The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  • My grandmother was the original writer in the family—a reporter and editor in the Texas Panhandle for close to sixty years. In her late eighties, she was still filing three stories a week for The Childress Index. Her life was not an easy one—and included several bad marriages—but I always admired her fierce devotion to her vocation as a journalist. The character of Loretta is inspired by her, though what happens in the story is all fiction.

  My grandfather was a skilled welder and owned his own welding shop until the day he died, in his nineties. I vividly remember those burn holes in his work shirts and coveralls and the way his skin was pocked with small heat blisters. My great nightmare—imagining his world when I was a child—was the possibility of hot steel in the eye. How a minuscule filament of metal could change the course of several lives became the guiding metaphor for the story.

  Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His fiction has appeared in New Orleans Review, the Los Angeles Review, Gargoyle, The Fiddleback, Numéro Cinq, and elsewhere.

  • “The Funeral Bill” came out of a story I heard years ago about a renter who was demanding that his landlord pay for a funeral. As in “The Funeral Bill,” the funeral had been for the renter’s wife, and the renter was insistent—to the point of menacing—that the landlord pay. The landlord didn’t understand why he was responsible for the costs, and he never paid. I held on to the nugget of this story for years, wondering what could have been the renter’s motive. I made up several, but none of them sounded true. In the end, I figured it would be a scarier story if he didn’t have a reason or a clearly stated one, just a scheme for someone else to pay.

  The other bit of key inspiration that went into this story comes from eyewitness accounts of lucid decapitation. That is, of freshly removed heads still blinking and trying to speak. As the story was told to me, during the French Revolution, there was such a glut of heads rolling; the more philosophical in the rabble would often ask whether these heads were seeing evidence of an afterlife. Blink once for yes, two for no. This might be apocryphal (knowing its source), but I think the idea was aptly applied to the final scene between Jeffers and RD. A special thanks goes to M. Bogan, C. Chambers, and R. Piet for your input on the final drafts of this story.

  Joe Donnelly is the coeditor and cofounder of Slake: Los Angeles. Prior to starting Slake, he was deputy editor of LA Weekly during its Pulitzer Prize–winning heyday. He is also the former editor in chief of the influential lifestyle magazines Stick and Bikini. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he won the Reader’s Digest Foundation Excellence in Journalism Award. Donnelly has won several press association awards for his journalism, and his writing has appeared in LA Weekly, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, and many national and international magazines. Donnelly’s fiction and essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals.

  Harry Shannon has been an actor, an Emmy-nominated songwriter, a recording artist, a music publisher, vice president at Carolco Pictures, and a music supervisor on Basic Instinct and Universal Soldier. His novels include Night of the Beast, CLAN, Daemon, Dead and Gone, The Hungry, and The Pressure of Darkness, as well as the Mick Callahan suspense novels Memorial Day, Eye of the Burning Man, One of the Wicked, and Running Cold. His collection A Host of Shadows was nominated for the 2010 Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association. Readers may contact him via Facebook or www.harryshannon.com.

  • “Fifty Minutes” began as a fun provocation by Harry to shake me out of a bit of the writing doldrums several years ago. An e-mail showed up in my in box with the first line of the story and the terse command Your turn. Harry and I have collaborated on several big projects over the years, including him as my counselor/therapist on my path to sobriety and me as his counselor/therapist (though not licensed!) on his early Mick Callahan novels. So it was not an e-mail to be ignored. Harry and I wrote back and forth by e-mail over the course of a couple weeks, editing and prodding each other during the process. Having been Harry’s client added a unique dynamic, though not necessarily the obvious one. I often wrote from Dr. Bell’s point of view and Harry from Mr. Potter’s. No doubt the cover of fiction, the friendly fire of collaboration, and our shared experiences gave us a unique opportunity to explore the dance of therapy and the depths of psychology. It was a lot of fun, and I think that shows despite the dark nature of the story. The story lay dormant on my desktop for a couple years, all but forgotten, until Laurie Ochoa, my Slake partner, and I were putting together issue 2, “Crossing Over,” a theme that certainly lends itself to “Fifty Minutes.” Somehow, I remembered the story, dug it up, and Harry and I went back to honing it with Ochoa’s steady editing hand. There must be a lesson to be found in how unlikely it is that this story ever saw the light of day yet ended up here . . . Harry?

  Kathleen Ford has published in Yankee, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly, Antioch, North American Review, New England Review, Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. Two of her stories won PEN Awards for Syndicated Fiction and another story was anthologized in Cabbage and Bones (1997). Her first novel was published in 1986. Kathleen received a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Award for 2011. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is currently writing stories about Irish maids and the soldiers of World War I and completing a novel about the Great War.

