The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

Contributors’ Notes

Pam Blackwood grew up south of Greensboro, North Carolina, surrounded by extended family, a host of animals, and a child’s haven of nine wooded acres to explore. She learned to love stories by listening to those her father told at the supper table on Saturday evenings. Now, somewhat tamed, she lives in the city limits with her husband, Taylor, and two black cats, Jem and Scout.

• The concepts in “Justice” are very personal to me. Having lost several loved ones over the years, I, like William, am unable to accept platitudes as comfort for the day-to-day heartbreak that comes with loss. The story was driven by my desire to let William find his way back, even while giving full expression to his bitterness and grief.

Jerry M. Burger is professor emeritus of psychology at Santa Clara University. His short stories have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Harpur Palate, the Briar Cliff Review, and the Potomac Review, among other publications. His novel, The Shadows of 1915, examines the generational effects of the 1915 Armenian genocide.

• The seed for “Home Movie” came from a newspaper article I stumbled upon several years ago about the discovery of some pre-WWII movies. The films were of Jewish citizens taken in either Germany or Poland just before the rise of the Nazis. What I recall most from the article is the descriptions of how happy everyone seemed and how they had no idea that their world was about to change for the worse. This observation got me thinking about how photographs and home movies necessarily capture people and events in the middle of their stories and how differently we react to old pictures based on what those stories turn out to be.

James Lee Burke has published thirty-nine novels and two collections of short stories. He is the recipient of two Edgar Awards, the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Three of his novels have been adapted for the screen, and a fourth is in production. He and his wife, Pearl, have lived for many years in western Montana.

• The first scene in my story is one I remember from the days after Pearl Harbor, when my mother and I pulled up to my grandfather’s house. I remember the coldness, the dust, the broken windmill rattling in the wind, the bareness of the land, as though it had been stricken by an angry hand, the light that had been drained forever from the sky. Psychologists call this a world-destruction fantasy. However, this was no fantasy.

And neither were the deportees. In bad times, frightened people seek scapegoats. The desperate and the poor on our borders have no voice. A man in our White House demonizes them. I hope this story says something about the precipitous times in which we live. I also hope it says something about the goodness of Latino people and the holiness that I believe is characteristic of the many I have known and lived among.

Michael Cebula’s fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, ThugLit, Midwestern Gothic, Mystery Weekly Magazine, and the anthology Murder Mayhem Short Stories. His story “The Gunfighters” was selected as an honorable mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019. He lives in the Midwest with his wife, Sheryl, and his sons, Silas and Samuel.

• I can’t write a short story until I know exactly what the first lines are, and once I put them down, they don’t change. The opening lines of “Second Cousins” bounced around in my head for several months, but other projects got in the way before I could sit down and write them. Once I did, the rest of the story came fast. One of the things I find most fascinating about fiction — ​or real life, for that matter — ​are people who generally think of themselves as fundamentally good or normal discovering, to the contrary, exactly what they are capable of when life demands it. Hopefully “Second Cousins” explores a shade of that in an interesting and entertaining way.

The managing editor of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine under the editorship of Cathleen Jordan during the late 1980s, Brian Cox is now a newspaper editor in Detroit. He has received a handful of state and national press awards for his reporting and opinion writing. In 2017 his dramatic play Clutter made its world premiere at Theatre Nova in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and went on to earn two Wilde Awards, for best new script and best performance — original production. As the artistic director of PencilPoint TheatreWorks in southeast Michigan, Cox produces “Snapshots: Stories of Life,” a live storytelling event in which people share true stories from their lives based on a personal photograph. He made his crossword puzzle debut when his puzzle “Knock-Knock” was published in the July 26, 2017, edition of the New York Times. He and his wife, Dana, have two children, Elijah and Annie.

