The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  • Vic Malic is a character in my 2006 novel, The Fallen. The protagonist of that story, an affable San Diego cop named Robbie Brownlaw, is thrown from a burning sixth-floor hotel room (while trying to rescue someone) but survives. He’s addled, however, diagnosed with synesthesia, a neurological condition in which one’s senses become transposed with each other. For instance, Robbie “sees” spoken words as colored shapes hovering in the air around the speaker. The guy who threw him from the hotel is a hulking and disturbed former professional wrestler named Vic Malic, whose old ring name was Vic Primeval. Robbie and Vic become friends, and this story is about what happens to Vic when he falls in love.

  Thomas J. Rice was born in rural Ireland, emigrated to the United States as a teenager, and graduated from Cornell University. Along the way he’s been a farmer, breeder of border collies, construction worker, tractor driver, bartender, licensed carpenter, social activist, founder of a social justice institute, and storyteller. He’s also been a sociology professor at Georgetown University. His writing has been published in a wide array of journals, editorial pages, and literary magazines, from In These Times to New Orphic Review. In 2010 he published a memoir about growing up in post–World War II Ireland called Far from the Land. He has recently completed a collection of Irish short stories. He lives in Andover, Massachusetts.

  • I first wrote “Hard Truths” as a chapter in my memoir. The term refers to my mother’s insistence on having me immediately accept the blame for my screw-ups: no excuses! Her reasoning: people you may want to impress will usually think less of you in the short term, but you’ll immediately restore self-respect and others will trust your character in the long run. The other kernel of biography in the story is that both my parents were active in the IRA resistance movement against the Brits leading to Irish independence in 1921; both were imprisoned for their roles. My mother was actually one of the celebrated “Women of 1922,” a group of hunger strikers credited with bringing an end to the Irish civil war. The rest of the story is pure fiction, a drama I’d always wanted to play out with an ending that might have been. Still, I’m confident there were many women in the resistance capable of filling Kitty’s shoes.

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch has published mystery, science fiction, romance, nonfiction, and just about everything else under a wide variety of names. Her Smokey Dalton mystery novels, written under her pen name Kris Nelscott, have received acclaim worldwide. She has been nominated for the Edgar and the Shamus (as both Nelscott and Rusch) as well as the An­thony Award. She has repeatedly won Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s Readers Choice Award for best short story of the year.

  Kristine often writes cross-genre fiction. Her character Miles Flint, from her Retrieval Artist series, has been chosen as one of the top ten science fiction detectives by io9 and as one of the fourteen science fiction and fantasy detectives who could out-Sherlock Sherlock Holmes by the popular website blastr.

  WMG Publishing has the difficult task of releasing her entire backlist over the next few years (under all her pen names), as well as the next Smokey Dalton novel sometime in 2013. A novel based on her story “G-Men,” which was published in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009, will appear in 2013 as well.

  • I grew up in Superior, Wisconsin, in the late 1960s and 1970s, moving out permanently in 1979. I visited several times, then didn’t return for a long time. I was surprised to see how little of the town changed. When I finally went back a few years ago, the custodian let me into the high school to look around. The graduation list from that year was still on the office door. All of the last names were familiar—I had gone to school with their parents. While some of us moved away, most of the kids from my high school class stayed, raised their families, and lived their lives, trying to make Superior better.

  I started thinking about what kind of outside murder could happen in a town like that, where everyone knows everything about everyone else through all the generations—the good and the bad. And the secrets. There are always secrets. And your neighbors always know them, even if they never discuss them. As I wrote, I vividly remembered what it was like to live in those dark, cold winters—and honestly, I’m glad I live on the breezy, sunny Oregon coast. I’m not hardy enough to go through those long winter nights again.

  Lones Seiber is a retired aerospace engineer living in Morristown, Tennessee. He received a BS in engineering physics from the University of Tennessee and worked for the Pratt Whitney Aircraft Research and Development Center in West Palm Beach as an experimental engineer on the RL-10 rocket program and later on the signature elimination project for jet engines.

