The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
Page 1
THE MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP
presents
THE BEST
MYSTERY
STORIES
OF THE YEAR
2021
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
LEE CHILD
SERIES EDITOR
OTTO PENZLER
THE MYSTERIOUS PRESS
NEW YORK
THE MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP
presents
THE BEST
MYSTERY
STORIES
OF THE YEAR
2021
CONTENTS
Otto Penzler, Foreword
Lee Child, Introduction
Doug Allyn, 30 and Out
Deadly Anniversaries, ed. by Marcia Muller & Bill Pronzini (Hanover Square)
Jim Allyn, Things That Follow
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (September/October)
Michael Bracken, Blest Be the Tie That Binds
Black Cat Mystery Magazine (Volume 2, No. 2)
James Lee Burke, Harbor Lights
A Private Cathedral (Little, Brown & Barnes & Noble)
Martin Edwards, The Locked Cabin
The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths, ed. by Maxim Jacubowski (Mango)
John Floyd, Biloxi Bound
The Strand Magazine (February–May)
Jaqueline Freimor, That Which Is True
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (July/August)
Alison Gaylin, The Gift
Hush, ed. by Jonathan Santlofer (Plympton)
Sue Grafton, If You Want Something Done Right . . .
Deadly Anniversaries, ed. by Marcia Muller & Bill Pronzini (Hanover Square)
Paul Kemprecos, The Sixth Decoy
Nothing Good Happens After Midnight, ed. by Jeffery Deaver (Suspense Publishing)
Stephen King, The Fifth Step
Harper’s Magazine (March)
Janice Law, The Client
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine (May/June)
Dennis McFadden, The Truth About Lucy
Louisiana Literature (Volume 37, No. 1)
David Marcum, The Adventure of the Home Office Baby
The Strand Magazine (February–May)
Tom Mead, Heatwave
Detective Thrillers Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing)
David Morrell, Requiem for a Homecoming
The Darkling Halls of Ivy, ed. by Lawrence Block (Subterranean Press)
Joyce Carol Oates, Parole Hearing, California
Institution for Women, Chino, CA Boulevard (Spring)
Sara Paretsky, Love & Other Crimes
Love & Other Crimes (William Morrow)
Joseph S. Walker, Etta at the End of the World
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine (May/June)
Andrew Welsh-Huggins, The Path I Took
Mystery Tribune (Winter)
Bonus Story
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, My Favorite Murder
The Best Mystery Stories 2021 Honor Roll
Additional outstanding stories published in 2020
FOREWORD
Long ago, I came to agree with the brilliant John Dickson Carr, who wisely averred that the natural form of the traditional mystery is not the novel but the short story. It is not uncommon for a detective story to revolve around a single significant clue—which can be discovered, divulged, and its importance explained in a few pages. Everything else is embellishment, and novels have more of this than short stories.
The classic tale, as invented by Edgar Allan Poe, popularized by Arthur Conan Doyle, and perfected by Agatha Christie, is familiar to aficionados and casual readers alike: A crime (usually murder) is committed, law enforcement officers are called in and respond with utter bafflement, and assistance is offered by a gifted amateur, a private eye, or an outlier police detective, who discovers clues, breaks down alibis, and, ultimately, identifies the culprit.
Mystery fiction has changed a great deal over the years, as have all art forms, and as deliciously satisfying as this type of story may be, it is seldom written today. The traditional tale of observation and deduction has largely slipped into the background. The psychology of crime has become the dominant form of mystery fiction in recent years, replacing the whodunit and the howdunit with the whydunit. Those tales of pure deduction may be the most difficult mystery stories to write, as it has become increasingly difficult to find original motivations for murder, or a new murder method, or an original way to hide a vital clue until the detective unearths it.
The working definition of a mystery story for this series is any work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or the plot. The detective story is merely one subgenre in the literary form known as the mystery, just as are romantic suspense, espionage, legal legerdemain, medical thriller, political duplicity, and those told from the point of view of the villain.
I am confident that you will find this to be a superb collection of original fiction about extremes of human behavior caused by despair, hate, greed, fear, envy, insanity, or love—sometimes in combination. Desperate people may be prone to desperate acts—a fertile ground for poor choices. Many of the authors in this cornucopia of crime have described how aberrant solutions to difficult situations may occur, and why perpetrators felt that their violent responses to conflicts seemed appropriate to them.
