The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Lisa Scottoline

  • John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter are characters I created for the novel Quincannon (1985). In that book they were not as yet a detective team. Sabina was then employed as an operative for the Denver office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency (her character is loosely based on Kate Warne, the first female PI, who worked for Allan Pinkerton in his Baltimore agency during and after the Civil War); Quincannon was a field agent attached to the San Francisco branch of the U.S. Secret Service. They joined forces to open their San Francisco–based detective agency shortly after the events described in Quincannon and have since appeared in more than a score of short stories, including one, “The Chatelaine Bag” (2010), that my wife, Marcia Muller, and I wrote together on a whim. The story turned out so well that we decided to do a series of collaborative novels featuring the duo, with Marcia writing the scenes told from Sabina’s point of view and me writing those from Quincannon’s. The first of these, The Bughouse Affair, was published in 2012; the second, The Spook Lights Affair, is due out in December of this year. “Gunpowder Alley” is the most recent Carpenter and Quincannon short story, and the last to be published under my solo byline.

  Winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his first book, a collection of literary short stories, Randall Silvis is also the author of eleven critically acclaimed novels in various genres and a book of narrative nonfiction about the exploration of Labrador. He has written feature and cover stories for the Discovery Channel magazines, has won two NEA literature fellowships plus several national playwriting and screenwriting competitions, and is a published poet, an unpublished songwriter, an unreliable blogger, and a primary source of profanity on his local golf courses.

  • I can’t remember the genesis of “The Indian” or, for that matter, the genesis of most of my other work. This is probably because I typically work on three or four projects simultaneously. And by “work on” I don’t mean that I write them simultaneously, but that while I am writing one I have a few others knocking around in my head and clamoring for attention. (See reference to Uncle Dave, below, for suspicious parallels.) Sometimes one of them will clamor so loudly that I have to stop writing, grab a different notebook, and write something else for the rest of the morning. I hate it when that happens. But I love it, too. Better to have too many ideas than to have too few. Or, worse yet, none at all.

  What I do remember about “The Indian” is that it used to be longer. So did my hair. I cut most of it back in the ’90s, I think, when it started falling out on top faster than it was growing on the sides. I just didn’t want to end up looking like my Uncle Dave, who covered his naked dome with aluminum foil and also made foil plugs for his ears. The foil plugs stuck out like stubby antennas through his scraggly hair. Now that I know about the government’s projects Bluebird and MKUltra, I wish I had taken Uncle Dave more seriously. He’d start talking about the crazy messages being beamed into his brain and I’d say, “Okay, yep, you mind if Cindy and me go out for a little ride?” Cindy was my second cousin, a few years younger than me but something of a sexual prodigy. Of the two of them, I miss her more.

  (Side note: No matter how strong the urge, no matter how enticing the temptation, no matter how freaking nostalgic you get for your sweet young lover from the good old days, DO NOT search for current photos of that lover on Facebook. Ewwwwww!)

  Anyway, “The Indian” used to run to nearly 30,000 words. Janet Hutchings told me she would publish it if I cut it to under 20,000, which I could probably do just by taking out the f-words. I spent a few more of those words cursing silently, then started cutting.

  I had intended to use this space to say something about how much I love to write novellas and why don’t more places publish them, something about how “The Indian” is an elegy to small-town life, something about what an idiot my former dean of liberal arts is, and, finally, to direct a few hundred expletives at the pompous Magoos who continue to insist that genre fiction cannot be literary . . . but it looks like I’ve already used up my miserly ration of page space. F**k!

  Patricia Smith is the author of six books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the National Book Award, and her latest, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Tin House, and both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She was the editor of Staten Island Noir, in which “When They Are Done with Us” appears; the story won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year. She is a 2012 fellow at both the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. A professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, Patricia is married to Edgar Award winner Bruce DeSilva, author of the Mulligan crime novels.