  He began writing short fiction seven years ago and, after successfully publishing several stories, returned to the University of Tennessee to audit junior and senior creative writing courses under Professors Allen Wier and Michael Knight. Based on the stories he presented in the senior workshop, he was invited to present stories in the graduate workshop. His fiction has appeared in GSU Review (now New South), The Pinch, Lynx Eye, The Wordstock Ten, Roanoke Review, the TallGrass Writers anthology, Inkwell, Pearl, and Indiana Review. His nonfiction has appeared in American Heritage. He won the 2005 GSU Review Fiction Contest, the 2007 The Pinch (River City) Fiction Contest, the 2008 Leslie Garrett Award for Fiction, the 2011 Warren Adler Prize for Fiction, and the 2011 Indiana Review Fiction Contest for the story “Icarus.” He has completed a novel based on “Icarus.”

  • I was watching the movie Exotica by Atom Egoyan, most of the scenes, and even the premise, somewhat gloomy, when it flashed to a golden field of grain and a cobalt-blue sky, minute figures strung along the horizon searching for a missing girl. The visual impact of that scene became the inspiration and core of my story “Icarus.”

  Charles Todd, of the writing team Caroline and Charles Todd, who happen to be mother and son, have published fourteen novels of suspense in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, including The Confession, A Lonely Death, and The Red Door. The first in that series, A Test of Wills, was included in The One Hundred Favorite Mysteries of the Twentieth Century. The Bess Crawford mysteries opened with A Duty to the Dead, and the fourth, An Unmarked Grave, was published in the summer of 2012. The Murder Stone is a stand-alone, and Rutledge short stories can be found in many anthologies and in Strand Magazine. The fifteenth Inspector Rutledge book is in the works.

  • “Trafalgar” began at a luncheon in Bury St. Edmund, England. One of our English friends, filling us in on the latest news from his family, added, “And the old dog died at noon that day,” as if its passing were the last straw in a litany of sadness. The line stayed with us because it was an epitaph in a way, and it had a certain poetic feel to it. We, too, had cared about the old dog. That eventually gave us the first line. The rest of the story came from a house and a bookstore we saw in Dartmouth, England, home of the Royal Naval College, while on board the Explorer, the Lindblad/National Geographic ship, and from a snippet of history that we hadn’t heard before. There it was, taking shape, as so many things we write do, snowballing into characters and settings—and obviously turning out to be a Rutledge inquiry by its very nature. Mike Ashley had asked us to write another short story for him, this time to be included in The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction, which he was editing. This gave us the excuse to pursue that snowball to its logical end. As John Curran has pointed out in his intriguing works on Agatha Christie, this sort of gestation for a book or a story over a period of time is perfectly normal. What’s fascinating is that given the same points of inspiration, two people can wind up at the same satisfactory conclusion without killing each other in the process. Nineteen books later, so far, so good.

  Tim L. Williams’s work has been published in a variety of literary quarterlies as well as in magazines dedicated to the crime, mystery, horror, and dark fantasy genres. His story “Something About Teddy” was included in The Best American Mystery Stories 2004. “Half-Lives” is the fourth tale featuring Memphis private investigator Charlie Raines to appear in El
lery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Two previous works in the series, “The Breaks” and “Suicide Bonds,” garnered Shamus nominations from the Private Eye Writers of America. After years of knocking around the Midwest and the South, Tim returned to his native Kentucky, where he lives with his wife, Sherraine, and their two children, Carson and Madelyn. He is currently working on two novels, one a contemporary mystery featuring Charlie Raines, the other a historical crime novel set in a west Kentucky coal-mining town.

  • “Half-Lives” was inspired by a drive through an industrial section of Memphis, a city that has in recent years become my second hometown. In a quarter-mile stretch I passed at least a half-dozen crumbling warehouses, all surrounded by relatively new security fences and barbed wire, which caused me to wonder what those fences could possibly be protecting and who they could be keeping out. Ultimately, the central mystery of the story, at least to my mind, is the question of why the largest sacrifices and the highest prices are demanded from those in our society with the least ability to pay them.

  Daniel Woodrell is the author of eight novels and a volume of short stories. He lives in the Missouri Ozarks. He has won a couple of awards and had a couple of movies made from his novels.

