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Thomas H. Cook is the author of sixteen novels and two works of nonfiction. He has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award three times in three different categories; his novel The Chatham School Affair won for Best Novel in 1996. He has also been nominated for the Hammett Prize, as well as the Macavity Award. His short story “Fatherhood” won the Herodotus Prize and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 1999, edited by Ed McBain.
■ I wrote my first short story while working as a contributing editor and book critic for Atlantic Monthly. I’d never attempted such a thing before but was pleasantly surprised to discover that writing a short story gave me the same feeling of satisfaction as reading one. As a writer, I particularly liked that the payoff, that final moment toward which you have been moving all along, came much sooner in a short story than in a novel, and, with it, the sense of creative completion.
As a reader, I find that a short story is like a brief encounter, intense and highly charged, yet capable of lingering in the heart for a long, long time. In “The Fix” I strove for that intensity and resonance by using boxing, and particularly the battered nobility of a long-maligned fighter, to suggest the daily “fixes” that beckon us, the erosion of character that inevitably accompanies our acceptance of them, and finally the dreadful, dawning truth that corruption may know every pleasure save that of self-respect.
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Sean Doolittle’s debut novel, Dirt, a crime thriller set in and around a crooked Los Angeles funeral home, was selected as one of the 100 Best Books of 2001 by the editors of Amazon.com. Doolittle lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife, Jessica, and daughter, Kate. He is working on his next novel and any short stories that tug on his sleeve.
■ I imagine that most people, at one time or another, have probably experienced some version of the same gut-level fear: the fear of losing ability. I’ve heard writers say that they’ll never live long enough to write all the ideas they have floating around in their heads. Personally, I’ve never suffered from this affliction. I tend to be the type who wonders, after putting each idea to paper, if I’ll ever have another one. It wasn’t until after I finished “Summa Mathematica” that I began to suspect that this particular anxiety doesn’t really have all that much to do with writing.
As for this story: I was remodeling our basement (another story), trying to figure board feet or something, when I realized it had been so long since I’d done any math beyond using a high-powered PC to balance the checkbook that I had actually forgotten most of the multiplication tables I’d memorized in grade school. This bugged me a little in principle, but not that much overall. I never knew ‘em all that well anyway, and I always hated math. But I remember thinking something like, “If you held a gun to my head, I couldn’t times these fractions.” Stephen Fielder wasn’t far behind that thought.
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A former reporter and restaurant critic, Michael Downs learned to write fiction at the University of Arkansas’s graduate programs in creative writing, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He has published short stories in half a dozen literary reviews, including the Georgia Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Willow Springs. This is the second of his stories to appear in The Best American Mystery Stories series; “Prison Food” appeared in the 2001 edition. Downs lives and writes in Montana, where he is at work on two books, both set in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. One is a collection of short stories; the other is a book of nonfiction, supported by a grant from The Freedom Forum.
■ One snowy Easter morning when I was a boy of eleven or twelve, my family awoke to find police cars clogging our dead-end street. It was not long before we learned that our neighbor had killed his wife and their two dogs. I had liked the neighbors, and I had especially liked their dogs. This was when we lived in a small town in Vermont. Later in the afternoon that Easter Sunday, a reporter from the Rutland Herald rang our doorbell, but my father declined to say anything about our neighbors out of what I took to be a sense of propriety. Years later I became a reporter, and whenever I got frustrated that people wouldn’t talk to me, I tried to remember my father’s perspective. That dual vision — and, in general, the complicated needs of any reporter and any witness (in specific, my reporter and Dudek) — infuses “Man Kills Wife, Two Dogs.” I first tried to set the story in Vermont, mimicking my childhood experience, but as is often the case, fact could not accommodate fiction. Once I moved the story to Hartford and made Dudek my character (instead of a man like my father), imagination and story rocked loose. In truth, I know no more of what happened on that morning of my boyhood than Dudek knows about the murders in his landlord’s apartment.
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Brendan DuBois is a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, where he received his B.A. in English from the University of New Hampshire. A former newspaper reporter, he has been writing fiction for nearly twenty years and still lives in his native state with his wife, Mona. He is the author of the Lewis Cole mystery series — Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, and Killer Waves — and his fourth novel, Resurrection Day, a look at what might have happened had the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted into World War III, received the Sidewise Award in 2000 for Best Alternative History Novel. He is currently working on two new novels and has had more than sixty short stories published in Playboy, Mary Higgins Clark Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
His short stories have been extensively anthologized in the United States and abroad. He has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for Best Mystery Short Story of the year, and he has been nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his short fiction three rimes. Visit his Web site at www.Brendan-DuBois.com.