And what a remarkable job the contributors to this volume have achieved! James Lee Burke has stated that this story is the best he’s ever written. How fortunate have we been that an unknown story by the much-loved Sue Grafton was discovered among her papers by her widower and was published for the first time in 2020, four years after her death? David Morrell and Stephen King, two authors whose greatest successes have been on the fringe of mystery fiction, have superb entries that make us wish they wrote more in this category. Paul Kemprecos wrote his very first short story, which is so accomplished that it easily made the cut. Sara Paretsky, who doesn’t write nearly enough short stories, proved once again how good they are when she does turn to this challenging form. Doug Allyn is back with another highly professional thriller, as are John Floyd and Jim Allyn. Plus, here’s a long story by Joyce Carol Oates, arguably the greatest living writer who has not yet won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
To find the best of these stories is a year-long quest, largely enabled by my invaluable colleague, Michele Slung, who culls mystery magazines, both printed and electronic, for suitable stories, just as she does short-story collections (works by a single author) and anthologies (works by a variety of authors), popular magazines, and, perhaps the richest trove to be mined, literary journals. As the fastest and smartest reader I have ever known, she looks at about three thousand stories a year, largely to determine if they are mysteries, and then to determine if they are worth serious consideration. I then read the harvested crop, passing along the best to the guest editor, who completes the selection process to arrive at the twenty that comprise the book. Ten additional stories are listed on an Honor Roll. Finally, there will be a lagniappe—a bonus story from the past.
Having the right person serve as the guest editor to launch this series is no small thing. Being willing and agreeing to perform this service is an act of extraordinary generosity, certainly not the first such act by Lee Child, the creator of the Jack Reacher series and one of the world’s most successful authors. As a national and international bestseller, you may be certain that he is asked to do something virtually every day of his life: write a story, make a speech, sign a book, visit a bookshop or
library, provide a quote for a dust jacket, offer advice about how to be a better writer or a more successful one, attend a conference or convention, and even serve as a judge on the Booker Prize committee (which he did last year)—the list goes on.
Child has, at the time of writing this preface, written twenty-five novels in the Reacher series, beginning with Killing Floor in 1997 and continuing to The Sentinel in 2020, which he cowrote with his brother Andrew. Two novels have been adapted for the screen with Tom Cruise as Reacher: One Shot, released as Jack Reacher in 2012, and Never Go Back, released as Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, in 2016. Child had cameo appearances in both. His novels have won numerous honors from the mystery community, and he has been given lifetime achievement awards by the International Thriller Writers, the (British) Crime Writers’ Association, and others. In 2019, he was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his service to literature.
While I engage in a relentless quest to locate and read every mystery/crime/suspense story published, I live in terror that I will miss a worthy one, so if you are an author, editor, or publisher, or care about one, please feel free to send a book, magazine, or tear sheet to me c/o The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. If the story first appeared electronically, you must submit a hard copy. It is vital to include the author’s contact information. No unpublished material will be considered for what should be obvious reasons. No stories will be returned. If you distrust the postal service, enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard and I’ll confirm receipt.
To be eligible for next year’s edition of The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, a story must have been published in the English language for the first time in the 2021 calendar year. I am being neither arrogant nor whimsical when I state that the absolute firm deadline for me to receive a submission is December 31 due to the very tight production schedule for the book. Sending submissions early is better than sending them later. If the story arrives one day past the deadline, it will not be read. Sorry.
Otto Penzler
February 2021
INTRODUCTION
I was delighted when Otto Penzler asked me to be involved in this new short-story project. I felt the request implied he thought I had something worthwhile to offer on the subject. I’m always delighted to create that impression. But sadly, on this occasion, an impression is all it is. I don’t know much about short stories, or their true origins, mechanisms, or appeal. My only consolation is I’m not sure anyone else does either.
What is a short story? Clearly there’s a clue in the name. A short story is a story that’s short. A story is an account of events—in this context almost certainly made up—and the adjective short acts to separate the form from other types of accounts that customarily tend to be longer. As a compound noun, short story first appeared in print in the year 1877, alongside other compound nouns new that year, including belly button, coffee table, cold storage, genital herpes, medical examiner, musical chairs, stock option, and toilet paper.
Some of those things were genuinely new in the 1870s—cold storage, certainly, which shook up food supply and started the decline of landed aristocracies by breaking their local monopolies on agricultural production. And coffee table was new as well, I suppose, given the rise of the Victorian middle class, and stock options, and toilet paper, possibly. But others among those things were merely newly named—for example belly button, which of course we’ve all had forever, and probably genital herpes too.
Which category did short story fall into—new, or just newly named? The latter applies, as a matter of record. A by-then-established literary form was first called a short story in the year 1877. So, newly named. But, without doubt, wrongly named. And far from being new, the form could be the oldest we have ever known.
No one knows when fiction was invented. Or, long before that, the syntactical language that permitted it. Spoken words leave no archeological trace. As soon as their last echoes die away, they are gone forever. All that is left is speculation. Scientific advances in the field of human origins have been spectacular, but scientists don’t like to speculate. Just the facts, ma’am.
They will agree, however, on a couple of things. Some explanation is needed, of how a relatively weak and vulnerable and not-very-successful hominid proto-human later came to dominate the whole world and reach outward into the universe. How did that happen?