• “The Surrogate Initiative” started out as a concept story after a particularly well-targeted advertisement came across my phone, prompting me to think, Wow, they are getting disturbingly precise at figuring out my tastes and interests, which led me to consider the idea that technology — ​AI in particular — ​cannot be far from being able to simulate an individual’s decisionmaking process and accurately predict that person’s judgments, and I started speculating what that might eventually look like. Jury duty struck me as a suitable environment to explore the question, and I became intrigued by the challenge of writing a science fiction legal thriller.

I ran the concept by a few lawyer friends of mine, and they seemed intrigued enough by the idea to buy me a beer and offer some insights, and I became involved in building the story out. I particularly enjoyed imagining Detroit in the not-too-distant future.

As the plot developed and the character of Cassandra Howard emerged, I sensed loneliness in her that I didn’t understand, and it was through considering her loneliness that the special relationship with her father formed, which led me to this larger idea that the technological pursuit of digitally capturing our identities — ​our personhood — ​could result in an approximation of immortality, which, I realized with a forehead slap, I had read about years and years ago in a book by Frank J. Tipler called The Physics of Immortality, large swaths of which I hadn’t understood but had nonetheless found fascinating.

Having lost my mother a few years ago, I know Cassandra’s ache to have her father back, and I wonder how many of us who have felt that loss, if presented with the opportunity she has to resurrect her parent, would make the same choice at the end. The temptation and emotional reward would be too great for me, I fear.

Doug Crandell has received awards from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Kellogg Writers Series, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, and the Jentel Artist Residency. One of his stories appears in Pushcart Prize 2017. NPR’s Glynn Washington chose Doug’s story for the 2017 Page to Screen Award. A short story was awarded the 2017 Glimmer Train Family Matters Fiction Award, and stories are forthcoming in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Sun, and the Saturday Evening Post. Doug has been appointed as public service faculty at the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia. He is the author of four novels, two memoirs, and a true crime book about Santa Claus, Georgia.

• I grew up on farms in Indiana, places that were owned by landlords. My folks were called cash renters, a configuration that’s similar to sharecropping. On one of those properties, nestled among corn and soybean fields, is a real water feature named Shanty Falls. As a kid I played there, and when we left the place for another, the falls stayed with me. Those types of geographies can follow a writer for a long time, and I was somewhat dismayed that I’d never used it as a backdrop for fiction before. That explains the inspiration for the setting.

I’ve had quite a few inquiries about the ending of the story, which I will attempt to explain here. When I was in college, my best friend since kindergarten had traveled to the campus to spend the weekend with me, and we found several parties to attend, all of which had cheap keg beer. My friend had always been a bit careless with his own safety, sometimes getting into fights. In a crowded house party, from across the room I could see he was flirting with someone’s girlfriend, and the guy, someone we all knew liked to fight, decided to beat up my friend. People scattered, and I rushed to help while others pulled the guy off my best friend. When I got a good look at him and helped him to the car, it was clear he’d need stitches.

After he got almost a dozen stitches above his right eye and lip, I took him home to my rundown apartment. He was in pain but slept a lot. I found myself angry, with that kind of deep-down need for revenge. But I’m Quaker, and that provided a conundrum. I stewed. By 4 a.m. I found out where the guy lived and drove there, knocked on the door. His roommates roused him. I told the guy that my friend he’d beaten was in a coma, on life support. I told him the cops had asked me for names of others at the party. I told him that my friend’s parents were bringing their lawyer, flying in from Chicago, arriving in the next hour. I told him he’d better run.

I’d struck him with lies, with fiction, with an invention. I made up a story in real life thirty years ago to get payback, then used the technique again as the closer for Shanty Falls. It feels true to me.

David Dean’s short stories have appeared regularly in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies, since 1990. His stories have been nominated for the Shamus, Barry, and Derringer Awards, and “Ibrahim’s Eyes” won the EQMM Readers Award for 2007, as did “The Duelist” for 2019. His story “Tomorrow’s Dead” was a finalist for the Edgar for best short story of 2011. He is a retired chief of police in New Jersey and once served as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. His novels, The Thirteenth Child, Starvation Cay, and The Purple Robe, are all available through Amazon.

