The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

Contributors’ Notes

The author of eight novels and more than 120 short stories, Doug Allyn has been published internationally in English, German, French, and Japanese. More than two dozen of his tales have been optioned for development as feature films and television.

Allyn studied creative writing and criminal psychology at the University of Michigan while moonlighting as a guitarist in the rock group Devil’s Triangle and reviewing books for the Flint Journal. His background includes Chinese-language studies at Indiana University and extended duty in USAF Intelligence in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

Career highlights? Sipping champagne with Mickey Spillane and waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark.

His first published story won the Robert L. Fish Award from Mystery Writers of America, and subsequent critical response has been equally remarkable. He has won the coveted Edgar Allan Poe Award twice, five Derringer Awards for novellas, and the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award an unprecedented twelve times.

• A few years ago, in my hometown, a judge’s widow and two elderly lady friends shared a convivial lunch at a local steak house. On their way home, they rear-ended a car hauler. No one was hurt. The widow was cited for driving under the influence and released.

The story made a splash in the papers and on TV, but the small-town buzz it created was totally sympathetic to the three ladies. What purpose had been served by their public humiliation?

The phrase I heard constantly repeated was, “In the old days, this never could have happened.” They were right. In the old days, in our small town, the story would have been quietly suppressed. No harm, no foul.

In those days our town was run by an old-boy network, a loose circle of friends (lawyers, judges, doctors, cops) who golfed and hunted and partied together. Policy decisions that affected the entire county were often made by a few friends over drinks at the Yacht Club.

A conspiracy? In a way it was, but I’m not complaining. My own youthful misdeeds, from DUIs to street scuffles, were glossed over and dismissed because I came from a “good” family. If those exceptions hadn’t been made, I and many of my friends might be living very different lives now. And wearing ankle bracelets.

Still, those days weren’t all Hallmark card moments. I know mistakes were made, some of them pretty egregious, which gave rise to this story. What if the old-boy network, with the best of intentions, made a fatal mistake?

God, I love this game.

Andrew Bourelle’s fiction has been published in Hobart, Kestrel, Jabberwock Review, Prime Number Magazine, Red Rock Review, Thin Air, Weave, Whitefish Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He lives in Albuquerque with his wife, Tiffany, and son, Benjamin.

• I wrote this story several years ago, when I was a graduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno. I had been interested in writing a modern-day western for a while, and after reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, I decided to go for it. I wanted to write a fast-paced story where I could put my foot on the gas and not let up. I also tried to take common western themes and subvert them. Instead of riding off into the sunset at the end of the story, Jack is riding toward the sunrise. He has his whole life ahead of him, a life where he’ll never be able to outrun what he’s done.

I’m indebted to my former professor Christopher Coake, who gave me excellent advice for revising the story. I’m also thankful to Amy Locklin for first publishing the story in the anthology Law and Disorder.

Tomiko M. Breland is just beginning her literary career. Her short fiction has won the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award and placed in the Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Contest. She runs a small editing, manuscript review, and graphic design business out of her home in Monterey, California, where she lives with her husband and two sons, and is completing her first novel. “Rosalee Carrasco” was her first published piece of fiction.

• According to Stephen King, original stories occur when “two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.” I think that’s the best way to describe what happened with this story. I had this idea that I wanted to write a short story that cheated — that accomplished what a novel accomplishes (telling the past, present, and future of a cast of three-dimensional characters) in a very short space. I came up with my form, and then tinkered with a number of story ideas, all terrible, for several weeks. And then I read an article about a horrific social media bullying incident — and there was my second idea.

I began with a Stephen King quote because I think that Rosalee has the bones of King’s Carrie: she is a sympathetic outcast, her “becoming a woman” is witnessed by others, and we even have the backdrop of a girls’ locker room. But what happens when that girl’s “becoming a woman” is witnessed in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? When bullying becomes viral and untraceable, public and exponential? Nothing good. My second idea — Rosalee and her tragic but not unbelievable circumstances — poured itself into my first idea with the smoothness and liquidity of juice into a glass carafe, taking shape the way you always hope your stories will when you start out. To ensure that I really, really stuck to the short story form, I challenged myself to keep each character — past and future — to just one typed page, and that resulted in a dense little story that packed some punch, and I found that I had written “something new under the sun.”

