The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Lisa Scottoline

  The New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Eileen Dreyer has published thirty-eight novels and ten short stories in multiple genres, ranging from historical romance to medical-forensic thrillers. Living in St. Louis with her husband and children, she has turned in the nurse’s whites she wore during a career in trauma medicine and made writing, travel, and St. Louis Cardinals baseball her full-time hobbies. She has animals but refuses to submit them to the glare of the spotlight.

  • I was invited to submit a short story for the Crime Square Anthology, in which all the crimes took place in Times Square. Each story was set in a different decade. When asked which decade I wanted, there was no question. I picked the 1940s because immediately I saw in my head that iconic photo of the sailor kissing the nurse on VJ Day. It has always really spoken to me. There had to be a story there somewhere.

  I studied the photo. I researched it and found that Alfred Eisenstadt, who took the photo, had followed the sailor down the length of Times Square as he kissed every woman he passed. Then I learned that there was more than one photo and in each different people are seen in the background. What of those people? What is going on that day that we’re missing because we’re watching the performance put on by an exuberant sailor? My story is about two of those other persons, another sailor and the wife who has waited for him to come home. It’s about not assuming that you know what you see.

  David Edgerley Gates lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and many of his stories take place in the West—period pieces like the Placido Geist bounty hunter stories, and others more contemporary, dealing with the meth plague in Indian country, say, or the border war, drugs and human traffic moving north, guns and money going south, and the corrosive influence of the Mexican cartels. “The Devil to Pay,” although it’s set in present-day New York, nods in passing to the long reach of cartel money and the increased Latino gang presence in the American prison system.

  Gates is a past Shamus and Edgar Award nominee. His stories appear regularly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. His website is www.davidedgerleygates.com.

  • Tommy Meadows is small-time, a pilot fish swimming in an ocean of larger predators. He’s not as ruthless as some, but neither is he that nice a person. I think the character’s influenced, to some degree, by the guys Donald Westlake used to write about, grifters and also-rans, who never quite make it into the heavy or the big score. And Tommy is more of a catalyst than a major player. He just finds himself in the wrong place at the right time. The ending of this story is one of my few ventures into what might be called metafiction. The fairy tale Tommy tells his gramma is, of course, the story you’ve just read.

  Although best known for his true crime books, notably the Edgar-nominated Six Against the Rock, about Alcatraz, and Zebra, also nominated, which examined the infamous San Francisco murders of the early 1970s, Clark Howard has developed a great following for his short stories, five of which have been nominated for Edgar Allan Poe Awards; one, “Horn Man,” was picked as the best of the year for 1980. He has also won the Derringer Award and in 2009 was voted the Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement in the mystery genre. Other nominations have been for Shamus and Spur Awards, and five times he was named as the favorite for the Ellery Queen Readers Award by that popular magazine.

  Andre Kocsis lives in the West Chilcotin, a remote area of British Columbia, Canada. His work has been published in the Dalhousie Review, the New Orphic Review, Skyline Magazine, The Oak, and Couloir Magazine as well as a number of online publications. Currently he’s working on the fifth and, he fervently hopes, final draft of a novel entitled Canyon Marathon.

  • It has been my lifelong ambition to use the name Sierra for a protagonist. However, this was not the sole impetus for “Crossing.” Marijuana is a $6 billion industry in British Columbia, with an estimated 95 percent of this cash crop destined for the United States. A news story about the capture of some smugglers started me thinking that the mountains along the Canada-U.S. border could provide an interesting way to move drugs. I felt, however, that it was prudent to try out this idea in fiction rather than in real life.

  The southeast of British Columbia, where the Rocky Mountains cross the border, has a history of serving as a haven for dissidents. The Doukhobors, a pacifist religious sect with strong antigovernment beliefs, escaped persecution in Russia with the aid of Leo Tolstoy and settled here in the early 1900s. As well, a community of polygamous Mormons have made this area their home since 1946. And during the Vietnam War many American youths escaped the draft by settling here. They’ve had a noticeable impact on the culture of the region.

  During the late sixties, I was a Canadian student in Berkeley and observed an American social fabric rent by the war. Ever since, I have been fascinated by characters like Sierra, who had to decide between risking their lives in a war with which they disagreed and leaving their homes, their families, and the country they loved. No doubt many have never resolved internal conflicts that reflect the larger drama that was played out on the national stage during the Vietnam War.

  The wilderness has always drawn me, and mountainous terrain has a special fascination. There’s an inherent drama in the harsh conditions, with the abruptly changing weather, which tends toward the extreme. It’s an environment that tests the spirit, and many of my short stories take place with this backdrop. Consequently, skiing in the backcountry has become a passion that I indulge at every opportunity. In this context, I have met a number of mountain guides, and without exception, they have been fascinating, if often flawed, characters.

  Sierra strives to escape the complications, the frustrations, the ambiguities of civilization. In the wilderness, decisions are without ambiguity because they are about survival. Ironically, his desire to escape is what traps Sierra in a situation in which he must again make a choice, a choice that he thought he had made once and for all in his youth.

