowest estimate is six thousand, more than twice the toll of the next deadliest storm on record. In the storm’s aftermath, newspapers reported at first that the death toll was five hundred-not because they didn’t know that it was larger, but because they didn’t think the public would believe the actual number.

Arrogance played a large part in increasing the number of people who were killed. Forecasters in Cuba, a country recently acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War, correctly projected the hurricane’s path. However, the U.S. Weather Service considered Cuba to be a backward nation, in spite of the Cubans’ years of experience with hurricanes. The Weather Service projected that the storm would take an easterly track, and it clung to that forecast even as Galveston was being ravaged.

In a sense, the inhabitants of Galveston were like the passengers on the Titanic. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Galveston was the seat of financial power in Texas, rivaling New York City and Newport in the number of millionaires within its borders. People built homes only a few feet above sea level, confident that a low-pressure system off the coast would always turn away hurricanes. After the storm, Galveston never regained its prominence in financial dominance, losing that honor to Houston.

This was the first storm to have its devastation captured by motion pictures. A photographic team from Thomas Edison’s film company was nearby and made its way to Galveston after the storm. The footage can be seen on YouTube. If you want to know more about what happened, I heartily recommend Eric Larson’s wonderful book Isaac’s Storm.

I have my wife to thank for planting the seed that grew into “The Covering Storm.” While I was reading about the hurricane, she said, “Why don’t you use it as the setting for a mystery?” Why not indeed? Before the storm there was no shortage of hubris among Galveston’s upper crust. Its inhabitants were unaware of what was happening as the hurricane approached. I personalized these traits in the characters I created, and “The Covering Storm” is the result.

Ed Kurtz is the author of A Wind of Knives, The Forty-Two, and Angel of the Abyss. His short fiction has appeared in Thuglit, Needle, Shotgun Honey, and numerous anthologies. He lives in Texas, where he is at work on his next project. Visit him online at www.edkurtz.net.

• “A Good Marriage” is an exploration of the limits of sin and penance, in this case of the domestic variety. Its protagonist is not an innocent man, and as such is the recipient of tremendous mistrust and no small amount of grave disapproval-but these punishments come with a cost far greater than the misconducts they reprove. The husband’s crime, however, is never acquitted, and indeed made worse in his failure to remain faithful (compounded by his fear to walk away from his wife’s terrorizing efforts to force a patently bad marriage to at least appear like a good one). It is a story about broken people breaking each other, taken to extreme conclusions, but apart from that I think perhaps uncomfortably familiar to many. And despite its horrific elements, “A Good Marriage” is at its heart a noir tale-and what could be more noir than the precarious dichotomy of closeness and distance in a marriage? Particularly one in which such intimate personal information could be used so destructively by one entrusted with said knowledge. There is, perhaps, no more dangerous an enemy than one that a person has already let into the walls of his or her proverbial fortress. When Michael Corleone said, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer,” one wonders whether his own troubled marriage came to mind! Sin and penance can and perhaps do often ebb and flow over the course of a given relationship’s years, should it endure enough of them. That was my starting point when writing this particular piece, and taken to the lengths it goes-well, perhaps take it as a gentle warning to sleep with one eye open, all you lovers out there.

Matthew Neill Null is a writer from West Virginia, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a winner of the O. Henry Award and the Mary McCarthy Prize in short fiction. His stories have appeared in Oxford American, Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, West Branch, and PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011. He has received writing fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the University of Iowa, the Jentel Foundation, and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, among others. His debut novel, Honey in the Lion’s Head, is forthcoming in spring 2016. His story collection, Aleghney Front, which includes “Gauley Season,” is also forthcoming in 2016.

• All great stories have a ghost in them-I’ve come to be convinced of that. Something to haunt the land, quicken the flesh, never appear. This story has two ghosts, the first one obvious. Beyond that, I was born in Summersville, West Virginia, in 1984. Rafting on the Gauley began about then, so you could say we grew up together. The use of water is fascinating-its manipulation, its political power, its final resistance to the plans of men. The lake beat me into the world by eighteen years. I’ll take any excuse to write about Lyndon Johnson, certainly the most interesting president of the twentieth century, perhaps any century. “A genuine peace cannot be founded in a desert,” he said. “A genuine peace cannot be founded among crowded nations that are starved for this elemental-yes, this divine-gift.” Great thanks to G. C. Waldrep and West Branch for taking a chance on my work.

Annie Proulx has written short stories, novels, and essays. The work has been flattered with many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, Irish Times International Fiction Prize, Dos Passos Prize, National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and more. Several of the stories have been made into films, including The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain. Proulx wrote the libretto for the Brokeback Mountain opera. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and currently lives in Washington State.

• “Rough Deeds” is a somewhat modified chapter from my novel in progress, Barkskins. The character Charles Duquet has come to the forests of North America from the slums of Paris. He has a driving, relentless need to become wealthy and respected at any cost. Among his rough deeds is the killing of a timber poacher’s son. He gets as good as he gives in that no-holds-barred frontier world. His sons and grandsons become timber barons and forever wonder what happened to their ancestor, but only the reader knows the answer to the mystery of his disappearance.

Scott Loring Sanders was raised in New Jersey but has spent the past twenty-five years in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He has published two young adult mystery novels, the first of which, The Hanging Woods, has found a small but loyal following among adult readers. He has been the writer in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, as well as a two-time fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His short stories and essays have appeared in magazines and journals ranging in scope from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to Creative Nonfiction to Appalachian Heritage. He recently finished his first adult novel and is currently at work on a collection of mystery stories. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech.