Previously a law student, theater technician, television director, and union organizer, Lee Child is now the globally best-selling author of the Jack Reacher series.

• I was asked to contribute to Belfast Noir on the basis of my father being a Belfast man, which meant I had spent time there both before and during the Troubles and was familiar with the culture that had led in that tragic direction.

Family legend has it that when my grandparents moved in the 1940s, they sold their house to a couple named Morrison, whose first child, Ivan, went on to become the musician Van Morrison. I was interested in the idea of foreign fans seeking out his birthplace, but in the end opted for an imaginary writer instead of the real-life singer. (But the story’s title, Wet with Rain, is a common line in Van Morrison’s lyrics — as well as a perpetually reliable description of Belfast’s weather.)

I was also interested in the idea that although Belfast’s rifts were relentless and implacable to the point of psychosis, there must have been participants who on occasion opted for restraint, and Wet with Rain is about one of them.

Michael Connelly is the author of twenty-seven novels and one book of nonfiction. Ten of his novels — featuring the characters LAPD detective Harry Bosch, defense attorney Mickey Haller, and journalist Jack McEvoy — have hit the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. His books Blood Work and The Lincoln Lawyer were produced as films starring Clint Eastwood and Matthew McConaughey. He is executive producer of the streaming television show Bosch, based upon his long-running series of books. He lives in Florida and California.

• The task faced by Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly was figuring out how to legitimately bring together two characters who live and work on opposite coasts of the United States. Harry Bosch is an LAPD detective and Patrick Kenzie is a Boston private eye, and it would seem never the twain should meet. But it was decided by the authors that the most believable way to pull this off was to have Harry Bosch follow a lead on a cold case to Boston. And so Connelly wrote the setup. Evidence in the cold case leads to identifying a solid suspect in Boston. He gets on a plane and lands in Boston. From there he stumbles into Kenzie and the story goes from there. Since Boston is Lehane’s turf, he sort of met Bosch at the airport and took it from there.

Joseph D’Agnese is a journalist, author, and editor who has written for adults and children alike. His nonfiction has appeared in The Best American Science Writing two years in a row. His crime fiction has appeared or will appear in Shotgun Honey, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. One of his short stories was a finalist for the 2014 Derringer Award. He’s the author of three popular history titles, a children’s picture book on the Fibonacci sequence, and some novels. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, the author Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City).

• The seeds of my story “Harm and Hammer” were planted the day I visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, where I live, and encountered a blacksmith who entertained tourists by playing his anvil as a musical instrument. The sound of hammers on steel struck me as so beautiful, so clear, so pure, and so unlike any instrument I’ve ever heard that it lodged in my mind and never left. I’m not religious, but I am still strongly moved by hymns. Two of my favorites have always been “Amazing Grace” and “Jerusalem,” probably because the lyrics hint at their composers’ inner struggles. Years after I’d first seen that smithy’s anvil performance, I began to find the notion of combining these two disparate elements — the anvil and the hymns — in one story nearly irresistible. I just needed a protagonist. That got me thinking about the sort of person who might be drawn to obsessively play the anvil as a form of expiation. Before long I envisioned a young woman consumed with guilt, her anvil perhaps offering a somewhat healthier form of self-flagellation. Naturally, because of the way my mind works, it wasn’t enough to have one crime in the story. The deceit and violence, like the music itself, had to ripple outward.

A former journalist, folksinger, and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one bestselling author. His novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the New York Times, the Times of London, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into twenty-five languages.

The author of thirty-five novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book, and a lyricist of a country-western album, Deaver has received or been shortlisted for dozens of awards. His The Bodies Left Behind was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers, and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Broken Window and a stand-alone, Edge, were also nominated for that prize. He has been awarded the Steel Dagger and the Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, as well as the Nero Wolfe Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. The Cold Moon was recently named the Book of the Year by the Mystery Writers of Japan, as well as by Kono Mystery Wa Sugoi! magazine. In addition, the Japanese Adventure Fiction Association awarded The Cold Moon and Carte Blanche their annual Grand Prix. His book The Kill Room was awarded the Political/Adventure/Espionage Thriller of 2014 by Killer Nashville.