  • “When They Are Done with Us” has at its center a true Staten Island story that dominated the news for days. After a fire, the bodies of a mother and her four children were discovered. The throats of the mother and three of her children were slit, and near her thirteen-year-old son’s body was a razor and a note with the scrawled words am sorry. The assumption was that he had killed his family and then committed suicide by sliding a blade across his own throat. People were horrified; hastily penned editorials screeched about young black boys and their frightening dysfunctions. Later it was discovered that it was the mother who had written the note and effectively framed her son for the killings.

  As a writer with a fierce curiosity about all the ways the world goes awry, I couldn’t push the story from my head. When I decided to write a piece for Staten Island Noir, I saw my chance to process the horror.

  It happened in Port Richmond, a diverse but divided community, so this was initially a story about race: Jo, a white woman uncertain of her rooting, never quite sure how to respond or relate to her black and Latino neighbors, wrestles with feelings of disconnect and guilt when the tragedy occurs directly across the street from where she lives.

  But once her teenage son, Charlie, walked in and opened his mouth, I immediately saw another direction for the story. He started as a bit player, a chalk outline, but he urged me to step back and see just how poisonous he could be. He allowed me to develop a tension created by those dueling levels of familiar violence and to make Jo’s options, her space in this world, smaller and smaller, until her horrible choice was inevitable. Charlie created the reason for the necessary bond between Jo and Leisa, the woman who’d murdered her children and killed herself.

  Since I primarily identify as a poet and this was the first short story I’ve ever written, I chose poetry as Jo’s lifeline, her one shot at sanity and salvation. Having poetry be a part of the story linked the two genres and kept those voices (“Whatta ya think you’re doin’? You don’t know how to write a short story!”) at bay.

  Ben Stroud is the author of the story collection Byzantium. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, One Story, Electric Literature, the Boston Review, and the anthology New Stories from the South 2010. He lives in Ohio and teaches at the University of Toledo.

  • I drafted this story over a cold January weekend in Michigan in 2007. While researching another story, I came across a rumor in a history of Havana about vagabonds who came to the city and started selling “French sausage” in the market—sausage that was eventually discovered to be made of slaves who’d been kidnapped and murdered. Whether this truly happened, I don’t know, but the rumor stuck with me for a few months (it was too good, too rich with thematic and dramatic possibility), until that cold weekend. I wanted to get as far from Michigan as possible and so decided it was time to write about Havana. I started with the rumor about the sausage and built the story out from there. How would the truth be discovered? I’d need a detective. Who would be the ideal detective? Someone who could pass through the different racial worlds of nineteenth-century Cuba. This is how I came up with the character of Burke, who appears in ano
ther of my stories as well. That he is an American rather than a Cuban is a result of my own ignorance. I didn’t know enough about Cuba to pull off inhabiting a Cuban, so I made him a newcomer to the city. He would mirror me, also a newcomer.

  In writing the story, I ended up doing far more research than reading that initial history. I even tracked down a tourist’s map from the 1850s with fold-out views of the city (this I found in the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections). The story became a novella. Then it became the first section of a novel. And then, after five years, it became a story again. I didn’t plan it that way—it was a blind search all the way through—but it took that long process of growing and cutting away and leaving the story aside and coming back to it for it to finally become what it needed to be.

  Hannah Tinti’s story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award. Hannah is also cofounder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine and received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in magazine editing. Recently she joined the Public Radio program Selected Shorts as its literary commentator.

  • I based “Bullet Number Two” on an experience I had while driving through the Four Corners. I got caught in a dust storm, just as Hawley does in the story, and had to pull over at a strange motel run by Navajos. There wasn’t a shootout, but my room did have a hole punched through the wall. The storm was wild, and the sand and the colors and the light of the desert in the morning stayed with me. I’m grateful to Tin House for taking a chance and running this story, and to Best American Mystery Stories for giving it a second life.

