The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

Introduction

I cannot write short stories, any more than I can write poetry. I’ve tried, and the result, for both, is piles of something soft and smelly.

But oh, how I love to read them.

And how I admire both poets and those who can craft short stories. I think they come from the same taproot. A great short story is like a great poem. Crystalline in clarity. Each word with purpose. Lean, muscular, graceful.

Nothing wasted. A brilliant marriage of intellect, rational thought, and creativity.

I am in awe of those who can write short stories.

So when Otto Penzler asked me to be guest editor for this volume, I could not agree fast enough. To be honest, it’s just possible he did not ask me but rather was (quite sensibly) asking me to suggest others who might be better placed to judge.

But I didn’t care. I wanted to do it.

My love of the form started, as yours might have too, in infancy. With the stories read and reread at bedtime. While I was curled up, snug and warm and safe in bed, my mother would read, conjuring cowboys and princesses and untamed horses and wary piglets. Bringing whole worlds magically into the bedroom.

My first literary crush (I know I can trust you not to tell anyone) was Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Not Holmes but Watson. I have tried not to spend too much time analyzing that.

Did you know that Arthur Conan Doyle first planned to call John Watson “Ormond Sacker”?

I have to wonder if I’d have fallen quite so hard for Ormond Sacker.

I devoured all the Conan Doyle stories, and was quite upset when Watson married Mary Morstan and sincerely tried to feel bad for his “own sad bereavement.” But failed.

At university I spent a semester wearing a deerstalker. I began to question that fashion choice when I saw quite an attractive transvestite walking toward me, only to realize it was me in a mirror. After spending the semester date-free, I retired the deerstalker. But my love of all things Holmes (and Watson) remains to this day.

About that time I also met, figuratively speaking, Edgar Allan Poe, and while I did not develop a literary crush (nor did I repeat the deerstalker role-playing and have myself entombed prematurely—also bad for the love life), I have been haunted ever since by the horror of the telltale heart, the vivid images of the murders in the Rue Morgue, the house of Usher split apart by otherworldly forces. Poe’s short stories are romantic, oddly sensual, deeply disturbing, and unforgettable.

Only later did I hear that the great cryptologist William Friedman had been inspired as a boy to study ciphers after reading Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.” Friedman was instrumental in cracking a key Japanese code during World War II. How about that? A short story won the war in the Pacific. Or at least helped.

The Canadian writer Alice Munro recently won the Nobel Prize for literature for her contributions to the short story discipline.

And discipline is, I believe, the word to use. That’s what it takes to create a world, to breathe life into characters, to make us care about them. To give them flesh and blood, emotions and histories. All in a few well-chosen words.

A novel is a hundred thousand words, sometimes less, often more. But the works contained between these covers are only a few thousand. These writers are masters of the craft who, like Picasso and his sinuous line drawings, use a few short strokes to bring plot, characters, setting to life.

It takes creativity. Skill. Discipline. Knowledge of the form while not being formulaic. In a short story there is nowhere to hide. Each must be original, fresh, inspired.

And that’s what you have here.

The stories in this collection have been chosen from the thousands published in the United States and Canada in the past twelve months. From all of those, twenty made the cut. You can imagine how good these are. Varied. Imaginative. Ingenious. But, oh, the misery in trying to get it down to twenty! Felt at times like gnawing off a limb. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it was painful.

I was far from alone in the task of choosing. Otto Penzler, the Godfather of the Short Story (I believe that is actually his official title), led the way. He is indeed a leader in promoting this literary field. Elevating it. Making sure short stories are recognized and given the respect they deserve and have earned.

Just as (to return to the poetry analogy) haiku is not the baby sister of the sonnet, so too the short story is not a lesser version of a novel. It is its own literary form. With rules made to be both followed and transcended. Done well, as they are here, short stories entertain, enthrall, amaze, haunt.

You will recognize some of the writers. Lee Child has been brilliant and generous in providing a near-novella. Michael Connelly’s contribution is as smart and layered as you’d expect. The magnificent Joyce Carol Oates has a story that gets under the skin and into the marrow. And nests there.

Some of the writers will be new to you, as they were to me.

How thrilling it has been to discover new talent. To be a sentence, two, into a story and realize you’re in the hands of a master. Then to look again at the name of the author and realize it’s new to you. I think you’ll have that experience more than once in this book.

If it’s an exciting time to be a crime writer, it’s an even better time for those of us who love reading crime fiction.

It has been a singular honor to be asked to be guest editor of this anthology. The only difficulty, and it was awful, was having to winnow the collection down.

If someone had told me as I wandered the halls of academe in my deerstalker, searching for clues as to why I wasn’t being asked out, that one day I’d get to read all these marvelous short stories and guest-edit this volume, well, I’d never have believed it.

Not even Holmes could have predicted this. Now, my dear Dr. Watson…