  Kevin Leahy’s stories have appeared in the Briar Cliff Review, Slice Magazine, and Opium Magazine. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son and is working on a novel.

  • Years ago I read a statistic that stuck with me: there are now more prisoners than farmers in the United States. I found myself thinking about what that might mean, so I started writing about a farm community that became a prison town. The seed of the story was the sentence “No one recalls who built the prison.” While that exact phrase didn’t make it into the final version, the sense of anonymity and communal amnesia behind it helped me find a way into the story. It sounds orderly and analytical when I explain it like that. But the truth is, it was trial and error the whole way, and I didn’t get anywhere until I put my own fears on the page—of being jobless, having a sick child, losing my son.

  I’d like to acknowledge a debt to Tracy Huling for her excellent paper “Building a Prison Economy in Rural America,” which was invaluable in my research. When I reread my story now, I also hear the influence of fiction I read and loved in the years before I wrote it—Chris Bachelder’s U.S.!, Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Year of Silence,” and especially Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Whatever defects my story has are mine, and whatever resonance it has, the echoes of those earlier pieces helped me find it.

  Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels in the fantasy and horror genres, including the Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground and the crime fantasy Bullettime. His shift to crime fiction will be nearly complete with the publication of the mostly noir Love Is the Law in late 2013. His short fiction has been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, and the New Haven Review and in anthologies, including West Coast Crime Wave, Psychos, and Lovecraft Unbound. Nick’s fiction and editorial work have been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award five times, and also for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards.

  • My influences have always been broad—science fiction, “cult” fiction of all types, including the Beats, horror, and crime. I’m also a Long Island boy, and years ago was
sent out to Northport, where Jack Kerouac had made his home, to cover a marathon reading of Big Sur for an online magazine. I had found Akashic Books through my interest in punk/cult stuff and eagerly read the volumes of its fill-in-the-blank Noir Series as they came out. When Akashic announced Long Island Noir, I queried editor Kaylie Jones with a story idea about my hometown, Port Jefferson, but another writer had already called dibs on the location. I immediately thought back to Kerouac and my trip to Northport and quickly suggested an idea about that town. Kerouac isn’t the only thing Northport is famous for; the “acid king” Ricky Kasso’s murder of Gary Lauwers ranks high as well, especially for any 1980s LI kid who had long hair and liked horror and fantasy. (Guilty.) Obviously I had to combine the two and add other bits and pieces of Long Island: fears of breast cancer clusters, Mobbed-up waste management firms, and the tourism industry. In proper Beat fashion, the story came out in a mad rush. Luckily, Jones was there with her red pen to make it more comprehensible. I’ve grown to like writing crime fiction. I think I’ll stick around.

  Emily St. John Mandel is from the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. Her most recent novel is The Lola Quartet; her previous novels are Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun. She is a staff writer for The Millions, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies. She is married and lives in Brooklyn; her website is www.emilymandel.com.

  • My second novel, The Singer’s Gun, involved a man who finds himself drawn unwillingly into a criminal transaction, and an associate of his ends up getting shot. Although the associate, David, was a relatively minor character in the book, I found myself thinking of him a great deal. He was a young widower who’d been drifting across Europe, trying to avoid the ghost of his wife, and at the moment of death I had him see her again.

  Murder your darlings, writers are told, but sometimes those darlings refuse to stay dead. I cut most of David’s backstory from The Singer’s Gun because it slowed the pace of the book at exactly the point where I needed the narrative to pick up speed. In the final version of the book, not only is David’s backstory mostly gone, but his death takes place offstage. But that deleted backstory stayed with me in the ensuing years, and eventually I developed it into “Drifter.” I remained fascinated by the idea of a brokenhearted traveler trying to disappear, running from the memory of a lost beloved but at the same time secretly longing to see that person again.

  Leaving home is a formative experience in anyone’s life, and when I left home, I did so in a somewhat extreme fashion—I moved alone from rural British Columbia to downtown Toronto (a distance of some three thousand miles) when I was eighteen years old—and it was like flying into an entirely different life. I’ve been thinking ever since about the power and joy and hazard of relocation and travel, the way we can reinvent or lose ourselves through movement over the landscape. “Drifter” is about one of the very darkest possibilities of travel, which is to say, traveling in an effort to erase yourself.

  Dennis McFadden lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, New England Review, the Missouri Review, the Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Fiction, PRISM international, and the South Carolina Review. A story from his 2010 collection, Hart’s Grove, was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2011.

