The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

Contributors’ Notes

The author of 11 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 with USAF Intelligence in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Career highlights? Sipping champagne with Mickey Spillane, waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark, and co-writing a novel with James Patterson.

• A few years ago, on a flight from New York, my seat-mate was a former heavyweight contender from a famous Flint, Michigan, boxing family. For a lifelong fight fan, it was like sitting next to Elvis. We chatted the whole trip away. He’d suffered an injury similar to the one depicted in “Puncher’s Chance” and continued to fight for several years afterward. Consider that a moment. This man stepped into the ring with skilled fighters, two hundred pounds and up, who were trying to knock him into next week, knowing that his chances to win, or even to defend himself effectively, were limited by his injury. Why would anyone do this? “I was trying to salvage my career,” he said. “And hell, I always had a puncher’s chance.” And he was dead serious. Awed by his courage and commitment, I couldn’t wait to get to my desk to start weaving it into a story. Sometimes writing is work. Not this time.

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 also won the Detroit Press Club Foundation Student Grand Award for the best writing in a college newspaper or periodical. Upon graduation he pursued a career in health-care marketing and communications, working at major hospitals in three states. 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 Mystery Magazine and was selected by Marvin Lachman as one of the Best Mystery Short Stories of 1993. Six other stories have been published by EQMM since then, including “Princess Anne,” which was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. Allyn is a U.S. Naval Air Force veteran, having served in a helicopter squadron aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid.

• I found “The Master of Negwegon” very difficult to write. It began as a novel about five years ago and kept morphing and morphing so that I wound up with a couple of banker’s boxes full of rough copy and nothing that resembled a coherent plot or story. I realize now that I made the classic mistake of “If you warm up too long, you miss the race.” In an attempt to stay timely and relevant, I was continuously adding fodder about the war in Iraq, ecological problems such as the emerald ash borer, the utterly amazing lack of accountability among politicians, and developments in our understanding of TBI/PTSD. I got distracted and buried. So after walking away for a while, I decided to try it as a short story. Reduce it to bare essentials. That worked, but it was tough to extract and refine a short story from the morass that was to be a novel. The novel remains a target. Negwegon, at least, is stationary. Dynamic, but stationary. This beautiful wilderness park is located just a mile or so from my home in Black River and allows me to step back in time at will. When you emerge from the forest path to the broad, dune-swept horseshoe beach that fronts the bounding waters of Lake Huron, however far you’ve had to travel to get there will be worth it.

Dan Bevacqua’s stories have appeared in Electric Literature’s “Recommended Reading,” the New Orleans Review Online, Tweed’s Magazine of Literature & Art, and The Literary Review, among others. A chapbook, “Security and Exchange,” was published in 2015. Bevacqua is the fiction editor at Jerry Magazine. A visiting assistant professor in English and creative writing at Western New England University, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

• For lots of reasons I won’t get into, “The Human Variable” started in my mind with the image of a man driving through the night toward a marijuana farm. For weeks I didn’t know why, until my friend and neighbor Krzysiek, a Polish engineer and climate scientist, told me about an app he was developing that would more accurately predict horrible weather events, like tornados and hurricanes. Somehow these two ideas, marijuana farming and climate change, got all mixed together, and then everything in the story started to click and work toward its violent end.

C. J. Box is the number-one New York Times best-selling author of twenty-one novels, including the Joe Pickett series. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel (Blue Heaven, 2009) as well as the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), Macavity Award, Gumshoe Award, two Barry Awards, and the 2010 Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Award for fiction. He was recently awarded the 2016 Western Heritage Award for Western Novel by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. The novels have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Open Season, Blue Heaven, Nowhere to Run, and The Highway have been optioned for film and television. Millions of copies of his novels have been sold in the United States and around the world. In 2016, Off the Grid debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list in March. Box is a Wyoming native and has worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, fishing guide, and small‑town newspaper reporter and editor, and he owned an international tourism marketing firm with his wife, Laurie. In 2008, Box was awarded the “BIG WYO” Award from the state tourism industry. An avid outdoorsman, he has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied throughout Wyoming and the mountain West. He served on the board of directors for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo and currently serves on the Wyoming Office of Tourism board. He and his wife have three daughters and one (so far) grandchild. They split their time between their home and their ranch in Wyoming.