And scientists will agree that complex, coherent, if-this-then-that language, with a plan B, and a plan C, would have required a big brain. Which they’re happy to show us, because that’s back in the realm of facts. It’s right there in the ground: our brains got big enough less than half a million years ago. There’s a vigorous, but very polite, argument whether language colonized a freak mutation, or whether the increase in size was itself driven by the absolute need for language. But either way, that’s when it all started.
And it was crucial. A single human was slow and weak. Prey, not a predator. But a coordinated group of a hundred humans was the most powerful animal the earth had ever seen. Tooled up, organized, drilled, rehearsed, if this, then that, plan B, plan C. Language came to the rescue. It made all the difference. We survived. Not that things were easy. Pressures were many and various, and sometimes catastrophic. But we stood a better chance than most. We had lengthy discussions, accurate assessments, correct recall of past events, realistic projections into the future.
In other words, nonfiction saved the day. Language was a lifesaver because it was entirely about truth and reality. It could have no value otherwise. Possibly it stayed that way for hundreds of thousands of years. Then something very strange happened. We started talking about things that hadn’t happened to people that didn’t exist. We invented fiction.
When exactly? It’s impossible to say. The echoes have died away. But we can speculate. Just the guesses, ma’am. We know—because it’s right there in the ground, or on rocky walls—that music and representative art date back almost seventy thousand years. Both involved some kind of technical intervention—drums, with stretched skins, hollow bone flutes, with holes carefully drilled for finger stops, pigments found and mixed, twigs chosen and frayed for application—whereas storytelling required no technology. We already had what we needed. We had expressive voices, and sophisticated language. So, it’s reasonable to guess storytelling happened much earlier than art or music.
Why did it happen? Not to fill our leisure time. We had none. We were still deep in prehistory, still cognitively premodern, still evolving. Everything we did had a singular purpose: to make it more likely we would be alive tomorrow. Any notion or activity that didn’t meet that need quickly died out, literally. How do we square that circle? How did stories make it more likely we would be alive tomorrow?
By encouragement, and empowerment, and subtle instruction, surely. Perhaps the first made-up story was about a boy who came face to face with a snarling saber-toothed tiger. Maybe the boy turned and ran as fast as he could and made it safely back to the cave. Which was encouragement, in the strategic sense of maintaining morale, by delivering the message that not everything has to turn out bad. And also in the tactical sense, in that the specific terrain outside the cave was survivable. Which was the subtle instruction. You had to go out and hunt and gather. A balance had to be struck between reactive caution and proactive boldness, such that the tribe endured.
Then maybe a thousand years later the story evolved to where the boy swings his stone ax and kills the saber-toothed tiger. The first thriller, right there. The boldness is turned up a notch. The tribe not only endures, but prospers.
It’s worth noting in passing those who neither prospered nor even ultimately endured—our very distant evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. On its face, that’s a surprise. Compared to us, Neanderthals were faster, stronger, healthier, better toolmakers, better organized socially, and more solicitous of one another. They had bigger brains than us, which surely means they had sophisticated language, possibly even better than
ours. Yet they went extinct, almost forty-thousand years ago—granted, after hundreds of generations of extraordinary stress from the Ice Age climate emergency. But we survived it. Why us, and not them?
Those given to fanciful speculation might construct a clue from the actual in-the-ground evidence. Neanderthal settlements tell of occupation by sober, sensible people. They were sporadically nomadic, like all hunter-gatherers, but almost invariably their next settlement was barely out of sight of their last. There is no evidence they ever crossed a body of water without first being able to see land on the other side. The overall impression is one of stolid caution.
Whereas we—Homo sapiens—were nuts in comparison. We were bold to the point—beyond the point—of recklessness. We ranged thousands of miles into unknown regions. Hundreds of times we launched bark hulls onto giant oceans, and only a tiny percentage can have survived to see the far shore. If any. Our brains were wired differently. The Neanderthals did things we didn’t, and we did things they didn’t.
Did that include making things up? Nothing about the jump from nonfiction to fiction was biologically preordained or inevitable. It just happened to us. Maybe it just didn’t happen to our distant cousins. Maybe their sober, sensible, stolid brains couldn’t provide the necessary pathway. Maybe wild imagination was required to fire the spark.
What if Neanderthals never left the world of nonfiction? Never entered the land of make-believe? And thereafter, despite their speed and strength and health, and their technical and social skills, what if they didn’t make it because of that? Because they didn’t have story, to encourage and empower and instruct. Maybe that tiny margin made all the difference.
What do we know about the stories we had and they might not have had? Nothing, of course, but we can speculate. There would have been a strong central strand, be it encouraging, emboldening, instructing, warning, scaring, or whatever else, all wrapped up in context and diversion, and verisimilitude, but not quite. There would have been a rim of unreality, however faint, to expand our experience, which was the evolutionary purpose of story, to take us places we wouldn’t normally go, to shine a beam into corners normally left dark. The stories would have been concise, pithy, and focused. They wouldn’t have taken long to tell. Survival was a full-time job. Bandwidth was precious.