The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
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Much to my disgust, I have a bit of a “nice girl” rep in the mystery world and short stories have given me a chance to shake that up. I was particularly flattered when Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon asked if I would write a story for The Cocaine Chronicles. “What do you know about cocaine?” asked my parents, already mildly discombobulated by the recent revelation that I once wrote erotica. “More than I know about golf!” I said, referencing another story. But I also had a secret agenda. The cocaine trade in cities such as Baltimore would be much less lucrative if suburbanites weren’t part of the customer base. I wanted to show an African-American drug dealer helpless in the face of true evil — two white girls on a diet.
Ed McBain, whose novels of the 87th Precinct, Matthew Hope, and other characters sold nearly 100 million copies worldwide, died on July 6, 2005. He had been battling throat cancer for three years. While he did not quite invent the police procedural novel, he refined it and popularized it, becoming a household name and winner of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Under his own name, Evan Hunter, he wrote such memorable novels as The Blackboard Jungle and Strangers When We Meet, both of which also were successful films. Among his screenplays was the Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Birds. Improvisation was his last short story.
Mike MacLean is a faculty member of Harrison Middleton University and the author of numerous published stories. Born and raised in Arizona, he lives in Tempe with his wife, Bobbie, and their three dogs. Along with his love of writing, Mike has a passion for the martial arts and holds a black belt in Ja-Shin-Do.
Mike’s short fiction can be found in the pages of Thug Lit, Thrilling Detective, Demolition Magazine, and Plots with Guns. His first novel, The Silent, is currently under consideration by major publishing houses.
There is a mundane suspense that comes with getting a package. “McHenry’s Gift” was an attempt to take that everyday experience and infuse it with tension. While many of my stories are quick and brutal, writing this one presented a different kind of challenge. I wanted to dangle the threat in front of the reader without resorting to overt scenes of violence. I wanted to make the reader sweat it out.
Walter Mosley is the author of twenty-four critically acclaimed books, and his work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Some of his characters have become iconic: from the reluctant detective Easy Rawlins to the ex-con philosopher Socrates Fortlow. His books encompass a wide range of genres: from his popular mysteries to literary fiction, nonfiction, young adult fiction, and science fiction. He has won numerous awards including the Anisfield Wolf Award; a Grammy Award for his linear notes accompanying Richard Pryor... And It’s Deep Too!: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992); an O’Henry Award in 1996 (for a Socrates Fortlow story); the Sundance Institute Risktaker Award; and a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in New York City.
I am so happy to have this story recognized in the crime fiction field. I was deeply satisfied with the world that Leonid McGill represents. I wanted to start writing about New York and about the toll working with crime has on both sides of the law. This story is the beginning of a long and convoluted literary relationship.
Joyce Carol Oates, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978, is the author most recently of the novel Black Girl/White Girl (Ecco/HarperCollins) and the noir story collection The Female of the Species (Otto Penzler Books, Harcourt). She is the 2003 recipient of the Common Wealth Award for Achievement in Literature and the 2005 Prix Femina for her novel The Falls. She lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey.
Like most of my fiction, “So Help Me God” was evoked by some mysterious conjunction of place, time, and character. The setting is upstate New York in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, where young men like Luke Pittman, prone to violence, yet “attractive” as charismatic personalities, may be as likely to go into local law enforcement as into a life of sporadic crime. The attraction of such men to women, including even young women from “good” families, is part of the subject here, like the gradual awakening, in such a marriage, that the wife may have to emulate her violence-prone husband in order to save her own life. We’ve all had experiences with mysterious, unidentified telephone calls, especially women; the story’s opening was suggested by an episode of some years ago in my life, which remained unexplained.
Sue Pike is the editor of Locked Up, an anthology of short mystery stories marking the 175th anniversary of the construction of the Rideau Canal, a navigable system of lakes and rivers joining Lake Ontario to Canada’s capital in Ottawa. The canal was built as a defense against American invasion but now welcomes hundreds of boaters from the country each year.
Sue has stories in all six of the Ladies’ Killing Circle anthologies and is editor of Fit to Die, Bone Dance, and When Boomers Go Bad. Her work has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Storyteller and Cold Blood V, as well as Murder in Vegas. She won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story of 1997.
I wrote this sitting on the dock at our cottage on Lake Opinicon in Eastern Ontario, feeling about as far away from Las Vegas as it’s possible to be. I had a recalcitrant temporary crown at the time and began to wonder if DNA might lurk in its porous plastic. My dentist wouldn’t commit on the subject but I notice he’s been a little wary of me ever since.
Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship.
I was surprised to learn that “Smile” was selected for this anthology because I didn’t conceive it as a mystery story. My father, who is from the region depicted in “Smile,” describes it as a horror story. I think of it more as a love story because it depicts my romance with the Cajun language. Who knows? Maybe it’s all three. I’ve been thinking about the “mystery” designation, though. The thing that isn’t said, the thing that’s strategically withheld, is usually the thing that makes a reader want to turn the page. In a way, a lot of successful fiction could be referred to as mystery. Writing for me, like life, is also a mysterious process. I don’t know how it’s going to end and it’s only through the blind act of doing it that meaning occurs.
R. T. Smith lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and edits Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review. His stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and his new collection, Uke Rivers Delivers, published by LSU Press in 2006. He is also the author of several collections of poetry, including The Hollow Log Lounge and Brightwood. Smith is currently working on a novel about Sheriff Blaine Sherburne.
When I read in The Rockbridge Advocate the reprint of a newspaper account of a crime outside Lexington at the beginning of the twentieth century, I began wondering about the gaps in the record and the feel of a suppressed subtext rippling through the testimony. Because jigsawing accounts, especially in criminal matters, often bring Rashomon to my mind, I decided to write a story that was distinctly Appalachian but that addressed questions of both motive and memory similar to those that interested Kurosawa. One of the Ryunosuke Akutagawa short stories that the film works from is titled, in Kojima’s translation, “In a Grove.” I joined the first three letters to get the victim’s name and began looking at the evidence, as I imagined it, from disparate perspectives, in different voices. At one time or another in the process, every one of these unreliable narrators seemed to have some credibility and to arouse at least a little sympathy. Sherburne’s name, by the way, is borrowed from the Lynching Bee section of Huck Finn’s narrative.