Deaver has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. He also recently received another lifetime achievement honor in Italy, the prestigious Raymond Chandler Award. He contributed to the anthology Books to Die For, which won the Agatha Award and the Anthony Award. Deaver has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony, a Shamus, and a Gumshoe. He was recently shortlisted for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Best International Author. Roadside Crosses was on the shortlist for the Prix Polar International 2013.

His most recent novels are The October List, a thriller told in reverse; The Skin Collector and The Kill Room, Lincoln Rhyme novels, and XO, a Kathryn Dance thriller, for which he wrote an album of country-western songs, available on iTunes and as a CD; and Carte Blanche, the latest James Bond continuation novel, a number-one international bestseller.

His book A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. And yes, the rumors are true: he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As the World Turns. He was born outside Chicago and has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University. Readers can visit his website at www.jefferydeaver.com.

• I was, to put it mildly, bookish as a child. I read constantly. (It didn’t hurt that I had absolutely no talent for sports whatsoever; fiction was a safer — and less shameful — way to while away the hours.) Two authors stand out in the well-populated pantheon of my young reader’s experience: J.R.R. Tolkien and Arthur Conan Doyle.

I can’t tell you how many times I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (I can still recite a poem in Elvish, but please don’t tell anyone). Nor could I tally up the hours I spent, yes, in the company of Sherlock. I appreciated then, and still do, an intellectual protagonist: someone who had to outthink the villain and, ideally, prevail in a wholly unexpected way. (Aren’t we all tired of heroes who win simply because they shoot straighter or karate-kick higher?) Add a dash of exotic location, a different era, quirky characters, police procedure, and I’m on that tale in a London minute. Doyle delivered exactly what my story-hungry heart longed for.

When asked what were the inspirations for my own series protagonist Lincoln Rhyme, I answer not Ironside or Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window (Rhyme is a quadriplegic) but Sherlock Holmes. Rhyme is a forensic scientist and criminalist who uses his brain to track down the perps, since he obviously can’t outshoot anyone. He’s also a curmudgeon, reclusive, and substance-dependent (Scotch). Oh, I gave him a Watson too, though Amelia Sachs is a touch different from John: she’s a former fashion model turned NYPD detective who drives a muscle car and shoots like nobody’s business.

When I was asked to be in In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, I did a lot of thinking about the direction to take, rereading many of the original stories, since I knew mine would be among those of so many fine writers — and some with a far better grounding in the Holmes catalog than I possessed. At some point during this research I decided that Doyle seemed to share a trait with me: I delight in creating my villains, and no one created better bad guys than Sir Arthur.

Ping. There was the answer. I would imagine an antagonist in my story worthy of the rarely seen but undeniably evil and enigmatic Moriarty.

The result was “The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman,” a fairly typical story of mine, in which nothing is quite what it seems to be at first blush.

Brendan DuBois is the award-winning author of seventeen novels and more than 135 short stories. His latest novel, Blood Foam, was published in May.

His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000, and The Best American Noir of the Century, published in 2010. This is his sixth appearance in the annual Best American Mystery Stories anthology. His stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the MWA. He is also a Jeopardy! game show champion.

Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

• When I saw that the Mystery Writers of America was soliciting short stories for an anthology based on the Cold War (Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War), I knew I was going to submit a story. All right, at the time I didn’t have a story, but I knew one would quickly come to me, and I was right.

I was a child of the Cold War, and growing up in Dover, New Hampshire, I was just a few miles away from two key military bases, Pease Air Force Base, the home of a nuclear-armed Strategic Air Force installation, and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, where nuclear-powered submarines were constructed and overhauled.

This was a time when FALLOUT SHELTER signs were located at my Catholic elementary school, where “duck and cover” drills had been conducted, and when the roaring sounds of B-52 bombers taking off at night during an exercise would shake the house.