• “The Duelist” is what’s called historical fiction, and yes, I do get the irony. I have written but a few, and I only wrote those because the stories wouldn’t have worked set in modern times. So, too, did “The Duelist” demand a historical context, because of its plot, its characters, and its language. In many ways the story is as much about language — ​what is being said, and how, as well as what is not said but lies beneath — ​as it is about the violence that serves to frame the story and provide its impetus.

What I can state is that the story is one about deception and truth, vengeance and justice, bravery and cowardice, love and loss. But it’s mostly about bullying, and that’s why I wrote it, though I didn’t think of it at the time. It was only later that I recognized my motivation. Most of us have experienced being bullied or made afraid by someone at some time in our lives. I am no exception. In fact, looking back on my life, I suspect that being bullied had a lot to do with my choosing to be a police officer for twenty-five years. I wanted to protect people. I don’t like bullies. My guess is that you don’t either. If that’s the case, “The Duelist” may satisfy you.

A former journalist, folksinger, and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is a number-one bestselling author whose novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the New York Times, the Times of London, 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 twenty-five languages. He has served two terms as the president of the Mystery Writers of America.

The author of forty-three novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book, and a lyricist of a country-western album, he has received or been shortlisted for dozens of awards. His The Bodies Left Behind was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers association, and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Broken Window and a stand-alone, Edge, were also nominated for that prize. He has been awarded the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Nero Award. He is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. Solitude Creek and The Cold Moon were both given the number-one ranking by Kono Mystery Ga Sugoi! in Japan. The Cold Moon was also named Book of the Year by the Mystery Writers Association of Japan.

Deaver has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention and the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award in Italy. The Strand Magazine also has presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Deaver has been nominated for eight Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony, a Shamus, and a Gumshoe.

• I’ve always had an affection for reading short fiction, and I’ve learned much about writing from the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Joyce Carol Oates, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ray Bradbury, among many others. I also thoroughly enjoy writing short stories. I’ve always felt that all storytelling has as its most important goal emotionally engaging the audience to the greatest degree possible. I want to be captivated by art and entertainment, not merely intrigued or interested.

In long-form fiction this level of intensity is accomplished through creating complex, utterly real characters (good and bad) and intersecting, fast-paced plots. Without the luxury of length, however, how can short fiction achieve such emotional intensity?

“Security” is a perfect example of how I try to do just that: I grab readers with one device only: a shocking twist (or, ideally, two or three) at the end. I’m the illusionist, the sleight-of-hand artist, juggling props and displaying cards and keeping their eyes (in my case, minds) from seeing the truth — ​until, at the very end, it’s OMG, so that’s what was going on!

“Security” was part of an anthology called Odd Partners, in which we authors were asked to pair disparate protagonists, or antagonists, put them in a pressure cooker, and see what would happen. My story involves a streetwise woman security guard and a by-the-book law enforcer whose job is to protect an ambitious political candidate who doesn’t make their job very easy, to put it mildly.

I spent about a month outlining the story (I outline everything I write), getting the pieces to come together — ​especially making sure the ending would be completely unexpected yet completely fair. Only after it was planned out did I write the prose. I pounded out “Security” in two or three days. I’d write more here, but I’m hesitant to, for fear I’d give away some of the surprises.

Besides, as any illusionist will tell you, one doesn’t talk about a magic trick; one performs it. Enjoy!

John M. Floyd’s short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, the 2015 and 2018 editions of The Best American Mystery Stories, and many other publications. A former air force captain and IBM systems engineer, he is also an Edgar nominee, a three-time Derringer Award winner, a recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the author of eight books. He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Mississippi.

• If I recall, my first inspiration for “Rhonda and Clyde” came on a bitterly cold day. (We don’t have many of those here in the South, thank God.) It probably put me in a Fargo frame of mind, because when I created Wyoming sheriff Marcie Ingalls that morning, the image of the movie character Marge Gunderson sort of jumped into my head, and it stayed there throughout the planning of the story. That choice of a protagonist wasn’t surprising; I’ve always liked stories about strong and smart women in law enforcement, and the way their colleagues (and the criminals) often make the mistake of underestimating them.