  • “Man on the Run” was inspired by my father’s childhood. His family was populated by Irish nationalists, and many of them had taken oaths to do everything in their power to win Irish freedom. According to family lore, when Eamon de Valera visited New York in 1919, he stayed with my father’s family in Brooklyn. The children were told that they had to keep their visitor a secret so no one would know when the Irish patriot (the “man on the run”) had arrived. If they kept de Valera’s arrival secret, no one would know which ship he’d sailed on, thereby protecting the network that had smuggled him out of Ireland.

  The sheer drama of the words “man on the run” drew me to write this story, although I knew from the beginning that it would have to be a woman who was running. How I came to envision the two old ladies in their isolated house by Cayuga Lake, I don’t know. I lived in Ithaca for a year, and I guess those early-morning walks in the darkness before dawn gave me the setting. I’ve been interested in the themes of guilt and shame ever since I began writing, and I believe that these emotions can paralyze a person just as surely as fear can. Rosemary, my old lady character, is af­flicted with arthritis, but she is immobilized even more by the guilt she feels over her daughter’s death seventy years earlier. Both forms of paralysis are out of Rosemary’s control, or so it seems, until a battered young woman seeks shelter in Rosemary’s house.

  As a writer, I create characters. What I loved about writing “Man on the Run” was watching how a very old and frail character insisted on showing me the force of the human will. I’m thrilled to have my story published in The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 and am grateful to the New England Review, and always, of course, to my father.

  Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2011 she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, where she was researching a novel. She is currently teaching writing at the Eugene Lang program at the New School in New York City.

  • I wrote “The Other Place” for a very simple reason: I was afraid. I was living alone in a flimsy fishbowl house on a college campus that, as far as I was concerned, was a pervert magnet. The climatic scene of the story came to me before I had any intention of writing a story; I think it appeared in my mind because I wanted to imagine killer and victim coming right up to the crucial moment and then both walking away unharmed. At some point after
that, the story formed.

  Jesse Goolsby’s fiction has won the John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Richard Bausch Short Fiction Prize. His work has appeared widely, including in Epoch, The Literary Review, Harpur Palate, The Journal, Blue Mesa Review, and War, Literature & the Arts. A graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and the University of Tennessee, he was raised in Chester, California, and now writes in Alexandria, Virginia.

  • When I was a boy, my father would take me out to shoot guns. He had a variety of weapons—revolvers, shotguns, pistols, and rifles—and we’d drive deep into the woods and fire at empty soda cans, cardboard boxes, my sister’s old Barbies. One of his prized guns was a .300 Winchester Magnum, a rifle that would bruise you with the recoil if you weren’t paying attention. This gun was always off-limits to me. But when I turned twelve, my father finally gave me a turn. I was shaky and nauseous as he handed me the rifle. The power intoxicated my limbs, and as I readied myself and snugged the gun deep into my young shoulder, I took aim at a helpless paper plate stapled onto a standing slab of cardboard. And then it was time. My heartbeat rushed through my ears as I took a thin breath in, and at long last I tugged the trigger and . . . nothing. I tugged again . . . nothing. I pulled back, stunned, and from behind me, my father’s voice said, “Safety, son. Safety.”

  I wrote the end of “Safety” first, the written result being a manifestation of an unexpected fear that arose in me after the birth of my daughter, our first child: the knowledge that one day in the future I would need to be out of town, and what if trouble came on that exact day? What if I were physically helpless but acutely aware of the situation? The rest of the story was the result of me constantly asking, “How did these people get here?”

  I owe a great deal of thanks to my dear friends the great writers Donald Anderson and Brandon Lingle, who helped me through early drafts. Also a special thanks to Hao Nguyen from The Greensboro Review, who provided the most comprehensive and spot-on editorial guidance I’ve received from a literary journal. Her warmth and guiding hand played a critical part in the end product.

  Katherine L. Hester is the author of the short story collection Eggs for Young America (1998). Her fiction has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Five Points, The Yale Review, Brain, Child, and elsewhere. She lives south of Interstate 20 in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and two daughters.

  • Like James in “Trafficking,” I spent considerable time in my twenties driving back and forth on Interstate 10 between the place where I lived and the place where I’d come from. Also like him, I fell under the spell of that highway’s flat tedium, its seductive neither-here-nor-thereness.

  I don’t have a stepbrother, much less one in prison. But that tug of war—between the place you started out and the one where you end up—is pretty universal. As are those decisions, so small and incremental, they often don’t seem like decisions at all, that sometimes lead us to places we never expected.

  Lou Manfredo is the author of three novels featuring NYPD detective Joe Rizzo: Rizzo’s War, Rizzo’s Fire, and Rizzo’s Daughter. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005, Brooklyn Noir, New Jersey Noir, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He worked in the Brooklyn, New York, criminal justice system for twenty-five years. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now lives in New Jersey with his wife, Joanne.

  • The basic concept for “Soul Anatomy” had been meandering within my subconscious since my long-gone senior year at Brooklyn’s New Utrecht High School. While in science class, an incredibly gifted teacher, whose name, regretfully, I cannot recall, managed to successfully present the subject of biology in a compelling, thought-provoking manner. Much like young officer Miles in “Soul Anatomy,” I found myself confronting the nuances of human existence with a somewhat conflicted view, and it remained with me.

