One afternoon I found myself writing my own western (it just happened—I was working on something else when suddenly there was Matthis riding his horse down a slope, and the story took off), and though he looked every inch a hired gun out of one of those disappointing films, he had to be more than that. I wondered, What if he isn’t such a good guy? What if the point of the story isn’t a gunfight but something else? What if it’s a slow unveiling of what’s really going on?
I ended up with a story I wasn’t sure anyone would want: Who publishes westerns nowadays, especially mysterious ones? Thank you, Alaska Quarterly Review, for starting “Williamsville” on its journey.
S. L. Coney obtained a master’s degree in clinical psychology before abandoning academia to pursue a writing career. Currently residing in Tennessee, the author has ties to South Carolina and roots in St. Louis. Coney’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in St. Louis Noir, Noir at the Bar Volume 2, and Gamut Magazine.
• When I quit my doctorate program and moved to St. Louis, I immediately fell in love with the city and its people. Scott Phillips mentored me and influenced a lot of my early work, so when he asked for a contribution to St. Louis Noir I jumped at the chance. I was living in the Clayton-Tamm neighborhood—also known as Dogtown—and I am enamored of this area, with its Irish charm and St. Louis spunk. But most of all, with the old Forest Park Hospital that sat on the eastern side of the neighborhood. This was a huge brick building with contrary angles and seemingly inexplicable corners. It was torn down the year I wrote “Abandoned Places,” and so this story became my love letter to that particular bit of history.
Trina Corey is the pen name of Trina Warren, an elementary-school teacher who lives in California. Her five mystery stories have all been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, beginning with the Department of First Stories. They have received nominations for the Edgar, Macavity, Barry, and Derringer Awards.
• “Flight” began, as many mysteries do, with a what if? What if a serial killer who had always targeted elders ended up living with his target demographic? In the long process of answering that question, characters came and went, or stayed and changed. Jenny, the new nursing assistant, was originally going to be the main character. (She and her fiancé, Brian, are the wife and husband in “There Are Roads in the Water,” a story I wrote set many years later.) Mina is a composite of several women I knew whose principal shared characteristic was kindness. But it was Rachel, the heroine, who most surprised me. She was originally slated to be one of the victims. Over the six years that it took to write this story, Rachel didn’t so much change as I just got to know her better, and she changed the story. That a voiceless, seemingly helpless woman came to be the narrator and savior of others is a case of a character who would not be denied.
A former journalist, folksinger, and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one best-selling author. His novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the New York Times, the London Times, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times. His books are sold in 150 countries and have been translated into 25 languages. The author of thirty-nine novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book as well as a lyricist of a country-western album, Deaver has received or been shortlisted for dozens of awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award in Italy, and The Strand Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Deaver has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America.
• When Larry Block contacted me about the idea of writing a story inspired by the American artist Edward Hopper for an anthology entitled In Sunlight or in Shadow, I jumped at the chance. I was familiar with Hopper from my visits to Chicago’s Art Institute when I was young and had long admired his subdued and yet mysterious work. As for the painting upon which to base a story, contributors could select anything but Nighthawks (the iconic late-night diner). I picked Hotel by a Railroad, 1952. I had several stories in mind based on the couple in the image, but, curiously, it was the date of the painting that sent me to my word processor. I thought—as one would—the Cold War! And I was off and running.
Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of 20 novels and more than 150 short stories. His latest Lewis Cole mystery, Hard Aground, will be published in early 2018. He’s currently working on a series of projects with the New York Times best-selling novelist James Patterson. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000, and the The Best American Noir of the Century, published in 2010. His short stories have also appeared in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. His stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. He is also a Jeopardy! game show champion as well as a cowinner on the trivia game show The Chase. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.
• As a lifelong resident of the small state of New Hampshire, I’ve seen the tension and conflict between local townspeople and visitors from out of state, most often called people “from away.” No matter how much you read about how the culture of the United States is the same from one coast to the other, the truth is that we are very different indeed. Sometimes these differences are something to be celebrated, as when a New Hampshire guy like me can travel and enjoy Kansas City barbecue, or go to New Orleans and try Cajun cooking. But at other times, as in my story, the differences can lead to tension, conflict, and—eventually—death.
In my story, an avoidable accident on a lake in New Hampshire that ends in a woman’s death causes her husband to go on a long and exhaustive search for her killers and to find justice, ending up in the urban sprawl of Massachusetts. It’s the classic tale of city dwellers vs. country.
But in writing this story, I also wanted to play with the cliché of the suffering husband seeking revenge for his loved one, and I did so by making the wife a very unlikable character, in the slow process of divorcing her small-town husband. But after she is killed, it’s her small-town and apparently simple husband who makes things right. She was still his wife. It’s his duty. And he intends to complete his duty.
