The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

Contributors’ Notes

In the words of the New York Times, Louis Bayard “reinvigorates historical fiction,” rendering the past “as if he’d witnessed it firsthand.” Bayard’s affinity for bygone eras can be felt in both his recent young adult novel, the highly praised Lucky Strikes (named one of Amazon’s top 2017 titles), and his string of critically acclaimed adult historical thrillers: Roosevelt’s Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, The Pale Blue Eye, and Mr. Timothy.

A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar and the Dagger Award. He is also a nationally recognized essayist and critic whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Salon. An instructor at George Washington University, he is on the faculty of the Yale Writers’ Conference and was the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times.

• How did I go from writing about history to writing about the imminent future? It goes back to the day my mother asked me about my father.

By then Dad had been dead for three years, and my own memories of him were colored by the Alzheimer’s that in his final days had swallowed him whole. Mom’s dementia, by contrast, was gentler and more incremental, and if she sometimes blanked on the names of her grandchildren or forgot something that had happened to us when we were kids, she was able to find some other memory to cling to, even create new ones here and there.

So when she began quizzing me about my dad, I took it at first for minor fact-checking. But then the questions began to run deeper. What did he do for a living? What did he look like? What did he sound like? What was he like? The man with whom she’d spent half a century, the man she’d grieved for so wantonly three years earlier, had simply vanished.

From that realization, a new kind of grief—and, perhaps by way of understanding, a pair of thought experiments.

#1: Imagine learning on unimpeachable authority that from here on out your life will be a continuous cognitive decline. You will go from forgetting people’s names to forgetting people. The smiles and faces dearest to you in the world will, sooner or later, be utterly lost to you, and there will be no reversal, no appeal, no reprieve. Do you get out now? While the going’s good? I suspect most of us wouldn’t. Living is a hard habit to kick, after all, so we would probably muddle along, congratulating ourselves on what we were still able to recall, and by the time the shadows had well and truly descended, it would be too late. We would no longer even be able to mourn our losses, because we would have no memory of what we’d lost.

#2: Now imagine that someone offers to make the call for you—gauge the exact moment when you have slipped into oblivion and afford you the release you no longer have the capacity or awareness to effect for yourself. Do you take them up on it? Knowing that you won’t recall having made the transaction? If so, what will your criterion be? The point beyond which you will not suffer yourself to slip?

Those are the end-of-life questions that haunt “Banana Triangle Six.” It goes without saying that they haunt me too.

Andrew Bourelle is the author of the novel Heavy Metal and coauthor with James Patterson of Texas Ranger. His short stories have been published widely in literary journals and fiction anthologies. This is his second story selected for inclusion in a volume of The Best American Mystery Stories. Bourelle lives in Albuquerque with his wife, Tiffany, and two children, Ben and Aubrey. He teaches writing at the University of New Mexico.

• Rhonda Parrish asked me to contribute to an anthology she was editing titled D Is for Dinosaur. Each author was assigned a letter of the alphabet and was asked to write a story about dinosaurs using that letter. I looked up dinosaurs whose names began with Y and came across the Yangchuanosaurus, otherwise known as the Yangchuan Lizard. I kicked around some ideas for a few months, but I couldn’t think of anything that I was in love with. Then, as the deadline loomed, I had a strange dream that provided the premise for the story. I can’t remember much of the original dream. It certainly wasn’t as coherent as the story turned out to be. But the dream gave me my idea: a drug made of dinosaur bones. I wrote the first draft in a rush. It was one of those magical writing experiences where you have just the seed of an idea and the rest of the story grows during the act of writing.

I’m indebted to Rhonda Parrish for publishing the story and for her helpful edits. And thanks to Otto Penzler and Louise Penny for including “Y Is for Yangchuan Lizard” in this volume of The Best American Mystery Stories.