With that background, a story idea immediately came to me, concerning the sinking of the submarine USS Thresher on April 10, 1963, with the loss of all hands. This disaster still reverberates among the residents of my home state, and my family has a connection: reactor control officer Lieutenant Raymond McCoole was a neighbor of ours, and survived because he had to take an ill wife to the hospital.

But suppose the Thresher wasn’t lost because of an accident? Suppose it was sabotage? And that’s where “Crush Depth” came from. It was an intriguing yet melancholy story to write, and I’m honored to have it appear in this anthology.

John M. Floyd’s short stories and features have appeared in more than two hundred different publications, including The Strand Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Woman’s World, and The Saturday Evening Post. A former air force captain and IBM systems engineer, Floyd won a Derringer Award in 2007 and was nominated for an Edgar in 2015. He is also the author of five collections of short fiction: Rainbow’s End (2006), Midnight (2008), Clockwork (2010), Deception (2013), and Fifty Mysteries (2014). He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Mississippi.

• The idea for my story “Molly’s Plan” began years ago, when I was employed with IBM. During most of my career there, I worked with bankers and banking software and spent a lot of time in the lobbies, back rooms, and computer centers of financial institutions. One of these was a big, ugly branch of a regional bank located at the very end of a narrow street that was always jammed with traffic. Its limited access triggered an idea in my devious mind, which was already seriously devious, even back then. My thought was, This bank would be really hard to rob — or at least really hard to escape from after the robbery. It would be so difficult, in fact, that no sane criminal would attempt it. As I later mentioned in the resulting story, “Smart rustlers tend to avoid box canyons.” Needless to say, the characters in my story — who consider themselves both smart and sane — do attempt it. The story itself was great fun to put together, and the setting is so similar to the one I remembered (my memory bank?) that I felt I was actually there during the writing process. Which makes me wonder, sometimes, about my own sanity...

Scott Grand is the pseudonym for Zach Basnett, who lives on the California coast with his wife and cat. “A Bottle of Scotch and a Sharp Buck Knife” is his first published work and appeared in Thuglit, issue 11. His other short stories, “No Rest for the Wicked” and “Sight,” can be found in Dark Corners Pulp Magazine, Vol. 1, issues 1 and 2. His science fiction novella, Proximity, will be published this year. His other works include the self-published novellas SPORT, 3 Day Life, and Only Child.

• In many ways, I don’t think I will ever have better friends then I did when I was twelve. Maybe it’s because we grew up together, learned how to talk shit and fight and set things on fire. I don’t really understand it; maybe that is an age before greed and selfishness and jealousy kick in. It could be I was just better back then. I hope to have captured those experiences of adolescence accurately, of friendship and loneliness and loss.

Steven Heighton’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in Best English Short Stories, Best American Poetry, Zoetrope: All-Story, Tin House, Poetry, London Review of Books, New England Review, TLR, Agni, and five editions of Best Canadian Stories. His novel Afterlands appeared in a number of countries, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was included on best-of-year lists in ten publications in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Heighton has been nominated for the W. H. Smith Award in Britain and has received four gold National Magazine Awards in Canada, where he lives. He was the 2013 Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence at McGill University and reviews fiction for the New York Times Book Review.

• On rereading “Shared Room on Union,” I see that the mystery at its core is the mystery of marriage, or at least of marriages that endure for any length of time. Most enduring ones sooner or later include chapters where one or both partners act in cruel, faithless, bizarre, or otherwise unlaudable ways. Unforgiveable things — or at least unforgettable things — get said and done. How does a marriage metabolize such compound calamities and emerge intact, and, often enough, annealed and deepened? I can’t seem to answer the question in a pithy way that transcends truism and cliché; maybe that’s why I’ve explored the mystery through fiction, a mode of inquiry more suggestive than conclusive, and hence truer to human relationships.

As for the predicament at the heart of “Shared Room on Union”: short story writers can’t waste time if they mean to bare the hearts and minds of their characters (and, in this case, the workings of a relationship) within a few pages. Tipping a couple suddenly into an appalling situation seems as good a way as any to get them to show their souls quickly and for all time.