When he’s finally captured by the husband, the urban man responsible for the woman’s death can’t believe it. Why would this simple country man do so much and risk everything to get justice for an unlikable woman who’s about to divorce him?
The answer shows the gulf between the two worlds, and the two ways of life, as the two “men from away” have their final, violent confrontation.
Loren D. Estleman, the author of more than 80 books and 200 short stories, has won 20 national writing awards and has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award and the American Book Award. He served as president of the Western Writers of America, and in 2012 that organization presented him with the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement in the western field. The Private Eye Writers of America honored him with its lifetime achievement award in 2013. (How many lives can a writer have?) He lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.
• I always had a hunch my ten-foot shelf of books on Jack the Ripper would pay off someday, but no one was more surprised than I when, once the opportunity came to write about him, I chose to leave behind 1888 London and move the action to World War II Detroit. Maybe it was inevitable, as I spent most of my youth listening to my parents sharing their experiences of the era and watching 1940s noir thrillers on early TV. Despite the time jump, “GI Jack” gave me the chance to use my late close friend Dale Walker’s pet theory about the Ripper’s identity, which makes as much sense as any.
Peter Ferry’s stories have
appeared in McSweeney’s, Fiction, OR Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. Ferry is the winner of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Short Fiction and a contributor to the travel pages of the Chicago Tribune and to WorldHum. He has written two novels, Travel Writing, which was published in 2008, and Old Heart, which was published in June 2015 and won the Chicago Writers Association Novel of the Year award. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, and Van Buren County, Michigan, with his wife, Carolyn.
• “Ike, Sharon, and Me” is a story that has been bumping around my head, my heart, and my portfolio in various shapes and forms for about thirty years. It is inspired by events and people in my life, not the least of whom is my old friend Patrick Snyder, who took a proprietary interest in “ISM” and would not let it die, even when I sometimes wished that it would. I wrote the last line just a year ago. That the story is finally amounting to something makes me proud and happy.
Charles John Harper is the pseudonym for Minneapolis attorney Charlie Rethwisch. His noir stories featuring 1940s PI Darrow Nash appeared in the February 2008, March/April 2008, and July 2009 issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine under the name C. J. Harper. A fourth Darrow Nash tale, “Lovers and Thieves,” was the cover story for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine’s April 2016 issue. Stand-alone stories have also appeared in those magazines. Harper has twice been shortlisted for the British Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, Dana, and their two itinerant kids, Ellen and Bobby.
• Heading to my day job one morning seven years ago. Slogging through traffic snarled by dreary Minnesota weather. Sick of the repetition of a mostly unfulfilling job. Frustrated at not having—or making—the time to do what I really loved to do. Feeling trapped. Seeing no end in sight. And worst of all, out of ideas for a new story.
Then Darrow Nash popped into my head. And all he did was simply give me a weather report of the world beyond my windshield: “It was a misty November rain.” Hmmm. Sounds like an opening line. Immediately my mood brightened. The gray skies took on some color. Even my day job became bearable. I had found a story.
A story from a line that seemed to offer very little. No plot. No clever twist. No distinct setting. No unique characters (other than Darrow, of course). But in fact it had something very intriguing to me: it had a feeling. An atmosphere. And out of that atmosphere arose a story. A story that grew more complicated the more I wrote. Luring me to two dead people on a couch in an apartment, a strangled man and a woman with a gun in her hand and a bullet hole in her head. To the police it was a clear-cut case of murder-suicide. But to Darrow Nash, all was not as it seemed. It sounded perfect.
So perfect that it took me four years and two rejection letters to finally figure out what really happened inside that apartment. But those four years not only helped me find the solution to the puzzle, they helped me uncover the issues that became the true heart and soul of the story:
The treatment of gay men in postwar America.
The differing attitudes that veterans had toward their service in the war, from bragging tin soldiers to silent heroes, some silent for decades.
And, ultimately, the contradictions that live in all of us and the facades we create to disguise those contradictions. Our immutable predisposition to be, like the crime in the story, not as we seem. To be in our hearts both the lover and the thief.
Craig Johnson is the New York Times best-selling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels, which are the basis for Longmire, the hit Netflix original drama, now in its sixth season. The books have won multiple awards: Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/Bibliobs, the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year, Le Prix 813, the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award, the Mountains and Plains Book of the Year, the SNCF Prix du Polar, Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, the Watson Award, Library Journal’s Best Mystery of the Year, the Rocky Award, and the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Fiction. Spirit of Steamboat was selected by the Wyoming State Library as the inaugural One Book Wyoming. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.