T. C. Boyle is the author of twenty-eight books of fiction, including, most recently, The Relive Box and Other Stories (2017), The Terranauts (2016), and the forthcoming novel Outside Looking In. He has published his collected stories in two volumes, T. C. Boyle Stories (1998) and T. C. Boyle Stories II (2013), and was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award in Short Fiction in 1999 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2014. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• Over the course of my career I’ve taken it as a challenge to inhabit the points of view of characters of diverse ethnicity, gender, and age, attempting, like most artists, to examine the human condition from every angle possible. Early on, when I wasn’t nearly so close in age as I am now to Mason Alimonti, I got a letter from my grad-school mentor praising me for my insight into the worldview of the elderly in my stories and novels, and that praise meant as much to me as any prize or blue ribbon. I figured I must have been doing something right, because he was old and I was young, and if anybody knew how the elderly perceive things, he certainly did. But then for me, for all of us, it’s an act of imaginative projection to enter that limbic world of the aged—barring accident or disease we will all someday get there, and when we do there will be predators like Graham Shovelin awaiting us.

I received a letter very similar to the one Mason did—in fact, I even lifted certain phrases from it for the sake of authenticity. It was so obviously a fraud I was amazed that anyone could be taken in by it, but then the news is chock-full of stories about people who have been. I didn’t have to look too far. A friend of mine fell for a similar scheme, which cost him everything he had—his business, his family, his friends—and no amount of evidence or reasoning could ever persuade him that he’d been taken. Once you invest—financially, yes, but emotionally, in the deepest repository of hope and expectation—you’re hooked. And once you’re hooked, you’re going to be landed, just like Mason.

Michael Bracken is the author of eleven books, including the private-eye novel All White Girls, and more than twelve hundred short stories in several genres. His short crime fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Espionage Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and in many other anthologies and periodicals. A recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for lifetime achievement in short mystery fiction, Bracken has won two Derringer Awards and been shortlisted for a third, and he has received numerous awards for advertising copywriting. Additionally, Bracken has edited six crime fiction anthologies, including the three-volume Fedora series and the forthcoming The Eyes of Texas. He lives, writes, and eats barbecue with his wife, Temple, in Central Texas.

• Each time we visit my wife’s parents, we spend much of the three-hour drive brainstorming story ideas while Temple notes them on a legal pad. Shortly before one such trip, I read the submission call for Noir at the Salad Bar, which sought stories that “feature food or drink, restaurants, bars or the culinary arts,” and during that trip my wife filled two handwritten pages with every food-related story idea we could imagine.

Then she suggested barbecue.

By the time we arrived at her parents’ home, I knew the story’s setting and primary characters. While Temple visited with family, I filled several more pages of the legal pad with notes, and I created a rough outline. But after inspiration comes perspiration, and the story required several drafts before becoming “Smoked.”

James Lee Burke is the author of thirty-six novels and two collections of short stories. He and his wife, Pearl, live in western Montana.

• I wrote “The Wild Side of Life” in part as a tribute to Jimmie Heap, the man who recorded the original of the most famous song in the history of country music. The postwar era marked our entry into neocolonialism and the building of a petrochemical empire, but the vision of those who worked in oil exploration was confined to coastal swamps dotted with cypress and gum trees and live oaks strung with Spanish moss, and beer joints and honky-tonk bands on the levee and jukebox music that played until two in the morning.

People who used to pick cotton and break corn now worked on drilling rigs and strung pipe, and had money and felt an independence they’d never experienced. The southern oligarchy had been broken. Unfortunately, an equally dark reality lay just beyond our ken. Oil companies don’t pick fights, but they don’t take prisoners either. The bombing I describe took place in South America in 1956.

I’ve never gotten Jimmie Heap out of my head. Or Kitty Wells, who sang the rebuttal to Jimmie’s lament. It was a grand time to be around. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea what he’s talking about.

Previously a television director, theater technician, and law student, Lee Child is the author of the globally best-selling Jack Reacher series, evaluated by Forbes magazine as the strongest brand in contemporary fiction. He was born in Britain and lives in New York City.

• My U.S. publisher wanted to do a collected edition of all the Jack Reacher short stories and asked for a new story to anchor the volume. I wasn’t keen—I was in the middle of writing my next novel and didn’t have much time. But ironically I ended up very happy with “Too Much Time”—as a concise piece of work I thought it was one of the best things I had ever done.

Michael Connelly has published thirty-one novels, most of which have been about the exploits of LAPD detective Harry Bosch or the Lincoln lawyer Mickey Haller. He is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America. He splits his time between the Los Angeles he writes about and the Florida where he grew up.