  Maurine Dallas Watkins (1896 –1969) wrote the 1926 play Chicago, on which the musical is based. Winner of six Tonys and a Best Picture Oscar for the 2002 film, Watkins based her Broadway-bound play on the newspaper articles that she wrote as a young crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune while covering the sensationalist murder trials that rocked 1920s Chicago. Her tongue-in-cheek features on the “beautiful murderesses” turned media darlings were the inspiration for Chicago’s Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. Watkins wrote several other plays, including the long-lost Revelry, about the scandal-ridden White House of President Warren G. Harding, and the acidly cynical farce So Help Me God!, which received its first production in 2009, eighty years after its creation. She wrote or contributed to several films, including two Best Picture nominees, Libeled Lady and Up the River, as well as such screwball comedies as Professional Sweethearts, No Man of Her Own, and I Love You Again.

  Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2012

  ALLYN, JIM

  The Deer Woods. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February

  APPEL, JACOB M.

  Canvassing. SubTropics, Spring/Summer

  ARVEDON, RICHARD

  We Lived in Paradise. 13 Stories from the West Hartford Fiction Writers Group

  BOHEN, LES

  Poseidiana. Popcorn Fiction

  BROWN, KAREN

  The Philter. Crazyhorse, Spring

  CHILD, LEE

  The Hollywood to Remember. Vengeance, ed. Lee Child (Mulholland)

  CLEVELAND, JANE

  Last Supper. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June

  CONLEY, JEN

  Finn’s Missing Sister. Needle, Winter

  DANIEL, RAY

  Driving Miss Rachel. Blood Moon: Best New England Crime Stories (Level Best)

  DOAK, EMILY

  Hatchlings. Crazyhorse, Spring

  DONOGHUE, EMMA

  The Widow’s Cruse. One Story, no. 168

  ESTLEMAN, LOREN D.

  Big Band. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, January/February

  FRIEND, TIMOTHY

  Dog Night. Needle, Fall/Winter

  HALL, PARNELL

  Times Square Shuffle. Crime Square, ed. Robert J. Randisi (Vantage Point)

  HELLER, GABRIEL

  Fugitive. Inkwell Journal, Spring

  HOFFMAN, ALICE

  Conjure. Shadow Show, ed. Sam Weller and Mort Castle (William Morrow)

  LAW, JANICE

  The General. Vengeance, ed. Lee Child (Mulholland)

  MACLEAN, MIKE

  Just Like Maria. Thuglit, no. 2

  MAKSIK, ALEXANDER

  Snake River Gorge. Tin House, vol. 13, no. 4

  MORAN, TERRIE FARLEY

  Jake Says Hello. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December

  OAK, B. B.

  Death from a Bad Heart. Blood Moon: Best New England Crime Stories (Level Best)

  PENNCAVAGE, MICHAEL

  Mistakes. Staten Island Noir, ed. Patricia Smith (Akashic)

  PHELAN, TWIST

  The Fourteenth Juror. Vengeance, ed. Lee Child (Mulholland)

  PRUFER, KEVIN

  Cat in a Box. Kansas City Noir, ed. Steve Paul (Akashic)

  SHANNON, JAMES

  Shame the Devil. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July

  SHEEHY, HUGH

  Meat and Mouth. Kenyon Review, Summer

  STEVENS, B. K.

  Thea’s First Husband. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June

  VAN DEN BERG, LAURA

  Opa-Locka. Southern Review, Summer

  WARTHMAN, DAN

  Pansy Place. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, January/February

  WHITE, DAVID

  Runaway. Lost Children Protectors, ed. Thomas Pluck (CreateSpace)

  About the Editor

  LISA SCOTTOLINE is the New York Times best-selling writer and Edgar Award–winning author of more than twenty novels, including stand-alone works like Don’t Go and her most recent novel in the iconic Rosato & Associates crime series, Accused. Scottoline has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America. She also writes a weekly humor column, “Chick Wit,” with her daughter Francesca Serritella for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and these columns have been collected into a series of nonfiction books.