I also remember wanting to (1) give her a deputy she didn’t particularly like and (2) make the villains a husband-wife team, maybe because I especially enjoy writing dialogue and I knew both those partnerships would give me a lot of opportunity for that. This line of thinking was a bit different for me, because I usually start with the plot and only then come up with the characters. In this case I created my players first and then dreamed up something for them to do, with some twists and reversals along the way. Anyhow, once I had all that in mind, I sat down and wrote the story in a couple of days’ time — ​and it turned out to be one of my favorites.

Maybe an occasional cold snap isn’t a bad thing...

Tom Franklin is the author of a collection of stories, Poachers, the title story of which won an Edgar Award. His novels include Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, the UK’s Gold Dagger for Best Novel, and the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction. His most recent novel is The Tilted World, cowritten with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and teaches in the MFA Program at Ole Miss.

• I wrote this story because the great Lawrence Block asked me to, for his terrific anthology From Sea to Stormy Sea. Block had writers choose an American painter (from a list) and then select one of his or her paintings (from another list) and go from there. My painter was John Hull, and the painting is called This Much I Know. I’d not heard of this artist, but the picture he did was rather quiet, muted in color, depicting a small house and a couple of cars, bystanders, cops. It seemed like an “after” shot — ​something terrible had happened in that house, and I began wondering what the “before” was. The story came quickly after that.

Richard Helms is a retired forensic psychologist and college professor. He has been nominated six times for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award, winning it twice; five times for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award; twice for the International Thriller Writers Thriller Award, with one win; and once for the Mystery Readers International Macavity Award. He is also a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, along with other periodicals and anthologies, and has recently written three screenplays for independent filmmakers in North Carolina. A former member of the board of directors of Mystery Writers of America and the former president of the Southeast Regional Chapter of MWA (SEMWA), he was presented with the SEMWA Magnolia Award for service to the chapter in 2017. “See Humble and Die” is his first appearance in The Best American Mystery Stories.

• I’ve lived in the South all my life. Though a greater portion of those sixty-five years has been spent in cities like Charlotte, Charleston, and Atlanta, I have always been fascinated by small towns. In fact, for twenty-three years — ​until we downsized and moved back to Charlotte in 2016 —​ we lived in a town so small it had neither a police force nor a post office of its own. Law enforcement was handled by the county Sheriff’s Department, and our mail arrived courtesy of a post office in a town ten miles away. We were one step removed from being a 1950s-style rural route.

Living in a small town is a strange mix. On one hand, neighbors tend to be closer and to support one another better than in a city. The downside is the potential for simple arguments to turn into bitter, decades-long blood feuds or, in the worst case, to erupt overnight in violent retribution. Resentments simmer and run long and deep in places where you cannot escape or hide from disputes.

My captivation with small-town life led me to devour Bill Crider’s series of Texas-based Sheriff Dan Rhodes novels. I finally met Bill at the Shamus Awards in St. Louis several years back. We developed a casual friendship that I dearly wish had been closer and of longer duration. Bill was gracious enough to provide a cover blurb for one of my small-town Judd Wheeler crime novels (Older Than Goodbye), and I am indebted to him for his support. I last talked with Bill at Bouchercon in Toronto, only months before he passed away. When I heard that Michael Bracken was editing a book of Texas private eye stories, I endeavored to produce a story that would make Bill proud. With the inclusion of “See Humble and Die” in this collection, I hope that mission was accomplished.

Ryan David Jahn is the author of seven novels, including Good Neighbors, which won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Dagger, and The Dispatcher, which was named by the Financial Timesas a top-ten crime novel of the year. He lives with his wife, Jessica, and two daughters, Francine and Matilda, in Louisville, Kentucky.