• With each short story and novel I write I draw from the landscape and terrain around me, and “Power Wagon” was written while elk hunting in northwestern Wyoming near Big Piney, with the Wind River Mountains to the east and the Wyoming Range to the west.

There’s a rhythm to each day while hunting that involves leaving well before dawn in subzero temperatures, returning to the camp for the middle of the day, and going back out into the mountains to hunt in the evening. Most days result in seeing no elk, but every foray is an adventure that may involve wading across ice-covered swamps and fording freezing rivers. There is also the opportunity to encounter local ranch families and to hear their stories and witness the history and culture of the area from the ground up.

I wrote the story in the hours between the morning hunt and the evening hunt, when everything I’d seen or encountered was still fresh in my mind.

Big Piney is in rough country. It’s located in Sublette County, and family histories and feuds spread out along Lower Piney Creek, Middle Piney Creek, and Upper Piney Creek. There are four-generation homesteads scattered through the pine trees, and the memories of the locals are long. There are splits and divisions even among those with the same family name, and keeping track of who likes whom and who hates whom becomes a full-time job that was almost beyond my capacity.

The isolation of the area and the independence of the locals breed long memories and colorful stories. There’s the one about the dead trapper found in a cabin in the middle of the winter, who was hauled by sleigh down to a ranch, where his body remained in the barn for three months until the ground thawed out. There’s the one about a water-rights feud between two old-time ranchers on the same drainage that ended with a tractor battle and high explosives.

And there are stories about the tangled relationships of families who grew up and either stuck or dispersed.

That’s where “Power Wagon” came from. It’s about the four adult children of a malevolent Big Piney patriarch and how they deal with their father’s death as well as a high-profile unsolved crime. Brandon, the youngest son, returns with his pregnant wife, Marissa, to sort out the financials of the inheritance. But it isn’t just the surviving children of the old man who have come back to the ranch for a reckoning.

On a bitterly cold night, when Marissa sees a single headlight strobing through the willows on the way to the house, she senses that trouble is on the way. When four disturbing people climb out of the car and approach the front door, she’s sure of it.

And so are we.

Soon Brandon will learn that the key to everything is the ancient 1948 Dodge Power Wagon that’s been parked for years inside an outbuilding. It’s described by one of the strangers as follows: “The greatest ranch vehicle ever made. Three-quarter-ton four-by-four perfected in WW Two. After the war, all the rural ex-GIs wanted one here like they’d used over there. That original ninety-four-horse, two-hundred-and-thirty-cubic-inch flathead six wouldn’t win no races, but it could grind through the snow and mud, over logs, through the brush and willows. It was tough as a damn rock. Big tires, high clearance, a winch on the front. We could load a ton of cargo on that son of a bitch and still drive around other pickups stuck in a bog.”

“Power Wagon” was written for an anthology called The Highway Kind, which was edited by Patrick Millikan. The subtitle describes it thus: “Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads” — even though the vehicle in question in this tale may not ever run again. But it does hold secrets.

The story was constructed over a week filled with blood, sweat, mud, ice, and some of the most awe-inspiring Rocky Mountain terrain in the country. I hope that atmosphere seeps through to the story itself.

Gerri Brightwell is originally from southwest Britain. She is the author of three novels: Dead of Winter (2016), The Dark Lantern (2008), and Cold Country (2002). Her short stories have appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Redivider, and Copper Nickel, as well as on BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her husband, fantasy writer Ian C. Esslemont, and their three sons.