• In “The Third Panel” I got the chance to write about the painter who has had a great influence on me and my books, Hieronymus Bosch. I studied this fifteenth-century artist while in college, and what I found is that there are many different interpretations of his paintings, particularly his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. I have always been drawn to the third panel, because it depicts the wages of sin and in many ways is similar to a macabre crime scene. Though Harry Bosch does not appear in this story, his name and perhaps grim outlook are drawn from this panel. This is the world where he dwells. I enjoyed writing about it.

John M. Floyd’s work has appeared in more than 250 different publications, including Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Strand Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Mississippi Noir, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2015. A former air force captain and IBM systems engineer, he is also an Edgar Award nominee and a three-time Derringer Award winner. John’s seventh book, The Barrens, is scheduled for release in 2018. He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Mississippi.

• As soon as I received the invitation to submit a story to the Coast to Coast: Private Eyes anthology, I knew what kind of tale I wanted to tell. Back in 2013 I’d published a long story called “Redemption,” about a former gunfighter turned Pinkerton’s agent who quit both careers to open a private-investigation office with his brother in San Francisco in the 1880s, and I had for some time been considering doing a sequel to that story. After all, I’d grown up watching westerns and reading about private detectives, and I’ve always been fascinated by stories/novels/movies about reluctant gunfighters in the Old West—Shane, Unforgiven, Open Range, etc. And since I already had a main character I knew well, my only task was to give him a challenging new case and come up with some twists and turns. I finished “Gun Work” several weeks later, sent it in, and was pleased to find that the C2C:PI editors, Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks, liked it. Now I’m even more glad they did…

David Edgerley Gates is the author of the Cold War thrillers Black Traffic and The Bone Harvest and the companion novella Viper. His latest book is Exit Wounds; the next is Absolute Zero. His short stories have been nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, Derringer, and International Thriller Writers Awards. Gates blogs regularly at www.sleuthsayers.org; his website is www.davidedgerleygates.com.

• “Cabin Fever” is one of those stories that started in my head with the weather, something ominous building on the horizon, and picked up momentum from there. It’s the fourth of my stories to feature Hector and Katie, and like the others, it’s much about physical landscape. Here’s a curious thing. I’d already written “Cabin Fever” when I happened on the Craig Johnson novel Hell Is Empty, which I hadn’t read before. Craig’s book has Walt Longmire in pursuit of an escaped con deep in the woods, trapped in a blizzard. Ideas gather shape in their execution. Two different guys pluck a similar situation out of the zeitgeist, independently, and then take off at right angles to each other. It’s a little odd, but there it is.

Charlaine Harris is a true daughter of the South. Born in Mississippi, she has lived in Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. Her career as a novelist began in 1981 with her first book, a conventional mystery. Since then she’s written urban fantasy, science fiction, and horror. In addition to over thirty full-length books, she has written numerous short stories and three graphic novels in collaboration with Christopher Golden. She has been featured on bestseller lists many times, and her works have been adapted for three television shows. Charlaine now lives at the top of a cliff on the Brazos River with her husband and two rescue dogs. She has three children and two grandchildren.

• I’ve written about Anne DeWitt several times, and it’s always fun to see what she’s up to. High school principals always seem extremely powerful to the staff and students, but Anne takes this several steps further; she’s a survival expert who’s trained clandestine operatives, and she’s intensely goal-oriented. Travis High is going to be the best high school in North Carolina… or else. “Small Signs” is about Anne’s past rising up to bite her and how she reacts to the threat.

Rob Hart is the author of five novels: Potter’s Field, The Woman from Prague (selected as one of the best reads of summer 2017 by Publishers Weekly), South Village (a best-of-2016 pick by the Boston Globe), City of Rose, and New Yorked (nominated for an Anthony Award for best first novel). He also cowrote Scott Free with James Patterson. His short stories have appeared in such publications as Thuglit, Needle, Joyland, and Shotgun Honey. Nonfiction articles have appeared at Salon, the Daily Beast, Literary Hub, Nailed, and Electric Literature. He is the publisher at MysteriousPress.com and the online writing workshop director at LitReactor. Find him online at @robwhart and www.robwhart.com.

