The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

Introduction

A few years ago, I dug up some short stories to share with my son, Jack. I got him the world’s greatest (and funniest) story of workplace dysfunction, “The Catbird Seat” by James Thurber. I dusted off the classic that some say inspired The Hunger Games — “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. I got him the not terribly short but unforgettable Hemingway classic, “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” I passed him the heartbreaking “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury. And several others.

They included laugh-out-louders, cry-in-your-handers, heart-in-your-throaters, and shake-your-fist-at-the-worlders. All, to my mind, were profound and provocative. It’s no wonder these stories have endured through the years. Each one manages to say something more profound and provocative in a few pages than some novels manage to say over the course of several hundred pages.

These days, Americans tend to think about short stories in a, well, shortsighted way. How many short stories can the average person name off the top of his head? Probably a few here and there by Edgar Allan Poe, sure. But how about ones that were written in the last year? The last five years? The last ten? I think you’d be hard-pressed to find even a handful of people who could do it.

It’s a simple fact of modern life that short stories are not very popular. Which is bizarre when one considers what one hears about our attention spans. My personal theory is not that they don’t work for us any longer but rather that we (except when we’re trying to inspire our kids with the things that inspired us when we were their age) have largely forgotten about them. And, perhaps, that they haven’t been very well published lately, given the changes in the magazine world.

The short story is also one of the most fertile mediums for adaptations. Movies, TV shows, and plays are often adapted from short stories, and it’s not hard to see why. With such a limited amount of space, authors bring to life a world created through the painstaking selection of every single word, leaving a lasting, highly visual impression in the minds of readers.

Think of some iconic films, ones that have made a cultural impact in our world — The Birds, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Brokeback Mountain, The Shawshank Redemption, Minority Report, Million Dollar Baby. Did you know they were based on short stories? Does the typical moviegoing American know? People love short stories, and often they don’t even realize it.

When I think about the batch of short stories you’re about to read, it makes me wish more people would read these imaginative, rich, complex tales before (if?) they get the big-screen treatment. I often hear people lamenting the state of Hollywood, how they’re hungry for original, dynamic, surprising stories rather than another middling popcorn one. If that’s the case, I’ve got one thing to say: read these short stories. You can thank me later.

One such story, “Molly’s Plan” by John M. Floyd, details the formation and execution of a bank heist so real and intense that I find it impossible to believe the tale took up only a few pages. “Branch manager Donald Ramsey was fond of saying that no one on earth was brave enough or foolish enough to attempt to rob his bank. He was mistaken,” writes Floyd. And just a few paragraphs later? Not to give too much away, but we learn that to get people to follow a bank robber’s instructions, “A little blood is a fantastic incentive...” An imaginative twist at the end of the story makes it a truly satisfying read.

Jeffery Deaver’s “The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman” delivers a walloping blow to the head with its big number of unexpected turns. A modern send-up of Sherlock Holmes, the story introduces us to Paul Winslow, whose affinity with the famous sleuth isn’t quite what it seems. I was so enamored with the originality and creativity of this story that by the time I read the last word, I found myself cursing the format of the short story, because I wanted to read so much more about this imaginative character Deaver has created. This one could easily be a major Hollywood franchise.

Another of the things I love about short stories is how they can make fresh voices accessible to readers. I’d bet people are more willing to read a few pages of a short story by an unknown author than they are to read an entire book. Take “Rosalee Carrasco” by Tomiko M. Breland, an up-and-coming writer whose fiction placed in the 2014 Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Contest. This story about a high school tragedy blew me away with its simplicity and power. As you’ll soon discover, it’s what Breland chooses not to say that packs the biggest punch.

There are also glimpses into the lives of intriguing characters, as is the case with Kyle Minor’s “A Kidnapping in Koulèv-Ville” and Lee Martin’s “A Man Looking for Trouble.” The former examines the choices of a privileged young woman living in Haiti, while the latter explores the devastating effects of infidelity and war on a small-town family. These are unfamiliar characters living through very familiar circumstances. The reader is innately drawn in — who didn’t rebel against their parents during those wonderfully arrogant teenage years of life? And what person hasn’t had the realization that their parents, once so heroic and infallible in their childhood eyes, are just normal people perfectly capable of making their own bad choices? “That night, I couldn’t say I loved my mother, or Bill, or my father, who had gone without saying a word to me,” writes Martin. “I could only say that I felt sorry for them — sorry for all the trouble they’d found — and I felt sorry for Connie, who didn’t deserve to be on the other side of that trouble. It would be a while before I’d be able to say that I didn’t deserve it either.” These stories offer real, poignant portraits without ever veering into the maudlin or melodramatic.

I’m confident that you’ll enjoy reading these stories (and so will Jack), and I have no doubt we’ll be seeing a few of them adapted for the big screen in years to come. Of course, it would be nice for as many people as possible to read these stories before that happens, but there’s a bright side to Hollywood’s hunger for short stories. It means that as long as authors keep writing with such vividness and ingenuity, we’ll reap the benefits of having fantastic stories available to us both on screen and on paper.

JAMES PATTERSON