• One year I went through a phase of being obsessed with westerns — something about their grittiness and bravado fascinated me. There are some wonderful western novels out there (Portis’s True Grit, Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers) and spectacular films (The Revenant, the Coen brothers’ True Grit), but so many of the movies were disappointing: they relied on the same stock characters in the same stock situations. You could pretty much guess how the story was going to play out from the first few scenes.

One afternoon I found myself writing my own western (it just happened — I was working on something else when suddenly there was Matthis riding his horse down a slope, and the story took off), and though he looked every inch a hired gun out of one of those disappointing films, he had to be more than that. I wondered, What if he isn’t such a good guy? What if the point of the story isn’t a gunfight but something else? What if it’s a slow unveiling of what’s really going on?

I ended up with a story I wasn’t sure anyone would want: Who publishes westerns nowadays, especially mysterious ones? Thank you, Alaska Quarterly Review, for starting “Williamsville” on its journey.

S. L. Coney obtained a master’s degree in clinical psychology before abandoning academia to pursue a writing career. Currently residing in Tennessee, the author has ties to South Carolina and roots in St. Louis. Coney’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in St. Louis Noir, Noir at the Bar Volume 2, and Gamut Magazine.

• When I quit my doctorate program and moved to St. Louis, I immediately fell in love with the city and its people. Scott Phillips mentored me and influenced a lot of my early work, so when he asked for a contribution to St. Louis Noir I jumped at the chance. I was living in the Clayton-Tamm neighborhood — also known as Dogtown — and I am enamored of this area, with its Irish charm and St. Louis spunk. But most of all, with the old Forest Park Hospital that sat on the eastern side of the neighborhood. This was a huge brick building with contrary angles and seemingly inexplicable corners. It was torn down the year I wrote “Abandoned Places,” and so this story became my love letter to that particular bit of history.

Trina Corey is the pen name of Trina Warren, an elementary-school teacher who lives in California. Her five mystery stories have all been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, beginning with the Department of First Stories. They have received nominations for the Edgar, Macavity, Barry, and Derringer Awards.

• “Flight” began, as many mysteries do, with a what if? What if a serial killer who had always targeted elders ended up living with his target demographic? In the long process of answering that question, characters came and went, or stayed and changed. Jenny, the new nursing assistant, was originally going to be the main character. (She and her fiancé, Brian, are the wife and husband in “There Are Roads in the Water,” a story I wrote set many years later.) Mina is a composite of several women I knew whose principal shared characteristic was kindness. But it was Rachel, the heroine, who most surprised me. She was originally slated to be one of the victims. Over the six years that it took to write this story, Rachel didn’t so much change as I just got to know her better, and she changed the story. That a voiceless, seemingly helpless woman came to be the narrator and savior of others is a case of a character who would not be denied.

A former journalist, folksinger, and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one best-selling author. His novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the New York Times, the London Times, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times. His books are sold in 150 countries and have been translated into 25 languages. The author of thirty-nine novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book as well as a lyricist of a country-western album, Deaver has received or been shortlisted for dozens of awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award in Italy, and The Strand Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Deaver has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America.

• When Larry Block contacted me about the idea of writing a story inspired by the American artist Edward Hopper for an anthology entitled In Sunlight or in Shadow, I jumped at the chance. I was familiar with Hopper from my visits to Chicago’s Art Institute when I was young and had long admired his subdued and yet mysterious work. As for the painting upon which to base a story, contributors could select anything but Nighthawks (the iconic late-night diner). I picked Hotel by a Railroad, 1952. I had several stories in mind based on the couple in the image, but, curiously, it was the date of the painting that sent me to my word processor. I thought — as one would — the Cold War! And I was off and running.

Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of 20 novels and more than 150 short stories. His latest Lewis Cole mystery, Hard Aground, will be published in early 2018. He’s currently working on a series of projects with the New York Times best-selling novelist James Patterson. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000, and the The Best American Noir of the Century, published in 2010. His short stories have also appeared in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. 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 Mystery Writers of America. He is also a Jeopardy! game show champion as well as a co-winner on the trivia game show The Chase. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

• As a lifelong resident of the small state of New Hampshire, I’ve seen the tension and conflict between local townspeople and visitors from out of state, most often called people “from away.” No matter how much you read about how the culture of the United States is the same from one coast to the other, the truth is that we are very different indeed. Sometimes these differences are something to be celebrated, as when a New Hampshire guy like me can travel and enjoy Kansas City barbecue, or go to New Orleans and try Cajun cooking. But at other times, as in my story, the differences can lead to tension, conflict, and — eventually — death.

In my story, an avoidable accident on a lake in New Hampshire that ends in a woman’s death causes her husband to go on a long and exhaustive search for her killers and to find justice, ending up in the urban sprawl of Massachusetts. It’s the classic tale of city dwellers vs. country.

But in writing this story, I also wanted to play with the cliché of the suffering husband seeking revenge for his loved one, and I did so by making the wife a very unlikable character, in the slow process of divorcing her small-town husband. But after she is killed, it’s her small-town and apparently simple husband who makes things right. She was still his wife. It’s his duty. And he intends to complete his duty.

When he’s finally captured by the husband, the urban man responsible for the woman’s death can’t believe it. Why would this simple country man do so much and risk everything to get justice for an unlikable woman who’s about to divorce him?

The answer shows the gulf between the two worlds, and the two ways of life, as the two “men from away” have their final, violent confrontation.

Loren D. Estleman, the author of more than 80 books and 200 short stories, has won 20 national writing awards and has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award and the American Book Award. He served as president of the Western Writers of America, and in 2012 that organization presented him with the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement in the western field. The Private Eye Writers of America honored him with its lifetime achievement award in 2013. (How many lives can a writer have?) He lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.

• I always had a hunch my ten-foot shelf of books on Jack the Ripper would pay off someday, but no one was more surprised than I when, once the opportunity came to write about him, I chose to leave behind 1888 London and move the action to World War II Detroit. Maybe it was inevitable, as I spent most of my youth listening to my parents sharing their experiences of the era and watching 1940s noir thrillers on early TV. Despite the time jump, “GI Jack” gave me the chance to use my late close friend Dale Walker’s pet theory about the Ripper’s identity, which makes as much sense as any.

Peter Ferry’s stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Fiction, OR Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. Ferry is the winner of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Short Fiction and a contributor to the travel pages of the Chicago Tribune and to WorldHum. He has written two novels, Travel Writing, which was published in 2008, and Old Heart, which was published in June 2015 and won the Chicago Writers Association Novel of the Year award. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, and Van Buren County, Michigan, with his wife, Carolyn.

• “Ike, Sharon, and Me” is a story that has been bumping around my head, my heart, and my portfolio in various shapes and forms for about thirty years. It is inspired by events and people in my life, not the least of whom is my old friend Patrick Snyder, who took a proprietary interest in “ISM” and would not let it die, even when I sometimes wished that it would. I wrote the last line just a year ago. That the story is finally amounting to something makes me proud and happy.

Charles John Harper is the pseudonym for Minneapolis attorney Charlie Rethwisch. His noir stories featuring 1940s PI Darrow Nash appeared in the February 2008, March/April 2008, and July 2009 issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine under the name C. J. Harper. A fourth Darrow Nash tale, “Lovers and Thieves,” was the cover story for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine’s April 2016 issue. Stand-alone stories have also appeared in those magazines. Harper has twice been shortlisted for the British Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, Dana, and their two itinerant kids, Ellen and Bobby.

• Heading to my day job one morning seven years ago. Slogging through traffic snarled by dreary Minnesota weather. Sick of the repetition of a mostly unfulfilling job. Frustrated at not having — or making — the time to do what I really loved to do. Feeling trapped. Seeing no end in sight. And worst of all, out of ideas for a new story.