Janette Turner Hospital grew up, was educated, and taught high school on the steamy subtropical northeastern coast of Australia. She married a fellow graduate of the University of Queensland, and she and her husband came to the United States as graduate students, not intending to stay; but life, careers, children, and grandchildren intervened. A sabbatical spent in an equatorial village in South India led to a short story, an “Atlantic First,” in March 1978. The village sojourn also led to a first novel, The Ivory Swing, which won Canada’s Seal Award and international publication in 1982. Hospital has published ten novels and four story collections in multiple languages and has won literary awards in Australia, Canada, and the U.K. Forecast: Turbulence, her most recent collection of stories, was a finalist for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australia in 2013. Her most recent novel, The Claimant, was published in Australia last year. Both books are forthcoming in 2015 in the United States. Hospital is Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of South Carolina but has also taught at MIT, Boston University, Colgate, and Columbia. She and her husband divide their time between the U.S. and Australia.

Website: www.janetteturnerhospital.com

• A few years ago, I was riveted by two brief articles which appeared two days apart in a major national newspaper. The heading of the first one was “Man Claims to Be Boy Taken in 1955: Federal Officials Await DNA Results as Lead Revives NY Kidnap Mystery.” The opening paragraph read: “More than 50 years ago, a mother left her stroller outside a Long Island bakery and returned minutes later to find her two-year-old son had vanished.” The baby sister was still in the stroller. No trace of the two-year-old had ever been found, and the case had gone cold. The parents divorced a few years later. But now a Michigan man in his fifties was convinced that he was the kidnapped child. He made contact with the woman he believed to be his sister and an emotional bond was formed. They believed they were related. The man said he had “long suspected the couple who raised him were not his biological parents.” The FBI was conducting DNA tests. Two days later, a second article indicated that the man was not the kidnapped toddler and that the couple who raised him were indeed his biological parents.

This story was so disturbing and tragic and poignant in so many ways that it haunted me and still does. I read these articles a year before my retirement, when I was still teaching an MFA fiction class. I ran off photocopies of the articles and distributed them to the class. I often used what my classes called my “story prompts” — a device that has led to a number of publications for my students. Their assignment was to select a point of view and write a fictional version of the kidnapping/identity confusion from that perspective. As always, I received finely written and nuanced stories, but all from the perspective of one or other of the parents or from the point of view of the man who believed he was the missing child.

As so many writers have noted, there are ideas that will not let you go. They become obsessions. They show up in dreams. What haunted me were the black holes in the account, the permanent absences: the abducted child; the kidnapper/killer; the absence of closure (the never knowing what happened).

By this time I had actually written three novels about psychopaths, the first of these (Oyster) prompted by the cult messiah David Koresh and the horrific conflagration at Waco, Texas. I was trying to understand what made so many people willing to submit all to a darkly charismatic figure. I read voraciously in the scholarly literature on psychopathology. I realized it was impossible to portray a psychopath from inside because there is no inside. It is like reporting on an earthquake or a tsunami. All the fiction writer can do is chronicle the devastation on all sides and seek to pay tribute to the survival strategies and the stricken inner lives of those left behind. I confess, to my own regret and dismay, that as a fiction writer I have become morbidly obsessed with psychopaths, both violent (cult messiahs, terrorists) and nonviolent (Bernie Madoff, a fictional clone of whom is a major character in The Claimant). The kidnapper/killer (?) in this short story is the closest I have been able to come in an attempt to get inside the mind of such a person; though of course that is sleight of hand. The reader is never really inside the mind of the killer but is inside the mind of the man who needs not only to construct an alternative narrative of his own life but to construct his supposed kidnapper and killer.

To me, the greatest mystery is how anyone manages to survive catastrophic loss and trauma, and I am fascinated by the narrative strategies used.

Richard Lange is the author of the short story collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World and Angel Baby, which won the 2013 Hammett Prize. His stories have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, and The Best American Mystery Stories and as part of the Atlantic’s Fiction for Kindle series. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently working on a novel.

