The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

Introduction

THE OTHER DAY a friend tweeted, “21 years ago today I got married in Las Vegas. Best decision ever.”

I replied, “But worst opening ever for a noir story.”

And yet here I am, guilty of the same perky satisfaction as I contemplate the very existence of the mystery short story, much less the superb stories I had the pleasure of reading for this, The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. These stories, filled with mayhem and murder and darkness, make me want to dance and giggle. I’m weird that way.

The thing is, the mystery story has no practical reason to be. It is an unforgiving form, cutting the writer little slack. A short story is hard enough to write; a short story that incorporates a satisfying crime plot-with the requisite twists and answers but a resolution that must never be too on-the-nose-is harder still. I know from my own experience that a five-thousand-word short story can take as long to craft as twenty thousand words of a novel, but maybe that’s just me. (I doubt it.) Short stories can pay well, but generally don’t, and if you calculated out the hourly wage, you’d weep. The short story is, to steal one of my favorite lines from James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, about as commercial an enterprise as a hand-whittled clothespin. And yet, year in and year out, The Best American Mystery Stories anthology attests to the abundance of good short stories out there, which are discovered among the usual suspects (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine), venerable publications (The New Yorker), literary journals (Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Antioch Review), and cutting-edge newcomers (Needle).

I tried, in reading for this series, to offer up a variety across genres and subgenres. There are straightforward whodunits here, cozy in tone if not in deed, such as “Festered Wounds” by Nancy Pauline Simpson. There is Charlaine Harris’s “Small Kingdoms,” where we thrill and yet shiver to the realization that a new kind of sheriff is in town. But there are also stories that come at their crimes aslant, allowing the reader to fill in the disturbing and puzzling blanks-Jodi Angel’s “Snuff” and Roxane Gay’s “I Will Follow You.” This collection also has a sense of wanderlust that mirrors my own, ranging widely throughout the United States and reaching all the way to Antarctica in Laura van den Berg’s haunting story of that title.

But why does anyone write short stories? I only know why I write them: because someone has given me a subject, a deadline, and a promise of money, although the money is the least important aspect. (See hourly wage/weeping, above.) In fact, Michele B. Slung, who has been assisting Otto Penzler with this anthology since he began editing it seventeen years ago, jump-started my stalled ambitions that way. I met her at a party in Washington, D.C., and she asked, upon learning that I was a journalist, if I would consider submitting a story to a collection of erotica she was editing.

At the time I had managed to complete only a few short stories and relatively small ones at that-wistful vignettes inspired by my time in Waco, Texas. The stories all centered on the odd emotions kicked up when an assessor for the local tax district meets his new sister-in-law, a sullen Baltimore girl. It was less Desire Under the Elms, more Mild Lust at the Piggly-Wiggly. But I had enjoyed writing those stories and been encouraged by one teacher, Sandra Cisneros, then ripped apart by her successor, a gifted short story writer who had planted a flag in the vast territory that is Texas and declared it off-limits to me, an outsider who had missed some local nuances. She wasn’t wrong, but she wasn’t right either. If she taught me anything, it’s that a tormentor can push you as hard as a mentor.

Michele accepted my first attempt at erotica, published under a pseudonym, and asked for a second when the collection yielded a sequel. My sophomore effort required a heavier editorial hand, but I’ve never minded editing. (And the second story was based in Texas, although told from the point of view of a new arrival. Boo-yah, in your face, former writing teacher, who seems to have disappeared. Hey, I’m the first to admit I hold tight to my grudges. They’re good fodder for short stories, for one thing.) At this point, Michele suggested that I should consider writing a novel. She never specifically told me to write a crime novel, but she did mention that women often found it easier to start a novel when they approached it through the mask of genre, pretending the task was lesser (or at least less presumptuous) than attempting the Great American Novel.

As it turned out, I had sixty pages that I had scribbled in a black-and-white composition book, about an out-of-work reporter named Tess Monaghan who couldn’t figure out what to do with her life… Jump forward twenty years, literally. I’ve written nineteen novels and almost twenty short stories in that time.

I think I wrote at least two or three novels before anyone suggested I try a mystery short story. My first one, suitably enough, was for a series called First Cases, and it centered on Tess. And you know what? It’s not that good. In fact, it’s a waste of a lovely title, “Orphans Court,” and a decent-enough idea. Maybe I should rewrite it someday.