Then Darrow Nash popped into my head. And all he did was simply give me a weather report of the world beyond my windshield: “It was a misty November rain.” Hmmm. Sounds like an opening line. Immediately my mood brightened. The gray skies took on some color. Even my day job became bearable. I had found a story.

A story from a line that seemed to offer very little. No plot. No clever twist. No distinct setting. No unique characters (other than Darrow, of course). But in fact it had something very intriguing to me: it had a feeling. An atmosphere. And out of that atmosphere arose a story. A story that grew more complicated the more I wrote. Luring me to two dead people on a couch in an apartment, a strangled man and a woman with a gun in her hand and a bullet hole in her head. To the police it was a clear-cut case of murder-suicide. But to Darrow Nash, all was not as it seemed. It sounded perfect.

So perfect that it took me four years and two rejection letters to finally figure out what really happened inside that apartment. But those four years not only helped me find the solution to the puzzle, they helped me uncover the issues that became the true heart and soul of the story:

The treatment of gay men in postwar America.

The differing attitudes that veterans had toward their service in the war, from bragging tin soldiers to silent heroes, some silent for decades.

And, ultimately, the contradictions that live in all of us and the facades we create to disguise those contradictions. Our immutable predisposition to be, like the crime in the story, not as we seem. To be in our hearts both the lover and the thief.

Craig Johnson is the New York Times best-selling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels, which are the basis for Longmire, the hit Netflix original drama, now in its sixth season. The books have won multiple awards: Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/Bibliobs, the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year, Le Prix 813, the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award, the Mountains and Plains Book of the Year, the SNCF Prix du Polar, Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, the Watson Award, Library Journal’s Best Mystery of the Year, the Rocky Award, and the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Fiction. Spirit of Steamboat was selected by the Wyoming State Library as the inaugural One Book Wyoming. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.

• As Jean Luc-Godard once said, “It’s not where you take things from, but where you take them to.” I have a weakness for quirky or forgotten writers from different geographic regions across the country, and one of them is Davis Grubb, the Appalachian author of such luminaries as Fool’s Parade, Cheyenne Social Club, and the better-known Night of the Hunter, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1955. Though his output was small, many of his best-selling novels were adapted as feature films with actors like Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Kurt Russell, and George Kennedy.

There is a scene in Fool’s Parade, one of Grubb’s lesser-known works, where a paroled convict, Mattie Appleyard, intimidates a guard, and that scene stuck with me since I read it many years ago. My protagonist, Walt Longmire, is the sheriff of the least populated county in one of the least populated states in the country, and in Serpent’s Tooth, the ninth novel in the series, the deputy, Double Tough, loses an eye and has a little trouble getting it replaced, in that he’s colorblind in the remaining one.

Every year since the debut of my first novel, I’ve written and sent out a holiday story to all the readers on my website newsletter, The Post-It, and last year I couldn’t help but do my take on Grubb’s gruesome display — even going so far as to include his novel in my short story.

In the idyllic setting of a country church in Story, Wyoming, an evangelical heroin addict has taken the congregation hostage, and particularly a young woman from the choir. The Highway Patrol, an adjacent sheriff’s department, and even a SWAT team have cordoned off the church, but there doesn’t seem to be much hope of resolving the situation without deadly violence when Double Tough, having also read Fool’s Parade, comes up with a unique response in “Land of the Blind.”

William Kent Krueger (he goes by Kent) writes the New York Times best-selling Cork O’Connor mystery series, which is set in the great Northwoods of Minnesota. His protagonist, Cork O’Connor, is the former sheriff of the fictional Tamarack County and a man of mixed heritage — part Irish and part Ojibwe. Krueger’s work has received a number of awards, including the Minnesota Book Award, Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, Anthony Award, Barry Award, Macavity Award, Dilys Award, and Friends of American Writers Prize. His stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace received the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He lives in St. Paul, where he does all his writing in a couple of wonderfully funky coffee shops.