■ My short story “A Family Game” was written for an original collection of short fiction revolving around the game of baseball called Murderers’ Row. Knowing that many of the other authors for this anthology would be submitting stories concerning major league play, I decided to take a look at how all baseball players get their start: by playing in youth leagues in their hometowns.
But although the play on the field in these leagues is that of children being introduced into what really is a family game, the tensions, pressures, and yes, even violence, off the field can sometimes mirror the worst aspects of the major leagues. During these times when there are often news stories about “rink rage” or “stadium rage,” where angry parents get into fights with each other or referees or umpires, I was curious how someone with a criminal past — desperate to keep this past secret — might react when confronted by an angry parent intent on doing harm.
All too often the real cases of parental violence at sporting events end up in court or in the hospital. In “A Family Game,” I’d like to think I came up with an original and satisfying story, where not only a bully gets his due, but a special family is protected and kept safe by a loving parent.
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David Edgerley Gates grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, A Matter of Crime, and Story. He was a 1998 Shamus nominee for “Sidewinder,” and another of his stories, “Compass Rose,” was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2000.
He lives in Santa Fe.
■ A lot of my stories are drawn from historical incident, or some contemporary oddity that floats around in my head until I can make use of it, but “The Blue Mirror” is based more nearly on my own experience. Stanley Kosciusko is modeled on a real guy I worked in a garage with, years ago, who did in fact survive fifty missions as a tail gunner in Liberators, flying against the Germans, only to later die of cancer. Much of the other detail in the story, like the biker bar and the locale of the showdown, is real enough, too, but the methamphetamine turf war is generic, not specific.
The other thing about “The Blue Mirror” is that I didn’t spend a lot of time connecting the dots. I figured the private dick in the story
ought to be at least as sharp as the reader, and if the reader could put it together, why wouldn’t Jack?
The late Cathleen Jordan bought this story for Alfred Hitchcock. Cathleen was a terrific person, and a canny and sympathetic editor. She had an eye for the exact detail and an ear for clunkers. Her taste was elastic, not arbitrary, and she did me many kindnesses. I’m far from being the only one who’ll miss her. To use Norman Mailer’s apposite phrase, Cathleen added a room to the house.
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Joe Gores lived for a year in Tahiti and three years in Kenya, spent two years at the Pentagon writing biographies of army generals, and for twelve years was a P.I. in San Francisco. He is a past president of Mystery Writers of America and has won three Edgars. His novel Hammett, filmed by Francis Ford Coppola, won Japan’s first “Maltese Falcon” award in 1986. Other work includes scores of short stories and articles, three collections of his short fiction, and a massive fact book, Marine Salvage. He has also written ten screenplays, two TV longforms, and teleplays for most of the episodic TV mystery shows of the 1970s and 1980s, including Columbo; Kojak; Magnum, P.I.; Mike Hammer; and Remington Steele.
He and his wife, Dori, live near San Francisco and travel whenever they can get away.
■ “Inscrutable” started with a parrot. My wife, Dori, has a friend named Carol Colucci who has three pet parrots. One of them is named Knuckles. The first time I heard this, I exclaimed, “Knuckles Colucci? He just has to be a Mafia hitman out of Detroit!” But at the time I was working on Cases, a novel fictionalizing my early years as a detective in San Francisco in the 1950s, and Knuckles sort of slid from my mind.
Fast-forward to 2000. My editor at Mysterious Press, Bill Malloy, asked me to contribute an original story to a projected twenty-fifth anniversary Mysterious Press anthology. Then Bill added the kicker. He wanted the DKA crew to appear in the story. By then I was working on the most recent DKA File Novel, Cons, Scams & Grifts, and all my DKA energies were focused on that. But I said I would try to come up with something.
A January night, pouring rain. Waiting in my 4-Runner for Dori with nothing to read. Suddenly, bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom, as they like to say on The Sopranos, three short stories leaped into my mind. One was “Summer Fog,” which appeared in another 2001 anthology, Flesh and Blood. The second was a golf story I’m working on right now. The third was “Inscrutable.” Ballard, Heslip, Giselle, and O.B. get involved in saving a Chinese grocer being threatened by . . . who else? A Mafia hitman out of Detroit named Knuckles Colucci!
I hope you have as much fun pecking all of the bird references out of “Inscrutable” as I had writing them in.
