The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

Introduction

I’ve read a stack of stories — fifty of them, to be exact — sent to me after a preliminary selection by Otto Penzler, with instructions to pick twenty. I’ve done that. Some decisions were close, some were not; of the top twenty, I would rank most of the stories to be close, and the close calls probably extended to the top thirty. Dropping a third of those was tough.

Some of the previous editors pooh-poohed the idea of an intellectual tour of the history or theory of short story writing. I wouldn’t pooh-pooh doing a history, but I don’t know enough of the history of short stories to write about it with authority. Sure, I’ve read Poe and Hemingway and O. Henry and Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, Guy de Maupassant and Stephen King and Faulkner and O’Conner and Philip Dick and Kafka and Proulx and many more than I can remember — I majored in American history and literature in college, so I’m heavy on Americans and a little light on others — but there are more terrific short story writers than you can shake a stick at. That’s my take on the history.

Ah, but theory. As an occasional teacher of writing, I do have a taste for it.

Of fictionoid^© literature, there are several varieties that most people wouldn’t usually consider as relevant to the short story... but I do.

The newspaper column, for example. A newspaper column is often about 750 to 800 words and is an unusual hybrid of fact and opinion, the opinion leaning hard on fiction. A good newspaper column generally has the structural aspect of a short story: a fast, mood-setting opener, the rapid development of an interesting character, a few hundred words of exposition, frequently for the purpose of jerking a tear or two, and a snappy ending.

They’re almost short stories, except for the problem of the facts, which can really clutter up a good piece of fiction. There’s an old newspaper line about taking care to stop reporting before you ruin a perfectly good story.

As a newspaper columnist for a few years, I wrote several hundred columns, some good, some bad, some okay. I wrote on demand, four of them a week. No writer’s block allowed — the space was always waiting for me. (My friend and fellow novelist Chuck Logan and I were once on a book-writing panel at a St. Paul — area college, and Logan was asked by an audience member what he did about writer’s block. Logan asked the woman what she did for a living, and the woman answered, “I’m the president of this college.” Logan asked, “What do you do when you get college-president block?” The answer, of course, is “Work harder.”)

The biographic profile of the kind you frequently see in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, or The Atlantic may also be similar to the short story. They begin with a catchy opener and the careful construction of character. Since the reporting often involves interviews with the character himself/herself, it usually produces a raft of fiction, intentional or unintentional. Then we get a few unexpected twists of fate and a snappy ending. A profile of Donald Trump, for example, even if carefully documented from the Donald’s personal speeches and tweets, would arguably comprise mostly fiction, and certainly the twists of fate. Whether the ending will be snappy, of course, we don’t yet know. My personal opinion is that it might tend more toward sloppy; we’ll have to wait to see.

Haiku, carefully

groomed, may be the tightest

form of short story.

And has much to teach the short story writer, in my opinion. Especially about an opening. Read haiku: it’s like taking your vitamin pills in the morning.

Then there’s the novel. The novel is not a long short story but uses all the techniques of the short story, except length. It may be — I think it is — an ultimately more important form of literature, because of some of the inherent difficulties of the short form, but novels are not “better” in the purely literary sense.

They are usually a bit lazier, because they have the space to be; they can allow the reader to breathe, and to contemplate between sittings. They can present more author-nuanced character. Most important, they create a world of their own, which is comprehensible even hundreds of years later. How many people have gained a greater knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars through Tolstoy’s War and Peace than they have through any number of histories? Tolstoy created a world that survives today.

Novels, then, are an object of their own.

The short story, I believe, is not usually an object that stands on its own. Unlike a novel, a good short story is an intense collaboration between reader and writer. A novel may create an entire new world; a short story usually depends on the intelligence and understanding of the reader, because the elements of the story — the characters, the scene-setting (the total environment of the story) and the plot, whatever it may be — are usually so condensed that the short story is almost like an extended haiku.

The story is dependent on author implications and reader inferences. To take Poe as an example, his creepy dungeons are painted in few words; the shiver they send up the reader’s spine depends on the reader’s imagination as much as Poe’s, and Poe knew that. He was a master at tripping off the guilty hidden thoughts and imaginings of his readers.