  • “Returning the River” was begun with the notion that it might become a novel, but it did not, at least for now. As I age, I am more and more aware of things that are disappearing or gone—W. S. Merwin has a line, “Show me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are.” I live in the same neighborhood some elements of my family have lived in since before World War I, and I see little flickers of my lost dead ones all around. Some years ago we lost my grandfather’s house. It sits only 200 yards away, but I will no longer go past it. I eventually realized that I felt a sort of atavistic, animalistic anger whenever I did pass, and the fact that the present owner is a scumbag who defiles my people’s fine imprint on our hallowed old place did not help reduce the hostility. This is pretty common throughout the world, this broken connection to the land and one’s own past, and the story was meant to give recognition to these almost presocial feelings that I seem able to access too easily.

  Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2011

  BILL, FRANK

  The Old Mechanic. Crimes in Southern Indiana, by Frank Bill (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  CELIZIC, JOE

  Scavengers. Windsor Review, Fall

  COUPE, CARLA

  The Book of Tobit. Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, no. 6

  FISHER, EVE

  A Time to Mourn. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January/February

  FLOYD, JOHN

  Turnaround. Strand Magazine, no. 35

  GEORGE, KATHLEEN

  Intruder. Pittsburgh Noir, ed. Kathleen George (Akashic)

  HANSTEIN, WOODY

  Endgame. Dead Calm: Best New England Crime Stories 2012, eds. Mark Ammons, Katherine Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler (Level Best)

  HASTINGS, WILLIAM

  Ten-Year Plan. Cape Cod Noir, ed. David L. Ulin (Akashic)

  HEATHCOCK, ALAN

  The Daughter. Volt, by Alan Heathcock (Graywolf)

  LANDERS, SCOTT

  The Age of Heroes. New England Review 31, no. 2

  LAW, JANICE

  Enemies. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May

  MARGOLIN, PHILLIP, AND JERRY MARGOLIN

  The Adventure of the Purloined Paget. A Study in Scarlet, ed. Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger (Bantam)

  MATTSON, JOSEPH

  Hamm’s Toe. Slake: Los Angeles, no. 3

  PETRIN, JAS. R.

  A New Pair of Pants. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November

  PINCUS, ROGER

  Convenience. Fifth Wednesday Journal, Spring

  RASH, RON

  The Trusty. The New Yorker, May 23

  SANTLOFER, JONATHAN

  Lola. New Jersey Noir, ed. Joyce Carol Oates (Akashic)

  SIMPSON, NANCY PAULINE

  The Coffin Factory. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November

  SMITH, GREGORY BLAKE

  Punishment. Prairie Schooner, Spring

  STEINHAUER, OLEN

  Start-Up. Strand Magazine, June-September

  SULLINS, JACOB

  12 Rounds. Georgia Review, Summer

  TAYLOR, SETH

  Ritalin. Notre Dame Review, Summer/Fall

  TERWILLIGER, CAM

  Cherry Town. The Literary Review, Spring

  TREMBLAY, PAUL

  Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport. Cape Cod Noir, ed. David L. Ulin (Akashic)

  URBANSKI, DEBBIE

  The Move. New England Review 32, no. 1

  WATERS, DON

  Espanola. Georgia Review, Fall

  WEINGARDEN, MARK

  Agent Halverson Addresses the Space Coast Optimists. Five Points 14, no. 2

  WEINSTEIN, JACOB SAGER

  Golden Boy. Popcorn Fiction, June

  WOODINGTON, JOHN

  Camouflage. The Sewanee Review, Fall

  ZELTSERMAN, DAVE

  Emma Sue. On Dangerous Ground: Stories of Western Noir, eds. Ed Gorman, Dave Zeltserman, and Martin H. Greenberg (Cemetery Dance)

  About the Editors

  ROBERT CRAIS is the 2006 recipient of the Ross Macdonald Literary Award. He is the author of many New York Times bestsellers, most recently The First Rule and The Sentry.

  OTTO PENZLER is the founder of the Mysterious Bookshop and Mysterious Press.