• A number of years ago I started a novel that never got off the ground. One of the characters from that book, a security guard living in a skid-row hotel, stuck with me, and one day I started writing about him again. That story eventually became “Apocrypha.” So, in the end, something positive came out of that earlier failure. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

“Apocrypha” is a story about an invisible man engaged in a life-and-death struggle in a place most of us pass through — car doors locked, windows rolled up — as quickly as possible on our way to somewhere else. It’s these men and these places that fascinate me and that I keep returning to in my work. In this milieu, people live so close to the edge that the smallest misstep can be ruinous or even fatal. Just thinking about it scares me, and what scares me inspires me. I’m glad that I got to save the lost soul in “Apocrypha.” I only wish that I could save them all.

Dennis Lehane grew up in Boston. Since his first novel, A Drink Before the War, won the Shamus Award, he has published eleven more novels, which have been translated into more than thirty languages and become international bestsellers: Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River; Shutter Island; The Given Day; Moonlight Mile; Live by Night; The Drop; and his most recent book, World Gone By. Lehane was a staff writer on the acclaimed HBO series The Wire and a writer-producer on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

Three of his novels — Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Shutter Island — have been adapted into award-winning films. In 2014 his first screenplay, The Drop, based on his short story “Animal Rescue,” was produced as a feature film starring Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini in his final role.

Lehane and his wife, Angie, currently live in Los Angeles with their two children, a fact that never ceases to surprise him.

• As I remember it — and a writer’s memory is about the last person’s you should trust — Michael Connelly and I were approached by Steve Berry about a unique collection of stories he envisioned. We’d take our series protagonists and have them work together, which would mirror Michael and me working together. Michael said he couldn’t imagine Patrick Kenzie in L.A., so he thought it best and more believable if Harry Bosch were led to Boston on official business. So Michael took pole position and started the story with Harry arriving on the East Coast. At some point he and Bosch reached the place where Bosch’s path crossed with Patrick’s, and that’s where I jumped in. From there, I can’t explain how we decided when and where we’d toss the potato back into the other’s hand, but making prose is a lot more like making music than laypeople suspect, and a lot of riffing between successful collaborators happens organically. The whole experience, in retrospect, was a lot more fun than it had any right to be. Maybe the story reflects that. I hope it does, anyway.

Theresa E. Lehr is a scuba diver and educator and has published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and in Texas Magazine of the Houston Chronicle.

• Years ago, while six months pregnant and traveling Down Under with my children and husband by camper van, we stopped at a roadside park next to a rushing stream. Within moments a motorcyclist, dressed completely in black leather, pulled up next to us. Once the rider removed her helmet, I realized she was a young woman. Her independent spirit fascinated me, and she was the inspiration for my main character.

I have been a scuba diver for thirty years. Near-drownings, bad air, faulty equipment, and poor decision-making have given me a mighty respect for the power of the sea. However, nothing can keep me from exploring the wonders of the ocean whenever possible. After watching a show about the pearling industry in Western Australia, I knew I had to write this story.

Family dynamics can be such a complicated universe. Having three brothers, I found it only natural to make sibling rivalry and competition a main component of “Staircase to the Moon.” I chose estranged twin sisters for a dark twist. The twins are of Japanese descent to connect them to the immigrant Japanese who brought pearl diving to Australia. Writing about the tensions between the family members gave me the opportunity to explore jealousy, resentment, forgiveness, and reparation without having to interact with any of my own family. Great fun.

And last, pearls and Japan? I was born in Japan and have always coveted my mother’s strand of cultured pearls she bought in 1955.

Lee Martin is the author of the novels The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, River of Heaven, Quakertown, and Break the Skin. He has also published three memoirs, From Our House, Turning Bones, and Such a Life. His first book was the short story collection The Least You Need to Know. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at Ohio State University, where he is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and a past winner of the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