• My father killed himself in March 2004 while living in an RV park in Bullhead City, Arizona. I hadn’t talked to him in eight years, and don’t remember crying when I found out — ​don’t remember feeling much of anything at all. It was just information, like reading the obituary of someone you’ve never met in the morning paper. A stranger died and I was supposed to be torn up about it or something, but I wasn’t. I got a box of his things, including pictures he’d taken in Vietnam, his medals, and letters he’d written to his own father. I read about his platoon taking mortar fire; I read about a single leg lying in the dirt and how disconcerting it was to see it detached from a body.

An RV lifestyle catalogue dated February 2004 was in the box of his belongings I’d gotten. My father had circled a cabinet set, something he planned to buy for the RV he was living in if and when he got the money together. That made me cry. In February he’d had plans for the future — ​he was going to buy some new cabinets for his RV — ​but in March he was dead. I wondered if he’d saved some of the money.

My youngest daughter, Francine, likes to go hiking with me. We drive out to the woods and spend hours surrounded by trees, walking in relative silence. Sometimes we see a family of deer. Francine and I both freeze in those moments, and the deer freeze, and we all look at each other with dumb blank eyes, and in that instant — ​in that second before a distant twig snaps, breaking the spell — ​the world is absolutely perfect and beautiful. Take a picture and keep it forever. I’m not the most self-reflective person on earth, so I can’t tell you why, but “All This Distant Beauty” is about the mental and emotional juxtaposition of those two things: my father’s suicide sixteen years ago and an afternoon hike with my six-year-old daughter. Make of it what you will.

Sheila Kohler is the author of eleven novels, three volumes of short fiction, a memoir, and many essays. Her most recent novel is Dreaming for Freud, based on the Dora case, and Open Secrets will be published in July 2020. Her memoir, Once We Were Sisters, was published in 2017 in the United States, England, and Spain. She has won numerous prizes, including an O. Henry Award. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories and published in thirteen countries. She has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Princeton. Her novel Cracks was made into a film directed by Jordan Scott, with Eva Green playing Miss G. You can find her blog at Psychology Today under “Dreaming for Freud.”

• When Joyce Carol Oates, with her habitual generosity, asked me for a story for the anthology Cutting Edge, I sat down to write one for her, and “Miss Martin” appeared quite fast on the page, though I had to go back and revise somewhat, of course.

As so often with stories, there are some details from life: a house on Long Island with a loft above the dining room, which we built for grandchildren in the summer. Even the fall occurred to my poor husband, who went up the ladder that a workman had propped up carelessly against the wall and punctured a lung. I wanted to change the usual triangle here, with the “wicked stepmother” turning out in the end to be of help to my young protagonist. Here too, I have been a stepmother in life, and of course I do come from South Africa. I asked my husband, a psychiatrist, what a father could do that might merit punishment, and his response came fast: “Incest,” he said.

Jake Lithua was forever corrupted at the age of five, when he discovered his father’s Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. Ever since, he has been interested in telling stories of heroism and courage, fantastical or real-world. His short story “The Most Powerful Weapon” was first published in The Odds Are Against Us; his novella “Trust” is included in Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, published in 2018. He lives far too close to Washington, D.C., for anyone’s good.

• Ariya, or a character like her, has been bouncing around in my head for a long time. She began her conceptual life as a teenage American mercenary, a cold-blooded, traumatized survivor of war crimes who sticks out like a sore thumb among the relatively ordinary students at her boarding school. Then ISIS exploded onto the world scene in 2013 and 2014; with the savagery of their crimes, and especially their treatment of the Yazidis, it made sense to have the character who would become Ariya be a Yazidi herself, an enslaved child bride.

I don’t remember why I chose the name Tristan for the American Green Beret. Maybe I had James Herriot’s books floating around in the back of my head. But I like the idea of introducing Tristan, making it seem like he would be the white knight, and then pulling the rug out. Still, he plays an important role: he teaches Ariya that she is not just a victim, that she too can act. It is a lesson that we all can learn a little better, I think.