• When I was invited to submit a story for Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, the anthology in which “The Painted Smile” was first included, I drafted two stories. My initial attempt was a straightforward take on Holmes and Watson, with a ghost in an English castle thrown in for good measure. The story felt too derivative, so I bagged it and tried another approach altogether. I’d been writing about adolescents for a while, an age in which innocence and worldly understanding tug ferociously at opposite ends of the psyche. The idea of a child, incredibly bright but terribly vulnerable, appealed to me enormously. During the writing, I kept trying to imagine what Holmes might have been like in his childhood. Of course, the story had to be set in St. Paul, a city I know well and dearly love. And instead of a ghost, I decided to throw in a clown. Those guys are really scary.

Karen McGee grew up in Berkeley, California, but has spent the past few decades in Tokyo, where she teaches at Nihon University College of Art. She is the co-organizer of the Tokyo Writers Workshop. Her stories have recently appeared in Bête Noire, The Font, HiddenChapter, Twisted Vine, and 9Crimes, and she is currently working on a novel. She is an avid reader of mysteries and a big fan of Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers.

• I was inspired to write “Dot Rat” after watching The Drop and then tracking down and reading the source material for the film, Dennis Lehane’s brilliant short story “Animal Rescue.” I have never been to Dorchester, but I was attracted to the setting as a town with a tough reputation, a place that might be home to an old-school organized crime head. I was also interested in creating a character that appears vulnerable but is actually dangerous. As with much of my work, I subjected a draft of the story to my monthly workshop. At that time it was titled “Fence” (for lack of a better idea). The title inspired much confusion and several fascinating theories. As usual, the group was also a big help.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel A Book of American Martyrs and the story collection The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. Recently inducted into the American Philosophical Society, she teaches alternately at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. A new poem of hers will appear in The Best American Poetry 2017.

• “The Woman in the Window” was first imagined as a dramatic monologue giving voice to Edward Hopper’s mysterious woman in the window (Eleven A.M., 1926). The young woman in the painting is sensuous, pale-skinned, lost in thought. My evocation of her was originally in the form of a poem of long slow meditated lines that replicate the thought-patterns of one contemplating her future (suggested by the window in front of her, through which the viewer can’t easily see) as well as her past.

In transforming the poetic monologue into prose, I opened up the story considerably, providing the young woman with a revealing backstory and also with a lover, a married man who has paid for her apartment and is locked into an intense emotional relationship with her, which, we are allowed to see, will not come to a happy ending.

Steven Popkes’s work is found largely in the science fiction and fantasy world. His first sale was in 1982 to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Since then he has published three novels: Caliban Landing, Slow Lightning, and Welcome to Witchlandia. He is better known for his short fiction. Since 1982 he has published about forty stories. In 1988 his story “The Color Winter” was nominated for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award. Since then he’s been collected in several year’s best science fiction and year’s best fantasy anthologies. His novellas, Jackie’s Boy and Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected, placed second in the 2011 and 2013 Asimov’s Readers’ Award Polls. He lives with his wife in a Boston suburb, where he raises turtles and bananas.

• There are a couple of sources for this story. One is very personal. I was born in Southern California and lived there until we moved to Alabama in 1964. My parents both loved horse racing. I have many memories as a child hanging out with them in the stands watching magnificent animals run their hearts out for us. I remember my parents shoving me forward to shake hands with someone they said was Willie Shoemaker. I was probably around seven.

Another is more writerly. A number of years ago I wrote a novella entitled Mister Peck Goes Calling. This involved Cthulhu and the Boston Irish gang wars before Whitey Bulger got involved. It provided the character that ended up in “The Sweet Warm Earth.” I live in the Boston area now. After being here for over thirty years, it’s not hard to imagine an Irish mobster falling in love with California.

William R. Soldan received his BA in English literature from Youngstown State University and studied creative writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program, where his focus was fiction. He teaches Writing at YSU and is a board member of Lit Youngstown, a nonprofit organization focused on facilitating and nurturing the literary arts. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of publications, such as New World Writing, Thuglit, The Vignette Review, Kentucky Review, Jellyfish Review, Elm Leaves Journal, and others. He currently lives in Youngstown, Ohio, with his wife and two children.