  Years later, a story would periodically materialize in various forms, all based on that long-ago class and set within the framework of some violent incident. But something was always lacking. It wasn’t until my more recent personal interaction with the dismal, ultimately tragic, city of Camden, New Jersey, that the elusive missing piece of the puzzle presented itself. I rolled a blank sheet of paper into my ancient Smith-Corona and watched as the words appeared before my eyes, stigmatalike, through the dust of both long-past and vividly recent memories, and the story actually wrote itself. To date, it remains my most personal and unsettling piece of short fiction.

  Thomas McGuane lives in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of numerous novels and short story and essay collections, including Ninety-Two in the Shade, Driving on the Rim, and Gallatin Canyon. His stories and essays have been collected in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Sports Writing. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  • Like most writers who have been honest about their craft, I’ve found that writing for me has to be at some stage an entirely improvisatory undertaking; that is, chance, mystery, and intuition must be given their opportunities in composition. In the case of “The Good Samaritan,” I first thought the mystery lay in the relationship of the protagonist and his son, but what might have been no more than a support player, the supposedly merely irksome hired man, took over the mechanics of the story and led me on a kind of wild-goose chase that ultimately energized everything I had been trying to say in a less interesting way. It also let me embed a few beliefs about the importance of love versus the illusions of materialism. In the story decent people are cheated of their valuables and it doesn’t finally matter. A father whose child has nearly slipped away from him finds a way to hang on.

  Nathan Oates’s stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Witness, the Alaska Quarterly Review, and other literary magazines. His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, the seventieth anniversary issue of The Antioch Review, and Fifty-Two Stories. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Seton Hall University, where he also directs the Poetry-in-the-Round reading series. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and kids.

  • I wrote “Looking for Service” as I was finishing the first draft of a novel, thinking I could go back to the beginning and add this new voice, that the novel would now have two narrators, or maybe even three, or four. What I really wanted was a release from being caught in one character’s head for so long, and maybe because of that desire for release, I wrote this story quickly, finishing a draft in two sittings. This is not that uncommon for me, and sometimes after these quick first drafts the basic structure is in place, if in need of major revision. Other times the results are terrible, and I put the stories away. This story was the rarest sort: when I read it over, it seemed nearly finished. Out of the detail of the THANK YOU, GEORGE BUSH sign jammed into his front yard, the narrator’s personality—his bitterness, his anger, his tenderness—was clear, and the other characters, the situation, the setting, all seemed to fit naturally around him. The only part that didn’t quite work was the ending. I wrote five different endings quickly, each progressively darker, until I finally got the characters down into that room beneath the brothel, and then, with the prompting of a few readers, I got that American girl up on the stage with that whip in her hand. Then I could see what the story was really about: the divides that separate us from people—divides of age, ideology, wealth—and the persistent desire to cross those divides, to care for the people on the other side, or to hurt them, or sometimes both. After finishing the story I saw—or, rather, my wife saw—that this wasn’t part of a novel but a short story. As ever, I am indebted to my parents for their seemingly endless supply of stories that have so often provided the spark for my writing.

  Gina Paoli is a native of Colorado and grew up on the eastern plains, where the Rockies are only occasionally glimpsed as a purple mirage on the horizon. After completing a BA in English literature at Colorado State University, she took up residence in the univers
ity’s home, Fort Collins. While she has traveled the world, she has never lived anywhere else. She has worked at various nondescript jobs, the last as a technical writer for a small high-tech company, but currently stays at home and tries to write around the schedule of her four-year-old daughter. She has been writing stories since she was very young, and while a few of her stories were published in smaller literary magazines many years ago, she has only recently begun to pursue publication again. She is now working to complete the first of a series of what can only be described as soft-noir suspense novels, while continuing to write and rework her short stories. Visit ginapaoli.com for more information and updates about her work.

  • The central motif of “Dog on a Cow” came from a brief moment in Zora Neale Hurston’s beautiful novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The incident takes place during a flood of the Mississippi River, and while the cow was only a bloated carcass in this case, the dog behaved just as viciously as the one in my story. I can’t say why this terrible and bizarre image stayed with me, but it surfaced years later, converging with a roadside robbery, the hypnotic nature of driving the long, empty highways of the high plains, and another, no less traumatic flood on a much smaller river. The characters revealed themselves to me very slowly; their true natures didn’t come into focus until I’d been through the story a half-dozen times. It took another four rewrites for the story to reach its final state.

  T. Jefferson Parker was born in Los Angeles and has lived in Southern California all his life. He has worked as a janitor, waiter, veterinary hospital emergency attendant, newspaper reporter, and technical editor. All of his nineteen novels are set in California and Mexico. He lives in San Diego County with his family. The T doesn’t stand for anything.