The anger that Tristan expresses at the Americans leaving is mine as well; in a sense, the story was motivated by my fury that we had abandoned people who had risked so much to ally with us and allowed ISIS to run rampant for over a year. Beating an ISIS mujahid to death in fiction doesn’t accomplish much in the real world, but it certainly felt good.

After twenty-five years in federal law enforcement, Rick McMahan retired as a senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 2017. Currently he is a law enforcement instructor for Kentucky’s Department of Criminal Justice Training. Rick’s short stories have appeared in various publications, including twice having the privilege of being published in Mystery Writers of America anthologies (Death Do Us Partand Vengeance). “Baddest Outlaws” appeared in After Midnight, an anthology by the Writers’ Police Academy.

• The idea for “Baddest Outlaws” came from a real-life cop story told to me by my former coworker and friend Shawn Morman. Before becoming an ATF agent, Shawn was a Kentucky state trooper. Now, in Kentucky, Kentucky State Police is known as a no-nonsense agency enforcing the law in many remote counties. In some parts of the state officers are working where their nearest backup (if any) is a half hour away. KSP instills a distinct confidence and attitude, along with the sharply creased uniforms and polite conversation (No, ma’am, Yes, sir).

The way Shawn told the story was that when he started policing, several of the more experienced troopers warned him not to go on any call having to do with a certain family without several more officers (not just one!) as backup. Like a line from my story goes, when Kentucky state troopers leave their academy, they think they’re ten feet tall and bulletproof. I wondered what kind of dangerous criminals would make them be so cautious. He said that the family, every last one of them, was combative with law enforcement. Then Morman told me that the family known for fighting police were all “little people.” At that point I knew I had just found the nugget of a story that I needed to write.

I guess it’s because Kentucky has had some memorable and colorful crime groups that I wanted to make the criminal family more than just a family of ne’er-do-wells. Marion County’s Cornbread Mafia was a group of marijuana growers who instilled respect and fear among their own and other criminals. In fact, Johnny Boone ran the Cornbread Mafia with a very strict code of silence. During his first stint in prison, Boone had omerta, the Italian Mafia’s word for its code of silence, tattooed across his back. Over fifty members of the Cornbread Mafia were prosecuted in federal court, and not a single one agreed to cooperate with the government and turn state’s witness. Boone himself fled before trial and for several decades eluded police.

Another unique crime group was Drew Thornton’s cocaine-smuggling crew, made up of ex-military members and ex-cops, all criminals, as chronicled in the book The Bluegrass Conspiracy. They flew cocaine from South America into the southeast United States. They claimed to be working for the CIA. Of course that was never proven and denied by the government, but they sure had a ton of weapons they moved around. They had connections to politicians in Kentucky, some rumored to be as high as the governor’s office. As the crew became more brazen, law enforcement took notice and began investigating the group. As criminal investigations grew, the crew began to unravel. Several members went to prison, for everything from stealing classified government equipment to drug trafficking as well as murdering a Florida judge. However, Drew Thornton’s end wasn’t in a courtroom; rather, his demise played out like a scene from a bad spy movie. While flying back with a load of cocaine, his plane was being targeted by Customs aircraft, which he couldn’t lose. In an attempt to get away, Drew put on a parachute and jumped. However, he had strapped several duffel bags of cocaine along with a silenced pistol to his body, overloading the chute. He plummeted to his death, and was discovered when a homeowner walked out to his driveway to get his morning paper. Before jumping from the plane, Thornton and his copilot had shuffled more duffel bags out along their route. One of those floating parachutes full of cocaine landed in the Smoky Mountains National Forest. A curious black bear got into the duffel bag, and before his heart exploded, the bear consumed several pounds of Colombian powder. The Cocaine Bear is stuffed and on display in a museum in Kentucky.