• Someone else noticed before I did: over the course of a few months I had published short stories involving a bagel maker defending his storefront, warring food trucks, and a restaurant scam. A friend asked when my collection of food-noir stories was coming out. When he said that, I was working on a story about the murder of a bouncer at a popular pastry shop. I was writing to a theme without knowing it. Which, in retrospect, is not surprising. I like crime fiction and I like food. And they’re both great vehicles for storytelling. Crime is a measure of people at their worst, and food speaks to a wide range of cultural and personal attributes. It turned into a challenge: how many food-noir stories could I write? This is my tenth. I knew I wanted to set a story in Chinatown, and I knew I wanted it to involve enigmatic deliveries. I’ve always loved walking into Chinatown restaurants and bodegas and feeling completely lost in the city where I grew up. Those vague notions percolated for months until I ran across a news story about a gambling parlor busted above a restaurant in Chinatown. The story clicked immediately.

David H. Hendrickson’s first novel, Cracking the Ice, was praised by Booklist as “a gripping account of a courageous young man rising above evil.” He has since published five additional novels, including Offside, which has been adopted for high school student required reading. He is at work on a new suspense series, scheduled to release in early 2019. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and numerous anthologies, including multiple issues of Fiction River. He has published over fifteen hundred works of nonfiction and been honored with the Joe Concannon Hockey East Media Award and the Murray Kramer Scarlet Quill Award. Visit him online at www.hendricksonwriter.com.

• During my family’s trip-of-a-lifetime to Africa, I was amazed at the breathtaking wonders of the Serengeti, from the stunning diversity of life in the Ngorongoro Crater to the hundreds of thousands of wildebeests and zebras gathered near the Mara River, where crocodiles awaited, including one giant beast estimated to be eighteen feet long and weighing over a ton.

At the same time I was saddened to hear stories about poachers and their impact, especially devastating on the rhinoceros population. In fact, during our entire trip our group spotted only a single rhino, and that one only barely discernible in the distance through the strongest of binoculars.

That trip inspired my novel No Defense (a seemingly oxymoronic combination of a hockey romance and Africa) as well as several short stories. When I heard that Fiction River: Pulse Pounders Adrenaline would consist of short thrillers, going back to Africa was the ultimate of no-brainers. If my imagination doesn’t make many more return trips to the Serengeti, I’ll be very disappointed.

Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally best-selling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood; Don’t Say a Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas; and Empire of Lies. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He wrote the screenplays to A Shock to the System, which starred Michael Caine, and One Missed Call, which starred Edward Burns. His political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he currently does a popular podcast, “The Andrew Klavan Show,” at the Daily Wire. His most recent book is a memoir of his religious journey, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. His most recent fiction is the fantasy-suspense podcast “Another Kingdom.”

• The idea for “All Our Yesterdays” came to me more than twenty years ago, when I was living in London. I had meant to come to the city for a year but fell in love with the place and ended up staying for seven. Part of what I loved about London—and about the U.K. in general—was the deep presence of the past. Something about walking on ground the ancient Romans had trod gave me a peaceful feeling of being part of the great sweep of history. The notion that the love of the past might have a dark side as well led to the idea. I thought it would make a good movie and have pitched it many times without success. But now, with an increasing awareness of “time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” I feel the urge to get as many of my best ideas as possible down on whatever passes for paper. I’m delighted to find myself once again included in this anthology.

Martin Limón spent twenty years in the U.S. Army, ten of them stationed in South Korea. While still on active duty he began writing, typing on a Smith Corona portable typewriter (purchased in the PX) at his on-base quarters. After four years of trying, he published the first of what have now become over fifty short stories. His debut novel, Jade Lady Burning, featured 8th Army criminal investigation agents George Sueño and Ernie Bascom. It was published in 1992, shortly after he left the service, and it was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Since then George and Ernie have appeared in twelve more novels in addition to Nightmare Range, a short story collection. The most recent novel in the series, The Line, concerns a murder at the Joint Security Area on the Korean DMZ and is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2018.

• Juliet Grames at Soho Press challenged me to write a Christmas-themed story for inclusion in their collection The Usual Santas. At first I balked. Christmas stories seemed to be mostly set in quaint little towns in cozy little bungalows with plenty of snow outside and warm fires inside.