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James Grady’s first novel, Six Days of the Condor, became a Robert Redford movie picked by the Washington Post as one of the ten most defining films of the twentieth century. Grady has published a dozen other novels across genre lines, and three of his previous short stories have received national awards, including an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2001, the Cognac (France) International Film Noir Festival gave Grady’s collective prose work its highest “master of noir fiction” award. Grady has also been an investigative reporter, as well as a script writer for both TV and feature films. He and his family live in Silver Spring, Maryland.
■ Growing up in Shelby, Montana, I always felt embarrassed by my hometown’s bizarre claim to fame: its nearly suicidal self-promotional sponsoring of a heavyweight championship boxing match, a world event crash-landed in the middle of the great American nowhere. I always wanted to be a writer, but swore I would never—never!—touch that Dempsey-Gibbons debacle.
Then inspiration ran smack into absolutism, and the resulting big bang blasted characters and a twist of history out of the most savage and sentimental sections of my soul. While the mechanics of the resulting story are fiction, its heart is as true a piece of work as I’ve ever done.
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Clark Howard grew up on the lower west side of Chicago, a ward of the county and habitual runaway who eventually was sent to a state reformatory for being, he recalls, “recalcitrant.” He later served in combat in the Korean War as a member of the Marine Corps and began writing shortly thereafter. Having written 120-plus short stories, 16 novels, 5 true-crime books, and 2 short story collections, he is an eight-time Mystery Writers of America Edgar nominee in the short story and true-crime categories, and winner of an Edgar for best short story. He is also a five-time winner of the Ellery Queen Magazine Readers Award and has been nominated for the Shamus Award, for the Derringer Award, and twice for the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award.
■ “The Cobalt Blues,” like much of my work, is drawn from my early memories of the streets of Chicago and the scores of colorful people who passed through my young life there. The character of Lewis is based on an old guy I knew when I was an after-school runner picking up next-day bets for an illegal bookie (in the days before off-track betting). This old guy’s whole life was lived by the starter’s bell at racetracks all over the country. Potts was based on a man I served with in the Marine Corps. He was a real hard-luck guy. After he was killed, another Marine said, “What’s the difference? With his luck, if he’d made it back, he probably would’ve got cancer or something anyways.”
I like to write stories about life’s losers who sometimes become winners just once before the end. Like the men do in “The Cobalt Blues.”
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Stuart M. Kaminsky was born, raised, and grew damned cold in the winters of Chicago. He has, for the past dozen years, lived in the warmth of Sarasota, Florida, where he writes novels, short stories, movies, teleplays, comic books, and poetry and plays softball three days a week when he isn’t on the road. Winner of the MWA Edgar for Best Novel in 1989, he has been nominated for six Edgars in three categories. His series characters include 1940s private eye Toby Peters, Russian policeman Porfiry Rostnikov, Chicago policeman Abe Lieberman, and Sarasota process server Lew Fonesca. He has also written two original Rockford Files novels. His screen credits include Once upon a Time in America Enemy Territory, and Hidden Fears. His teleplay Immune to Murder was shown on A&E’s Nero Wolfe Mysteries.
■ “Sometimes Something Goes Wrong” was a first for me, an experiment. I wanted to see how quickly I could make a story move, a story in which I had no idea of what was going to happen, a story in which I started with two men in a parking lot and wrote in furious fascination to find out what they were doing there and what would happen to them. I always know who my characters are and what will happen in my novels and short stories. In this case, I had no idea and I had a great time. I plan to do it again and soon.”
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Joe R. Lansdale was born in Gladewater, Texas, on October 28, 1951. He left college when he decided his main interest was writing, and he worked a variety of jobs, including farming and janitorial work, while writing in his spare time. He became a full-time writer in 1981, producing more than two hundred short stories, articles, and essays, as well as more than twenty novels and several short story collections.
He is well known for his series of crime/suspense adventures featuring Hap Collins and Leonard Fine. Mucho Mojo, a New York Times Notable Book, has been scripted for film by Oscar winner Ted Tally.
A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has won numerous awards, including an Edgar for The Bottoms, six Bram Stokers, and the Critic’s Choice Award.
■ In my early twenties my wife and I owned a mule. I used the mule for plowing. We bought some land with a nice pond and plenty of grass, but we didn’t move there. We planned to, but never made it. We ended up selling the land and moving somewhere else.
But when we thought we were going to move there, we moved our mule to our land while we made plans. I went over every day to feed it, pet it, trim its hooves, make sure it was okay.
One day it was gone.
Mule rustlers.
Really.
Many years later, I got to thinking about that, the fate of
my old stolen mule. About the same time I was feeling nostalgic, I came across an article about criminals who cruised neighborhoods looking for things to steal.
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