The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

Introduction

As a kid, one who’d begun to want to write fiction by the time I was eleven or twelve, the first professional author I knew personally was Stanley Ellin, a master of the American crime short story. This was dumb luck for me — happenstance. Stan Ellin was one of the elders of the Brooklyn Friends Meeting — Quakers, as they’re colloquially called — a religious institution to which my father began taking me for Sunday school around that time.

Stan was a native of Brooklyn, a former steelworker and shipyard worker and army veteran who’d self-educated as a writer by immersing himself in the storytelling classics like Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, and Edgar Allan Poe. Among fellow writers he was celebrated for his subtlety and perfectionism, his measured craft. Never particularly famous in the wider culture, Stan was treasured in the field. He collected a few Edgars, was the president of the Mystery Writers of America, saw his works filmed a few times, and galvanized everyone who knew him personally with his integrity, fierce attentiveness, and droll charisma. When at some point in my teenage years I declared to Stan my intention to become a published writer, he encouraged me — barely. “Keep writing,” he told me. Simple words.

Though he wrote remarkable and beguiling novels in a number of different modes — detective novels, urban noirs, Hitchcockian wide-screen chase thrillers — Stan’s greatest accomplishment was in the art of the short story, and the yearly appearance of a new Ellin story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (he rarely managed more than one a year) was considered an event in the field. It took me a long time to realize how lucky I was to read Stan’s stories so early on, since he was the writer in plain sight for me, my parents’ friend and a local fixture, the fellow who somewhat scandalized his fellow Quakers with the darkness and sexuality in his late novels, particularly Mirror, Mirror on the Wall and Stronghold.

Yet he was also, truly, a marvel. A wizard. Stan’s story “The Question” remains one of the most acute and terrifying short stories I know, a study in complicity and implication that permanently illuminated my sense not only of what fiction can do but of what wallows in the recesses of the human psyche. “The Question” features an unrepeatable twist, but that was Stan’s signature: no two of his stories make the same moves. Like those of his models, Stevenson and Poe (and in some ways similar to those of international masters like Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges), each of Stan Ellin’s tales is singular, a tour de force.

I realize I’m describing stories that don’t appear in the anthology in your hands. You can seek out Stanley Ellin’s fiction now, or not. You can also skip this introduction, since that’s one of the main things introductions are for. I’ll at least explain: when Otto Penzler, who was Stan’s great friend and supporter as well as editor and publisher, asked me to consider selecting the stories for this year’s collection, the first thing I warned him of was that I’d want to make the introduction a tribute to Stanley Ellin. Thankfully, Otto didn’t blink.

Stan helped make me the person who’d be invited into this remarkable situation — not only a lifetime of reading and writing stories, of understanding how fiction can sustain a life and world-view, but of being invited by Otto to delve into the riches of the present version of the crime and mystery field and work with him on putting together this roster of remarkable stories. I’m not exclusively a crime writer (let alone a “mystery” writer, since I always forget to put in clues), and some people might say that my sporadic visitations to the role — three novels featuring detectives, in three different decades — makes me a wonky choice for presiding over this book.

I’m glad Otto didn’t think so. One of the things I love most about the present state of the crime field — or genre, that slippery word — is how much its boundaries have expanded and shifted, so that it has in certain ways engulfed and been engulfed by our larger understanding of what stories and novels are and what they can and should do. And yet (here’s the paradoxical part), much like the cousin fields of SF and fantasy and romance, the crime and mystery field remains a splendid affiliation, a community of obsession — perhaps an example of what Kurt Vonnegut called a “karass.” A family created by devotion.

Both sides of that coin are on view in the stories in this book: the strengths of a conversation within a self-defined community and the integration of its themes and motifs into literature — into the art of fiction — more widely. It’s nice not to have to choose between these things! This recent editorial journey, this immersion in the present tense of the field, has caused me to discover just how vital and diverse and happily contradictory the variations within a so-called genre can be. An anthology, at its best, reproduces a fundamental condition of any field of art or literature: that it is, always, greater than the sum of its parts.

Crime and mystery are essential to storytelling not only because of the truism — a true truism — that every story that captivates your interest is at some level a mystery. Yes, mystery lurks in language, in narrative, just as it lurks in the human heart. But it’s also the case that the specific do-wronging of one person or persons to another, and the impulse to explore or expose or make right the do-wronging, is the world we’re born to, the life we live, however unnerving it is to dwell on it. Crime stories are deep species gossip. They’re fundamentally stories of power, of its exercise both spontaneous and conspiratorial; stories of impulse and desire, and of the turning of tables. Crime stories allegorize the tensions in our self-civilizing, a process that’s never finished. (If I were a biblical guy I’d say this has been true “since Cain and Abel,” but since Alice in Wonderland is my bible I’ll say “since the tarts were stolen and Tweedledum and Tweedledee strapped on their armor.”) How can we not hang on their outcomes? Will injustice prevail? Might the oppressed outwit the powerful? Are we innocent ourselves, or complicit?

Turn these pages, and find out.

Jonathan Lethem