  • Okay, I admit it, I love Lafferty best. I’ve written a hundred stories, made up a hundred heroes, but Lafferty’s my favorite by far. I spoil him half to death. I treat him better than his brothers and sisters. I indulge him more (five stories of his own and counting), let him have his own way more, let him get away with bloody murder. I just don’t have it in me to scold him, to try to keep him in line. Who could blame me? He makes my writing life a hell of a lot easier than any of the others (most of whom, ungrateful bastards, don’t even try). All I have to do is imagine an inkling of something a little bit Laffertyesque, and wham, bam, here we go, Lafferty off to the races, barreling gangways here and there, this way and that, rambling on and on in that pseudo-rogue-brogue of his. I pretty much just sit back and listen, along for the ride. What can I say? I love this guy.

  Micah Nathan is a bestselling author, short story writer, and essayist. He has written several novels, some ignored, most well received. He received his MFA from Boston University, where he was awarded the 2010 Saul Bellow Prize for fiction.

  • “Quarry” was one of those rare pieces that emerged fully formed. An isolated farmhouse, a body in the woods, two children left alone with a murderous thief—if I couldn’t make that scenario work, I have no business writing.

  Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of novels of mystery and suspense, including most recently The Accursed, Daddy Love, and Mudwoman, as well as collections of stories, including Give Me Your Heart, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, and Black Dahlia & White Rose. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was the 2011 recipient of the President’s Medal in the Humanities. “So Near Any Time Always” will be included in Evil Eye: Four Tales of Love Gone Wrong.

  • Stories about stalkers always fascinate me. Years ago, a man whom I’d known in Detroit, who had tried to exploit me as a means of advancing his literary career, set out to stalk me—but through the mail, not literally. Thank God, this was an era long before the Internet—what devastation he might have wrought in the twenty-first century, under aliases, attacking “Joyce Carol Oates,” who would have been helpless to combat a many-pronged online attack.

  As it was, the Detroit stalker sent hundreds of letters to me and to others, bitterly denigrating me, over a period of ten to twelve years. He managed to publish, in a small literary magazine, a story with the ominous title “How I Murdered Joyce Carol Oates.” (No, I didn’t read the story!) His threats were clever, elliptical, and taunting—the kind of vague threat that wasn’t clear enough to be actionable, even if I’d wanted to appeal to the police.

  “So Near Any Time Always” is about a teenage stalker and his naively complicit victim. It has two distinct origins: the first, a blurred memory of adolescent yearning, misunderstanding, anxiety, and unease; the second, a more adult perception of the terrible harm people can inflict upon others, in their failure to take responsibility for, even to acknowledge, a potentially dangerous family member.

  Fundamentally, the story is about a young girl’s wish to believe that she is “special”—that a boy could be attracted to her, and feel emotion for her, on her own terms. So badly the narrator wants to believe, she overlooks clues in the boy’s bizarre behavior that would alert most of us to the possibility of danger. Foolish as the girl is, she is after all young—she is inexperienced, naive, intelligent, but not skeptical like her sister.

  It’s the unconscionable behavior of the boy’s parents that generates the story: their pretense that their son, who killed his young sister years before, was “cured” and “harmless”—and would not harm anyone ever again. This moral blindness is outrageous—yet a commonplace—as families protect relatives who are a danger to others and themselves.

  Of course, the great irony of the story is that the girl will never forget her “first love”—though the boy was insanely fixated on her as a reincarnation of his (murdered) sister. Never will she be pursued again in such an impassioned way. It is the girl who recalls the boy—the stalker—in darkly romantic terms; always she will remember him—“So Near Any Time Always.”

  Nancy Pickard is the winner of Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, Shamus, and Barry Awards for her novels and short stories. She is a four-time Edgar Award finalist. Her novel The Virgin of Small Plains was the Kansas book of the year in 2007. Her most recent novel, The Scent of Rain and Lightning, was a finalist for the Great Plains Fiction Award in 2011. Her next novel, set in Kansas, will be published in 2014.

  • “Light Bulb” is based more on my own life than any other story I’ve ever wri
tten. I was the child who walked home alone from church school and was frightened by a man who tried to lure me into a church. I am the woman who had an epiphany many years later that shocked me with the realization that although he had failed to molest me, he had surely also tried with other children and had probably succeeded with some of them. Like my protagonist, I visited the police to report him, knowing he could still be alive, he might be a grandfather, he could still be doing damage. In real life, I never found a way to stop him, so I invented one.

  A full-time professional writer since 1969, Bill Pronzini has published seventy-seven novels, including five in collaboration with his wife, mystery novelist Marcia Muller, and thirty-seven in his iconic “Nameless Detective” series. He is also the author of four hundred short stories, articles, essays, and book reviews and four nonfiction books, and he has edited or coedited numerous anthologies. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries.

  In 2008 he was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, the organization’s highest award. He has received three Shamus Awards, two for best novel; the Lifetime Achievement Award (presented in 1987) from the Private Eye Writers of America; and six nominations for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award. His suspense novel Snowbound was the recipient of the Grand Prix de la Litterature Policière as the best crime novel published in France in 1988. Two other suspense novels, A Wasteland of Strangers and The Crimes of Jordan Wise, were nominated for the Hammett Prize for best crime novels of 1997 and 2006, respectively, by the International Crime Writers Association.