I write about military bases. And military crime.

But then I realized that even at overseas military bases, Christmas—inevitably—comes and goes. And what did commanders worry about most during those holidays? One word leapt immediately to mind: suicide. The military suicide rate rises before, after, and during the Christmas holidays, despite the army’s best efforts to keep it down. Back in the early seventies, at the 8th Army Headquarters in Seoul, the commanders also worried about an increasing holiday rate of black market activity. That is, soldiers and their dependents buying duty-free consumer goods in the PX or commissary and then reselling them on the Korean economy. Profit margins were two or three times what the GI shelled out in the first place.

I threw these two issues together, posed a problem for my intrepid investigators, backed them up with a few other characters who I hoped would be interesting, and came up with “PX Christmas.” It’s not a story for the faint of heart, but I hope that the reader might come to realize that Christmas gifts come in all sorts of packages, even a few wrapped in horror and still dripping with blood.

Paul D. Marks won a Shamus Award for his novel White Heat, a mystery-thriller set in Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots. His story “Ghosts of Bunker Hill” (EQMM, December 2016) was voted number one in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s 2016 Readers Choice Awards and was nominated for a Macavity Award for Best Short Story. “Howling at the Moon” (EQMM, November 2014) was shortlisted for the Anthony and Macavity Awards for best short story in 2015 and came in seventh in Ellery Queen’s Readers Choice Awards. His short fiction also has been published in Akashic’s Noir series (St. Louis), Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Crimestalker Casebook, Dave Zeltserman’s Hardluck Stories magazine, Gary Lovisi’s Hardboiled Magazine, Weber—The Contemporary West, various anthologies, and many more. He is coeditor of the Coast to Coast: Sea to Shining Sea mystery anthologies. His novella, Vortex, was released in 2015. White Heat has been reissued and the sequel, Broken Windows, is due out in fall 2018.

Paul also has the distinction, dubious though it might be, of being the last person to have shot a film on the fabled MGM back lot before it bit the dust to make way for condos. According to Steven Bingen, one of the authors of the well-received book MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, “That 40 page chronological list I mentioned of films shot at the studio ends with his [Paul D. Marks’s] name on it.”

Paul has served on the boards of the Los Angeles chapters of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.PaulDMarks.com.

• Much of my work is inspired by Los Angeles, which I like to think of as another character in my stories. Growing up here, I’ve always had a fascination with Venice (where I lived for a time as a child and which I visited a lot as a teenager and over the years), both its history and the current carnival-like atmosphere that permeates every inch of it. Venice started as developer Abbot Kinney’s fever dream of creating an elegant resort mimicking the romance of Italy’s Venice, complete with canals and gondoliers. He wanted his Venice-by-the-Sea to be a cultural mecca. That didn’t last long. Neither did most of the canals, many of which were gone by 1929. Over the years the culture and glamour wore off, leaving behind a kitschy and slightly rundown beach town of leftover canals. By the 1950s it was a slum. In the 1960s it was a hangout for Jim Morrison and the Doors. In the ’70s and ’80s it was a haven for hippies and gangs. Today it’s a mix of free spirits, skateboarders, tourists, and gentrifying locals. That contrast between elegant and seedy, glamorous and gauche, old and new, trendy and trashy, rich and poor, intrigues me.

And despite its past-its-prime appearance, Venice has become the number one tourist destination in Los Angeles, at least according to some.

Most everyone knows the famous Venice boardwalk that runs along the shore, but one of my favorite spots is Windward Avenue, a street known for its long, arched colonnade that runs perpendicular to the shore and dead-ends into it. Windward doubled as a Tijuana street in Orson Welles’s great film noir Touch of Evil, and Venice’s oil wells of that time (the late 1950s) were where the oil-field scenes in Touch of Evil were filmed.

Venice is a little piece of the exotic on the edge of Los Angeles. That got me thinking about setting my story there and showcasing the colorful and sometimes dangerous streets of Venice Beach in my story “Windward” for Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea. So I gave Jack Lassen, my PI, an office (complete with 1950s bomb shelter) amid the old-world columns and archways of Windward. With a setting like that I needed a crime that would be equally intriguing, and what better fodder for crime than the façade of the movie business, where nothing is what it appears to be and a hero onscreen might be a monster offscreen?