But the pattern had been established. I wrote short stories if someone asked me. When I teach, I describe this as writing from external prompts, and it sounds like the antithesis of art, but that’s why I like it. The approach demystifies creativity, which could do with a little demystification. Did I want to write about baseball? Sure. Golf? Why not? Cocaine? You betcha. Dangerous women (twice), jazz, cities well known to me (Baltimore, Washington, D.C.), cities not quite so well known to me (New Orleans, Dublin). Poker, spies, New York City, Sherlock Holmes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. A ghost story with a sport, a Twilight Zone tribute. Senior-citizen criminals. Books themselves. The only subject I ever declined was cars, and the editor hocks me to this day. I keep telling him, “Dude, I drive a Jetta. A Jetta with manual transmission, but a Jetta. I was not the woman for the job.”

But perhaps my favorite assignment was “a box.” Brad Meltzer approached me with that one, and I said sure. I was getting cocky at that point. Riding high, due for a fall. All of a sudden the deadline was two weeks away and I still had no clue what I was going to write. To complicate matters, I was teaching at Eckerd College’s annual Writers in Paradise conference, which left me with virtually no free time.

Then my friend and faculty colleague Ann Hood lost her sweater. You think I can carry a grudge? Ask her how she feels about the restaurant where she left her distinctive black cardigan. We called. We went back three times. Finally I asked to see the lost-and-found box for myself, convinced that the staff had overlooked the sweater. No, the black sweater was not there. But pawing through that sad collection of left-behinds, I remembered an assignment from my early days as a reporter in Waco, Texas, when I was asked to write an article about what was in the lost-and-found boxes at summer’s end. I had triumphed over the less-than-interesting findings by writing in what I imagined to be a very good imitation of Philip Marlowe’s voice. (God, I hope that piece never surfaces. RIP, my Waco clips.) But now I began to imagine a more sinister version of this story, one in which a young woman who imagines herself to be sophisticated, perhaps even a libertine, discovers that she’s a real piker when she comes up against a couple of good citizens from Waco, sometimes called the buckle on the Bible belt. In fact, I saw a distinctive buckle on a belt, emerging snakelike from a soft, sagging cardboard box, an item that could be linked to an unsolved murder-and the editor who assigned the story.

I have two more short stories due right now-right now-and I just wish Ann Hood would lose another item of clothing.

No discussion of writing short stories would be complete without a discussion of those who edit short stories. I’ve done it exactly once, for the Akashic Books noir series, and found it gratifying yet challenging. Sure, you want all the stories to be perfect upon arrival, but then you have to wonder if you’re even doing your job. As a short story writer, I yearn to believe they’re perfect when they leave my desk-but a little voice in the back of my head tells me when they’re not. Some of my best experiences have resulted from very good editing. Otto Penzler, for example, once told me that a story just wasn’t good enough and explained what he thought the weaknesses were. He gave me a chance to rework it; that story, “Hardly Knew Her,” was nominated for an Edgar and won the Anthony Award. Since the news of the selections for this collection went out into the world, I’ve heard from some editors who say they did nothing-nothing!-to the chosen stories. But I suspect that some outstanding editors are standing behind these stellar stories.

So we circle back to why anyone writes short stories. One of the writers in this collection, Megan Abbott, told me that her students at Ole Miss, where she was the John and Renée Grisham writer in residence for 2013-2014, become starry-eyed over the occasional unicorn that wanders into the publishing forest-the writer who enjoys a big success with a collection of short stories. Most recently it was B. J. Novak, and George Saunders just before him, but such critically adored bestsellers are rare and almost unheard-of for those who specialize in the mystery story, such as the late Edward D. Hoch. I wonder again: Why does anyone write mystery short stories, with their exacting, exasperating demands?

I can speak only for myself. The phone rings. Actually, my e-mail box pings. Actually, it makes no noise at all, because my computer is set to mute. I’ll try again: A blonde walks into my office. That’s true and it happens every day, thanks to Marko at Sally Hershberger Salon. I check my e-mail, see a request from an editor. Could you write about…? And I say yes.

Unless it’s about cars.

I am grateful that the writers of this collection said yes, whether to external or internal prompts, to characters or situations that suddenly appeared, requiring their attention. Because as a reader, when I’m yearning for a short story, nothing else will do. As demanding as the form may be for the writer, it is exceedingly rewarding for the reader. Being guest editor of The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 was like being given an enormous box of very good chocolates and asked to go hog wild. If my final selection veers to the dark ones, preferably with nuts, that’s my personal taste. No, it really is-in chocolates and in stories. Dark, with nuts.

Dig in.

LAURA LIPPMAN