So what would be the essential working parts of an ideal short story?

The story must be tight and well written; a novel can take a few fumbles without much damage, but a short story really suffers from them.

The opening must be catchy and quick and set a mood — the story should be rolling with the first line. No space here for the dark and stormy night.

From C. J. Box’s “Power Wagon”: “A single headlight strobed through a copse of ten-foot willows on the other side of the overgrown horse pasture. Marissa unconsciously laced her fingers over her pregnant belly and said, ‘Brandon, there’s somebody out there.’ ”

Single headlight strobed/ten-foot willows/overgrown horse pasture/laced her fingers/pregnant belly/somebody out there.

All that bound in two sentences, thirty-six words.

What, you’re going to stop reading right there?

Scene-setting should be integral to the story, part of the fabric rather than long blocks of exposition. The scene-setting ideally should contribute to the mood and texture of the story. If you set a dark, morose story on a sunny summer’s day, you’re fighting yourself. Not to say that it can’t be done.

From Charles John Harper’s “Lovers and Thieves”: “It was the kind of rain favored by lovers and thieves. A misty November rain. The kind that hangs low, veil-like, obscuring the dark, desperate world beneath it. The kind that sends lovers into their bedrooms and thieves into the night... I was more like the thief, waiting outside the Bon Vivant on La Brea, a tired, three-story, stucco apartment building with a name more festive than its architecture. Waiting inside my gunmetal-gray 1934 DeSoto Airflow Coupe... It wasn’t where I wanted to be. It wasn’t where a PI makes any real money in this town.”

Now we get to character. The physical description of the characters is critical, and what the reader sees in this physical description should tell us much about the character’s personality. There’s a reason for that: it creates an immediate image in the reader’s mind, so that laborious explication isn’t necessary. If a guy has a twice-broken nose, a fedora, a double-breasted suit, and is smoking a Lucky Strike Green, we’ve got a pretty good idea of when and where the story is coming from, without even knowing much more.

From Dan Bevacqua’s “The Human Variable”: “Standing out front near the bug light was an incredibly tall, incredibly thin man with an orange beard. He had the word SELF tattooed above his right eyebrow. MADE was above the left. Ted asked him [where he was.]... ‘Liberty’... ‘Thanks...’ ‘Yut,’ SELF MADE said, as if he were offended by language, as if it had done something horrible to him as a child.”

Of course, a major factor in short story writing is that the story itself has to be good. One of the biggest problems of too many short stories is that they’re boring and occasionally stupid, and you feel that the editor who chose it for publication has some unstated motive for choosing it.

By “good,” I mean the reader has to want to continue it, the story should have something interesting to say about the characters (and about character in general), and it should have something surprising about it.

Not surprising in a jack-in-the-box way, where something weird pops up in the last paragraph, but something logical, something that develops directly from the story line, but something that the reader didn’t see coming. And preferably something that contributes to the resolution of the story. Something like the dog that didn’t bark in the night.

Almost all the stories in this collection work that way: I can’t quote them because I’d be giving too much away. I can say that one story that I didn’t like, and didn’t select, was doing fine until the last moment, when all the questions were answered by a jack-in-the-box.

And finally there has to be some resolution. You can’t just end a short story; you have to wind it up.

As Doug Allyn does in “Puncher’s Chance” (not a spoiler): “And because it’s the flat-ass truth.”

Some people might tell you that crime short stories, unlike the more precious kind, are a kind of fictional ghetto, full of cardboard characters and clichéd situations.

Not true. These stories are remarkably free of bullshit — although there’s always a little, just to grease the wheels. And as a guy who writes a lot of crime, I love the language, the kind of language you don’t generally find in The New Yorker.

I personally have used the phrase “douche-nozzle” to characterize a low-life character in an upcoming novel, and have to say that I’m nothing if not proud of myself; you’ll find more of that kind of fine stuff in this collection.

And so...

Here they are.

John Sandford