• As Jean Luc-Godard once said, “It’s not where you take things from, but where you take them to.” I have a weakness for quirky or forgotten writers from different geographic regions across the country, and one of them is Davis Grubb, the Appalachian author of such luminaries as Fool’s Parade, Cheyenne Social Club, and the better-known Night of the Hunter, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1955. Though his output was small, many of his best-selling novels were adapted as feature films with actors like Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Kurt Russell, and George Kennedy.
There is a scene in Fool’s Parade, one of Grubb’s lesser-known works, where a paroled convict, Mattie Appleyard, intimidates a guard, and that scene stuck with me since I read it many years ago. My protagonist, Walt Longmire, is the sheriff of the least populated county in one of the least populated states in the country, and in Serpent’s Tooth, the ninth novel in the series, the deputy, Double Tough, loses an eye and has a little trouble getting it replaced, in that he’s colorblind in the remaining one.
Every year since the debut of my first novel, I’ve written and sent out a holiday story to all the readers on my website newsletter, The Post-It, and last year I couldn’t help but do my take on Grubb’s gruesome display—even going so far as to include his novel in my short story.
In the idyllic setting of a country church in Story, Wyoming, an evangelical heroin addict has taken the congregation hostage, and particularly a young woman from the choir. The Highway Patrol, an adjacent sheriff’s department, and even a SWAT team have cordoned off the church, but there doesn’t seem to be much hope of resolving the situation without deadly violence when Double Tough, having also read Fool’s Parade, comes up with a unique response in “Land of the Blind.”
William Kent Krueger (he goes by Kent) writes the New York Times best-selling Cork O’Connor mystery series, which is set in the great Northwoods of Minnesota. His protagonist, Cork O’Connor, is the former sheriff of the fictional Tamarack County and a man of mixed heritage—part Irish and part Ojibwe. Krueger’s work has received a number of awards, including the Minnesota Book Award, Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, Anthony Award, Barry Award, Macavity Award, Dilys Award, and Friends of American Writers Prize. His stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace received the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He lives in St. Paul, where he does all his writing in a couple of wonderfully funky coffee shops.
• When I was invited to submit a story for Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, the anthology in which “The Painted Smile” was first included, I drafted two stories. My initial attempt was a straightforward take on Holmes and Watson, with a ghost in an English castle thrown in for good measure. The story felt too derivative, so I bagged it and tried another approach altogether. I’d been writing about adolescents for a while, an age in which innocence and worldly understanding tug ferociously at opposite ends of the psyche. The idea of a child, incredibly bright but terribly vulnerable, appealed to me enormously. During the writing, I kept trying to imagine what Holmes might have been like in his childhood. Of course, the story had to be set in St. Paul, a city I know well and dearly love. And instead of a ghost, I decided to throw in a clown. Those guys are really scary.
Karen McGee grew up in Berkeley, California, but has spent the past few decades in Tokyo, where she teaches at Nihon University College of Art. She is the co-organizer of the Tokyo Writers Workshop. Her stories have recently appeared in Bête Noire, The Font, HiddenChapter, Twisted Vine, and 9Crimes, and she is currently working on a novel. She is an avid reader of mysteries and a big fan of Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers.
• I was inspired to write “Dot Rat” after watching The Drop and then tracking down and reading the source material for the film, Dennis Lehane’s brilliant short story “Animal Rescue.” I have never been to Dorchester, but I was attracted to the setting as a town with a tough reputation, a place
that might be home to an old-school organized crime head. I was also interested in creating a character that appears vulnerable but is actually dangerous. As with much of my work, I subjected a draft of the story to my monthly workshop. At that time it was titled “Fence” (for lack of a better idea). The title inspired much confusion and several fascinating theories. As usual, the group was also a big help.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel A Book of American Martyrs and the story collection The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. Recently inducted into the American Philosophical Society, she teaches alternately at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. A new poem of hers will appear in The Best American Poetry 2017.
• “The Woman in the Window” was first imagined as a dramatic monologue giving voice to Edward Hopper’s mysterious woman in the window (Eleven A.M., 1926). The young woman in the painting is sensuous, pale-skinned, lost in thought. My evocation of her was originally in the form of a poem of long slow meditated lines that replicate the thought-patterns of one contemplating her future (suggested by the window in front of her, through which the viewer can’t easily see) as well as her past.
In transforming the poetic monologue into prose, I opened up the story considerably, providing the young woman with a revealing backstory and also with a lover, a married man who has paid for her apartment and is locked into an intense emotional relationship with her, which, we are allowed to see, will not come to a happy ending.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 Page 43