• I’m often intrigued by how a story actually becomes a story and the journey it takes once it leaves my hands. “Pleasant Grove” is a prime example of this, mainly because it didn’t start off as a short story at all. It was a piece of backstory for a novel I was working on (a failed novel, as it turns out) set in New Jersey. As the book dissolved, there were some scraps I liked and wanted to keep, including this one. I sent the story to a dozen or so of the usual suspects, all of whom promptly rejected it. I moved on to other things, and the story sat untouched for three years. When I learned of a small local literary magazine that had popped up in Floyd, Virginia, a town I’d once lived in, I revisited the piece with thoughts of sending it to them. I changed the setting from New Jersey to the rural mountains of Virginia, based Johnny’s house and property on the old farmhouse in Floyd where my wife and I lived when our son was born, and things finally clicked. I sent the story off and it was accepted five days later. Being a part of The Best American Mystery Stories has been a goal of mine ever since I threw caution to the wind, quit my corporate job with a Fortune 500 company, and focused solely on writing, in 2003. I’ve never once looked back or regretted that decision.

Nancy Pauline Simpson describes herself as “a first-wave baby boomer who remembers both ‘Duck and Cover’ and the federal polio immunization program.” Memorable moments of her youth include being part of a Beatles press conference, drinking Heineken aboard a Dutch submarine, and playing the lead in Star-Spangled Girl at the Cavalier Dinner Theater in Norfolk, Virginia. She was born in Louisiana and has lived as far north as Virginia, where she graduated from Old Dominion University (“It was a mercy admission”), and as far west as Okinawa, Japan. She benefited greatly from living in an Asian culture almost as ghost-filled as the American South (“But I still need a waitress to put a rubber band on my chopsticks”). In fact, the first fiction she sold, to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, featured malevolent Asian spirits and themes gothic enough to take place in New Orleans instead of Naha. It seemed only natural to segue to the southern version of uncanniness when she returned to the United States. “Anybody who thinks the South does not lend itself to imagining supernatural things has never driven the two-lane highway from Savannah to Beaufort on a breezy night with Spanish moss twitching over the top of the car.”

Simpson is now the divorced mother of two grown daughters, one a physician and the other a pipeline engineer (“Yeah, I had to look it up too”). Her one marriage was to a career officer in the Marine Corps, who introduced her to Camp Lejeune, the setting for her first novel, B.O.Q., a mystery that features a female NCIS special agent.

In addition to her stories, which have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, she has written a true-crime book, Tunnel Vision, about an unsolved triple homicide that took place at Camp Lejeune in 1981. She has also worked as a foreign correspondent for Off Duty magazine, based in Hong Kong, as a reporter and editor for stateside newspapers, and as an ESL instructor for Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina (“This one’s multiple choice: ESL means (a) Extra Sensory Lasciviousness (b) Eating and Surviving Lutefisk (c) English as a Second Language”).

• Suspense, like passion, requires pacing, and the payoff shouldn’t take so long that you start losing interest. That’s why the short story may be the very best vehicle for suspense. I think their brevity partly explains the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories. They immediately grab you, throw you to the ground, then release you while your heart’s still racing. Suspense (or passion) is just not as effective if the mood has been repeatedly interrupted by too many descriptions of scenery or, God forbid, moralizing.

Dennis Tafoya is the author of three novels, Dope Thief, The Wolves of Fairmount Park, and The Poor Boy’s Game, and his short stories have appeared in various anthologies, including Philadelphia Noir.

• I love short stories, but I take almost as long to write a short story as a novel. I remember it was most of a year from when I first saw the sign for Satan’s Kingdom in Franklin County until I sent the story off to Steve Weddle at Needle. I think, left to my own devices, I’d never send anything out but just tinker endlessly. And the stories would probably be better for it, because whenever I read one of them, I see opportunities I missed and places I’d like to push harder and get more. Isn’t there always more to get?

It’s not hard to imagine that for the Congregationalists of seventeenth-century New England, the dark woods of western Massachusetts were literally the devil’s kingdom, a place for the banished and condemned. The story began to take shape when I learned that (according to local legend) authorities had been deliberately misspelling the name as Statan’s Kingdom to try to deter stoner kids from stealing the signs.

The protagonist of “Satan’s Kingdom” is the kind of character I most enjoy spending time with. He’s done things he’s ashamed of and no longer knows for sure whether he’s essentially good or bad. I think that a lot of us fall into this trap-we long for some crisis to arise that will reveal our truest nature, but we’re terrified that we’ll find ourselves more frail and frightened than heroic. So I think most of us just wait and see, year in and year out, until, like Larocque, we realize we’ve been hiding a long time.

Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Award, and The Isle of Youth. A New York Times Editors’ Choice, The Isle of Youth was named a Best Book of 2013 by NPR, Amazon, the Boston Globe, the New Republic, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Van den Berg’s first novel, Find Me, is forthcoming in 2015. She currently lives in the Boston area.

• In 2012, I heard about an explosion at the Comandante Ferraz research base in Admiralty Bay on the news. Two men were killed. The story stayed with me. A few weeks later a line got stuck in my head: “There was nothing to identify in Antarctica because there was nothing left.” Right away I was flooded with questions. Why was this person in Antarctica? Who or what was she there to identify? Why was there nothing left? This line soon became the first line of a new story, and eventually two interlocking narratives emerged: a present thread set in Antarctica, where the narrator has come to investigate the mysterious death of her scientist brother, who perished in an explosion, and a past thread set in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have never been to Antarctica, but I know Cambridge intimately, and it was the collision between the radically familiar and the radically foreign that helped this story take flight.