• Stories often first present themselves to me in the form of an image or an ending. Or an ending image. But in the case of “All Things Come Around” it began with a situation and grew from there. My wife and I had decided to stop at Popeyes for some food on our way home one night — the same Popeyes in the story. Our son was about a year old then, and he was teething and miserable in his car seat, screaming and crying something fierce. So this element of the story — a fast-food chicken joint and a shrieking child in pain — was drawn straight from real life. As for the rest of the story, let’s just say it could have happened, or something close to it.

In my twenties I lived a reckless life and kept company with some rough individuals, some of whom did their dealings in the neighborhood my family and I found ourselves in that night. Some of whom still do, for all I know. As is the case anytime I find myself in a place where I used to run around during the darker days of my youth, I began to imagine what might happen if I crossed paths with someone from back then, back before kids and marriage and making other positive changes in my trajectory. That was when the idea began to take shape, while still sitting in the drive-through, waiting for my chicken. I must have had a faraway expression on my face, because my wife looked at me and said, “You’re writing a story, aren’t you?” She knows me well. Now, rarely does a story come into view fully formed, this one being no exception. However, the scenario and the players for this one came in a flash, and the rest was really a matter of organizing the content.

I originally started at the end, with Travis lying on the cold concrete with a bullet in his chest (I drew some inspiration for the scene from Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain,” in which he does some wonderful things with time and perspective). As Travis lay there, the events of the evening leading up to his being shot swirled through his mind, during which time the story slipped into flashback and came around full circle, ending where it began, more or less. I soon scrapped that idea, though, deciding it was better told in a linear fashion. Evidently my instinct was right, because Todd Robinson over at Thuglit, who had previously published another one of my stories, “The Long Drive Home,” loved it and included it in his journal’s farewell issue, Thuglit: Last Writes. I owe Todd a huge debt of gratitude for that. Now more than ever.

Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and four collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales and its two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, ten Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and four World Fantasy Awards. In 2008 he was given the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers. He has won several lifetime achievement awards. His most recent publication is Interior Darkness (2016), a collection of selected stories.

• “The Process Is a Process All Its Own” is the first real product of a long, long meander through the interior of a novel very much in progress. It was short of tumble-dried on its way toward the finish line, so I was obliged to start over. From the first page. I wanted to see what I could come up with and, because neuropathy had buggered my typing, also wanted to experiment with dictation. The act of dictating into my phone somehow suggested the synesthesia that begins the story. Most of the middle came from material already written. The ending is the development of a situation that had been considered but not yet written. And not long after I started, I bought a large-key keyboard, because typing was easier than talking.

Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and the author of eight novels, four of which feature professional thief Crissa Stone, whom Kirkus Reviews called “crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.” He’s also written for Esquire Japan, BBC Radio 4, Reader’s Digest, Salon, Slant, Writer’s Digest, Inside Jersey, and other publications. A lifelong resident of the Jersey shore, he was an editor for thirteen years at the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger, Tony Soprano’s hometown paper.

• When editor Patrick Millikin — a longtime bookseller at Arizona’s Poisoned Pen Bookstore — invited me to contribute to his collection The Highway Kind: Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads, my thoughts immediately went to that greatest of all road-rage stories, Richard Matheson’s classic “Duel.” I was intrigued at first with the idea of telling a similar story from the antagonist’s perspective — the hunter rather than the hunted. Once I began writing, though, the story veered off into unexpected directions, fueled by memories of my own long late-night commutes from a newsroom in North Jersey to my home at the shore. I began to riff on the idea of a cat-and-mouse game played out on a lonely stretch of highway in the middle of the night, with a driver so exhausted that his own senses are playing tricks on him, and where paranoia, fear, and danger are always waiting just up the road.