With such colorful (and, never forget, dangerous) criminal organizations in Kentucky’s history, I wanted the Creeches to be just as unique. In deciding where to set the story, I used the imaginary Clement County, a place invented by my writing mentors Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet. Many of their own mysteries, published under their pen name (Hal Charles), are set in Clement County, so I decided it would be as good a place as any for the Baddest Outlaws of Kentucky to call home.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, the author of nonfiction books, and an award-winning prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is the author of four novels and 150 short stories, a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and a world-class Halloween expert. Her most recent books include Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers 1852–1923 (coedited with Leslie S. Klinger) and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances. Lisa lives in the San Fernando Valley and online at www​.lisamorton​.com.

• My grandfather loved to shoot anything with his 16mm movie camera (remember when we had cameras instead of phones?), and I inherited a box of these tiny reels of film that could have anything on them. I suspect most of them are probably pretty dull vacation footage with people I won’t even recognize, so I’ve never paid to transfer them to DVD, but whenever I glance at that box, I always wonder, What if...? What if there’s something on there that he filmed by accident, or meant to destroy after he had the film developed? He was a lifelong resident of Indiana, so it’s thoroughly unlikely that he photographed any Veronica Lake — ish movie stars (like the title character in my story). I think I prefer to let the movies remain unknown and instead imagine that they hold tantalizing mysteries.

John Sandford (pen name for John Camp) has written more than fifty thriller novels, all of which have appeared, in one form or another, on the New York Times bestseller list, including many that debuted at number one. A former newspaper reporter, Sandford won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1986 for stories about a farm family experiencing small farming’s economic and financial crisis of the mid-1980s. In addition he has written nonfiction books on art (The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle) and plastic surgery (The Kindest Cut). He lives in Santa Fe with his wife, the screenwriter Michele Cook, and their Belgian malinois, Willa.

• I don’t write much short fiction, but when Lawrence Block approached me about doing a short story based on a famous painting, the idea greatly appealed to me. I’m an art history buff, the way some people are Civil War buffs, and have a special affection for American paintings of the first half of the twentieth century. I also play guitar, strictly as a hobby, and once considered writing a thriller based around L.A. pop music culture. My prospective title for the novel was “Girl with an Ax.” Maybe I still will do that, but she showed up first in this short story. And there was another thing going on. Way back when, working as a reporter, I was also trying to write novels, without much initial success, Larry Block was well known for his how-to books on writing as well as his fiction. I was looking through one of them when I encountered something to the effect of “Throw away your first chapter.” That was the only thing I ever got out of a how-to book, but it sort of changed my life. He was saying, in effect, don’t go through a bunch of tedious scene-setting and character introductions — ​go with the story. I threw away my first chapter and was on my way as a fiction writer. I’ve always felt indebted to him for that, so when he asked...

David B. Schlosser is an award-winning fiction and nonfiction author and an award-winning editor. His fiction has appeared in university literary journals and online magazines. His nonfiction and journalism have run in business and trade publications, academic and scientific journals, and print and online news outlets. As a political, public relations, advertising, marketing, and content strategist, he has delighted and offended people in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as on Hard Copy and Inside Edition. As a teacher, he has engaged high school debaters, university writers and communicators, continuing education mystery fans, and writers and editors at seminars and conferences. Kansan by birth, he turned Texan while earning degrees at Trinity University and the University of Texas. After living and working in nearly a dozen states, he, his lovely wife, Anne, and their dogs consider Seattle home.