Ultimately Venice is more a state of mind than a location. But either way, a great setting for a story.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the story collections Dis Mem Ber and Beautiful Days. She is visiting professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley (spring 2018) and visiting distinguished writer in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University (fall 2018). Stories of hers have appeared previously in The Best American Mystery Stories and in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She is the 2017 recipient of the International Festival of Literature and Art with Humor Award (Bilbao, Spain) and was inducted in 2017 into the American Philosophical Society.

• “Still she haunts me, phantomwise”—this line from a poem by Lewis Carroll about his great devotion to Alice Liddell, the seven-year-old daughter of Oxford University friends to whom he’d told the original story of Alice in Wonderland, has also haunted me for years. Indeed, the very word phantomwise is unique to this poem; I have never encountered it elsewhere.

In my story “Phantomwise: 1972” a nineteen-year-old named Alyce, a sophomore at an upstate New York university, finds herself the object of devotion of an older, much-acclaimed poet with an obsessive interest in the original “Alice in Wonderland” at the same time that she is, less benignly, an object of revulsion on the part of a young philosophy professor who has exploited her naiveté and regrets his involvement with her as a threat to his professional career. The story follows Alyce’s adventures in a wonderland, or perhaps a looking-glass world, in which she is simultaneously loved sincerely by one man and detested by the other; a world in which she is simultaneously treasured by one man (who wants to marry her) and an impediment to the other (who wants to annihilate her). Which Alyce prevails? The reader is welcome to decide.

Alan Orloff’s debut mystery, Diamonds for the Dead, was a best first novel Agatha Award finalist, and his eighth novel, Pray for the Innocent, was released earlier this year. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Jewish Noir, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Snowbound: Best New England Crime Stories 2017, and The Night of the Flood. Alan lives in northern Virginia and teaches fiction writing at the Writer’s Center (Bethesda, MD). He loves cake and arugula, but not together. www.alanorloff.com.

• In “Rule Number One,” I tried to weave two threads together. First I wanted to explore the honor-among-thieves notion. Was it a workable trope? Or a bunch of tripe? In this story a crook gets involved in a heist with his aging mentor. Which proves stronger, the “criminal drive” or that special bond between student and teacher? Where does a crook’s loyalty really lie? With the profession itself, where ripping people off is admired? Or with his criminal partners?

The second thread was born from my fascination with the double-cross, the double agent, the Mission Impossible pull-off-the-latex-mask deception where nothing is as it seems. That dark place where morals are murky and shifting allegiances are standard operating procedure.

Which begat the question, how many double-crosses and switchbacks could I shoehorn into one story without things getting ridiculous?

(FYI, nine double-crosses is too many.)

William Dylan Powell is an award-winning author who writes funny and sometimes dark crime stories set in Texas. Powell’s short fiction has been featured in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and other publications. He’s also the author of Untimely Demise: A Miscellany of Murder. He lives in Houston.

• I’ve always been fascinated with the intersection of nature and urban living—which can seem so fundamentally unnatural. When I first heard about the one hundred–plus vehicles submerged in the murky water of Houston’s bayous, I couldn’t help but wonder about the story behind each. At the same time, cheap oil was eviscerating the energy-based Houston economy, which had for the most part shrugged at the downturn felt by the rest of the country. I wanted to write a story bringing these two very Houston phenomena together.

Texas EquuSearch, a volunteer force that helps find missing persons via horseback, initially discovered the vehicles while using sonar equipment in the course of their work. After “The Apex Predator” was published (though not because of it), the Harris County Flood Control District, together with the City of Houston and Harris County Precinct 2 commissioner Jack Morman, initiated the Submerged Vehicle Recovery Project.

Working in phases, the project removed more than seventy vehicles from Houston bayous. Most of the vehicles had been stolen, one during an aggravated robbery and another during a home invasion. Seventeen were too deteriorated for identification, and many simply fell apart. Unlike in my story, nothing of investigative interest was found in any of the vehicles. The project was completed in mid-August 2017. Hurricane Harvey hit on August 29, 2017.

