Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night

Dennis Lynds

Both a literary and suspense novelist, Dennis Lynds is credited with bringing the detective novel into the modern age then, twenty years later-in the 1980s-introducing literary techniques that propelled the genre into its current dynamic form. An award winner, Lynds wrote under several pseudonyms, publishing some eighty novels and two hundred short stories. His most famous pen name was Michael Collins. Under that label he created fiction's longest-running detective series, starring the indelible private eye Dan Fortune. The New York Times consistently named Lynds's mysteries among the nation's top ten. One year, it listed two of his titles, each written under a different pseudonym, without realizing he was the author of both. His awards include both the Edgar and the Marlowe Lifetime Achievement.

Lynds also published literary novels and short stories. Five were honored in Best American Short Stories. Then, in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, he pioneered the detective form again, writing books in both third and first person and lacing them with short stories, techniques which today's writers employ regularly.

"Powerful and memorable, [these works] indicate Collins has embarked on a new course after some 60 books," wrote critic Richard C. Carpenter in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers. "Truly, he is a writer to be reckoned with." Of his most recent short story collection, Fortune's World, the Los Angeles Times commented, "To spin tales as intriguing and thought provoking as these for three decades is a remarkable enough achievement. Even more remarkable is the sustained quality… It takes style to bring that off. Bravery, too, of course."

Iconoclastic, witty and generous, sadly Lynds died August 19, 2005, at the age of eighty-one. Several of his short stories will be published posthumously, including the one here, Success of a Mission. This story was first published in 1968. Since then, it has been nominated for several awards and anthologized. The story is still relevant today in both its triumph and its tragedy.