• “Pretzel Logic” was inspired by Steely Dan’s song of the same title. I am grateful to Brian Thornton for his invitation to submit a story to the anthologies of crime fiction inspired by the band’s music, Die Behind the Wheel and A Beast Without a Name, which he curated and edited. The concept of pretzel logic appealed to my sense that no matter how irrational a person’s behavior seems to observers, a rational human acts on motives I can understand if I peel enough layers off the onion. Part of the joy of storytelling is interpreting behavior and motivation through action. Part of the joy of Steely Dan’s music is that it’s open to so many different interpretations. The musicians who crafted the song claimed it’s about time travel. That was not my interpretation. After living in cities challenged by race issues I’d associated with prior generations before encountering them in mine, I also was inspired by the concept of minstrelry in the southland. I’ve been illuminated by more than a few light-bulb moments in which I came to understand as rational what appeared initially to me irrational. I wanted to explore my fellow humans going about routines that seem counterintuitive, counterproductive, or antisocial but on deeper consideration make not just sense but perfect, tragic sense. I also have wanted to work into a story the location of the story’s climax — ​one building in two states. That building exists in Kansas City, but I imagine this story’s fictional metro area is more like Charlotte, which sprawls over the line between the Carolinas. I’m optimistic that Bax will enjoy more adventures there, and I hope that you will enjoy reading about them in the future.

Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and the author of nine novels, four of which feature professional thief Crissa Stone, whom Kirkus Reviews called “crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.” His previous short story, “Night Run,” was chosen for the 2017 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories. He has 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 (N.J.) Star-Ledger.

• Few books meant as much to me in my formative years as the novels of Lawrence Block. So I was happy to accept his invitation to contribute a short story to his 2019 anthology At Home in the Dark. The brief was simple — ​the stories could be in any genre, set anywhere and in any era, as long as they were at the “darker end of the spectrum.” I chose to revisit my series character Crissa Stone, a blue-collar professional thief who’d previously appeared in four novels, the last being 2015’s The Devil’s Share. Fittingly for the anthology, I wanted the story to take place over the course of a single night, with Crissa trying to hold on to $100,000 in stolen drug money while its previous owners hunt her down across a barren New York City nightscape. So I’m grateful to Larry for both the invitation to contribute and the chance to bring Crissa out of retirement, if only briefly.

Robin Yocum watched his father come home from a West Virginia steel mill black with fly ash and soot and thought, There’s got to be an easier way to make a living. When he discovered that writing required no heavy lifting and offered virtually zero chance of falling into a ladle of molten steel, he signed up. Yocum is proud of his Ohio River Valley roots and sets his fiction in eastern Ohio, near his boyhood home of Brilliant. A former award-winning crime reporter with the Columbus Dispatch, he has published two true-crime books and five novels. A Brilliant Death was a finalist for both the 2017 Edgar and the Silver Falchion Award for Best Adult Mystery. Favorite Sons was named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. Yocum is a proud graduate of Bowling Green State University, where he received a degree in journalism that prevented an untimely and fiery death in the steel mill.

• When I’m asked where I get the ideas for my stories, I offer this honest answer: I have no earthly idea. How does one explain imagination and the creative process? My brain is always pinballing with ideas.

With that said, I was no stranger to the presence of the mob while growing up in the Ohio River Valley. The Youngstown mob controlled the prostitution and gambling in Steubenville. It was the worst-kept secret ever. The whorehouses lined Water Street, and gambling was everywhere. Literally everywhere. I could get football spot sheets at my high school. I’m not even sure I knew they were illegal.

That’s where my protagonist, Angelo, was born in my imagination. He was a product of a system that thrived in the Ohio Valley when the steel mills were at their zenith. My late father said that the reason the Ohio Valley economy boomed was because the 60,000 steelworkers who lived and worked there spent every dime they made. A portion of those paychecks went for prostitutes and gambling. But when the mills died, there was no money for playing the daily number or the spot sheets, and there was certainly not enough money for a turn with the girls on Water Street. With no profits to be had, the mob retreated from the valley.

When that happened, I remember wondering what became of the old guard, the low-level mobsters, bagmen, and enforcers who made their money protecting the prostitutes, collecting debts, and breaking bones. You know, doing mob stuff. Does the mob have a retirement plan or offer severance packages? I’m betting no.

As the story unfolds, that’s where we find Angelo. He’s an admitted dinosaur who has lost his usefulness to the family. The story explores my version of what happens when a longstanding member of the mob is no longer mission critical. I can’t image it would be good.