• “A Man Looking for Trouble” began, as my stories sometimes do, with a narrator’s voice that I heard one day while I was out for my morning run. I remember hearing the line “My uncle was a man named Bill Jordan.” Immediately I wondered who was speaking and why his uncle’s presence made it urgent that he tell this story. I often write from a point of curiosity. I try to complicate that curiosity while moving the story forward but never quite answering all the questions that are there to be answered. In that way, I’m like the reader with anticipations and expectations and a reason to keep moving forward. When I got home from my run, I wrote the sentence “My uncle was a man named Bill Jordan, and in 1972, when I was sixteen, he came home from Vietnam, rented a small box house on the corner of South and Christy, and went to work on a section gang with the B & O Railroad.” Later, after the story’s interests had announced themselves to me in the first draft, I added the second sentence, about the narrator’s mother’s romance with Harold Timms, and just like that I had two threads to follow. By this point I also knew why this story mattered so much to my narrator. I wanted to place the innocence of his love for Connie alongside the ugliness of the adults’ lives. At the end of the story, my narrator knows that he and Connie are now helpless in a world run by the adults. “A Man Looking for Trouble” is a story about what ruins us. Above all, it’s a story about those moments when love might save us if only we’d let it.

James Mathews grew up in El Paso, Texas, and now lives in Maryland. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Masters in Arts Program. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Painted Bride Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Florida Review, Northwest Review, The Wisconsin Review, The South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, and many more. His short story collection, Last Known Position, received the 2008 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. He is also a retired air force chief master sergeant who has served overseas numerous times, including two tours in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (in 2003 and 2006). He is currently at work on a novel.

• As an Iraq war veteran who has depended on the “band of brothers” mentality during hazardous deployments, I have always been intrigued by that rare breed of serviceman who willingly rejects the bonding process and instead isolates himself from comrades. It struck me as a defense mechanism, albeit one that was starkly counterintuitive. “Many Dogs Have Died Here” is my attempt — with a dash of mystery and absurdism — to better understand the self-exiled warrior in a postwar setting who must ultimately account for his isolation and face the grief and loss from which there is no hiding.

Thomas McGuane lives in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of numerous novels and short story and essay collections, including Ninety-Two in the Shade, Driving on the Rim, Gallatin Canyon, and Crow Fair: Stories. His stories and essays have been collected in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Sports Writing. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• “Motherlode” is a story that suggested itself out of my preoccupation with life in the American West and its collision with the energy industry, often an enemy of the earth with the capacity to generate, besides money, its own publicity and access to government. These are of course generalizations, but I know intimately people like this vulnerable protagonist, and I have seen much of the deterioration of civic life at the behest of oil and its broadly corruptible allies.

Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the 2015 Story Prize Spotlight Award.

• Alice Munro said it better than I can say it:

“Two mysteries, really: Why do they do it? And how do they live with it?”

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of many novels of mystery and suspense, including most recently Ace of Spades, Daddy Love, The Accursed, 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 Anytime Always” will be included in Evil Eye: Four Tales of Love Gone Wrong.

• “The Home at Craigmillnar” was written during a very anxious time in my life, about which I can say only that I survived it!

During this enforced time in Edinburgh at the hospital bedside of my husband, stricken with pneumonia, I had the occasion to read of a breaking scandal involving a Catholic-run orphanage that was truly horrendous — dating back decades and involving generations of abused children. The nuns were as atrocious in life — or more so — as in my story. I found the material extremely upsetting, especially as there seemed to be little remorse among the surviving abusers.

The story of the American-set “Home at Craigmillnar” was my way of converting a personal crisis into something larger and I hope more valuable. It is still very hard for me to reread the story and recall those circumstances spent in a Scottish hospital, though — fortunately! — my husband, Charlie, recovered and we returned home a week after we had planned.

Eric Rutter’s first short story appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 2007. Since then he has contributed half a dozen more stories to that magazine, including one that was nominated for a Barry Award. He is a lifelong resident of southeast Pennsylvania.

• My taste in mystery stories has changed over the years. In the beginning I preferred what I think of as the traditional kind, stories of deduction where clues are gathered and a puzzle solved. These days character interests me at least as much as plot. I find the drama more powerful in a story that arises from some personal conflict — someone facing, and then making, a difficult choice. “The Shot” is a good example of this kind of story. The protagonist finds himself in a tough spot, and as the story progresses, the walls close in on him steadily, relentlessly. But he finds his way out.

In terms of this story’s origins, the climax came to me first. I did some research to make sure the climactic act was plausible, then some more to learn about snipers in general. Research is always an integral part of my writing process, and this story was no exception. The fascinating details about snipers I uncovered didn’t just flesh out the story, they gave it a shape I couldn’t have imagined.