Scott Loring Sanders is the author of two novels, a short story collection, and an essay collection called Surviving Jersey: Danger & Insanity in the Garden State. A previous story of his appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, and he’s also had work noted in The Best American Essays 2015. The piece selected for this year’s anthology was first published in his collection Shooting Creek and Other Stories. He is a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and his work has appeared in a wide array of journals, ranging in scope from Creative Nonfiction to North American Review to Sweet, among many others. He’s been the writer in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and most recently was a fellow at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY, where he began work on a new literary suspense novel. He teaches creative writing (including mystery writing) at Emerson College and Lesley University.

• The evolution and actual creation of this story, like all of my work, is more or less a complete mystery (pun intended.) I do know that at the time I was teaching a story by Larry Brown called “Big Bad Love,” which has nothing to do with crime or mystery at all. But I’ve always loved that protagonist’s voice, and so, using my own little spin, I tried to mimic some of that with my main character, Steven. Except where Larry Brown’s protagonist was a bit of a sexist, drunken dimwit, I wanted Steven to be much more savvy and complex than the way most people perceived him on first blush. In fact, I wanted him to use that misperception to his advantage. I believe the saying that best describes him goes something like, “Oh, he’s dumb all right. Dumb like a fox.”

I often set my stories in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where I lived for twenty-five years. I love those mountains, as well as the people who hail from them. For several years I worked on Christmas tree farms in the area and always knew that one day I’d probably write about the experience, because it’s such a rich and unique environment. It’s tough, brutal work (far more difficult than sitting at a desk and punching keys on a keyboard) but also gratifying and a great way to experience the outdoors through all four seasons, with each period offering its own particular challenges and rewards. During my time on the farms I met some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever known, as well as some of the most down-to-earth and caring, but I was always bothered by how certain groups were clearly treated differently than others. Perhaps, in my own little way, this sheds some light on that. But mostly it’s just a story full of twists and turns and surprises to keep readers thinking and on their toes. I hope I was able to accomplish that with “Waiting on Joe” while creating a bit of an homage to the late, great Larry Brown. And yeah, I once had a dog exactly like Erick—smelly rabbit fetus, leather footballs, dirty diapers, and all. But his name was Kafka, swear to God.

Brian Silverman has been a professional writer for over thirty years. The diverse subjects he has covered over those years include food, travel, music, and sports. His travel and food writing has appeared in publications such as Islands, Caribbean Travel & Life, and Saveur. He served as senior writer for Frommer’s Travel Guides for ten years and was the author of that brand’s New York City guidebook series. His sports background includes, most notably, editing Going, Going, Gone: The History, Lore and Mystique of the Home Run and, in a collaboration with his father, Al Silverman, The Twentieth Century Treasury of Sports. A lifelong love of mystery literature and the works of Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, Walter Mosley, and Charles Willeford, to name just a few, inspired him to write his debut mystery story, “Breadfruit.” He lives in New York with his wife of twenty years, his two sons, and a dog named Milton.

• As a travel writer I’ve visited most every Caribbean island and some more than a few times. I covered the region mainly from a cultural perspective; I would write about the music, the food, festivals, and the people rather than about the all-inclusive hotels or the cruise-boat lines that frequent the Caribbean. I came to love many of the islands, especially the smaller, more remote ones that were still somewhat immune to the encroachment of big-time tourism and all that entails. I wrote a short story not long ago with the main character, an ex–New Yorker, who settles on one of those small remote islands, a fish out of water who starts a business on the island and slowly comes to learn the sometimes strange ways of the island. The story, “Pane di Casa,” was not a traditional mystery, though you could, I guess, call it a mystery of the heart. I wrote another with the same character and on the same fictional island, which I named St. Pierre, and then, thanks to the persistent prodding of my wife, who knew of my love of the works of Lawrence Block, Chester Himes, Michael Connelly, and others, encouraged me to try something similar to what I was reading and had read almost all my life. Taking the characters and the fictional island I created in the other stories, I turned the main character into someone who, whether he wants to or not, begins to solve crimes and other problems; who becomes involved in a deeper way in the lives of the islanders. The first of those stories is “Breadfruit.”