The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (56 page)

• I have always romanticized the 1970s, and one aspect of that decade that fascinated me was the urban legend that developed around snuff films and whether they are real. I wanted to write a story about a snuff film, but what came out was not really a story about a snuff film but a story about a brother and sister who are involved in a car accident on a deserted back-country road. Because my stories are from the point of view of teenage narrators, the journey from innocence to experience often takes place under the surface of everything else that goes on, but in “Snuff” I deviate from that a little bit by having the narrator come to the story as having already lost his innocence by watching the “could be” snuff film at his buddy Billy’s house, so the character who actually makes the journey to experience during the story is the narrator’s sister, Charlotte. “Snuff” is a story about sex and violence and appearances versus realities—much of what drives the snuff-film myth—and about how who Charlotte wants to be isn’t who she is. It’s going to take more than a pocket knife and a bad situation to change that fact, but in her innocence, she believes it could be just that easy. Charlotte loses her innocence by the end of the story, but like most losses, it’s a painful process.

Russell Banks
is the prizewinning author of seventeen books of fiction, including the novels
Continental Drift
and
Cloudsplitter
, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Two of his novels,
Affliction
and
The Sweet Hereafter
, have been made into critically acclaimed, award-winning films. He has published six collections of short stories, most recently
A Permanent Member of the Family
(2013), which includes “Former Marine.” His work is widely translated, and in 2010 he was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the minister of culture of France. He is the former president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was the New York State Author from 2004 to 2008 and in 2014 was inducted into the New York Writers’ Hall of Fame. He resides in upstate New York and Miami Beach, Florida.

• In the fall of 2011, after having written three novels in a row and no short stories, I decided to take a break from the long form while the well refilled (with the hope that it would indeed refill) and return to the short form for a while. I went back over my notebooks and culled a dozen sketches, ideas, notions, scraps, and yellowing newspaper articles I’d saved during the previous decade. Then I sat down and over the next year wrote the twelve stories that became
A Permanent Member of the Family
, which opens with “Former Marine.” Among the notes and clippings that generated the stories was a one-paragraph news account of a man in his seventies who had gone on a bank-robbing spree in Illinois and had been caught and turned in by his son, who happened to be a police officer. There was nothing about why an old man would suddenly become a bank robber, and nothing about the moral crisis his son the cop must have faced on discovering that his dad had a secret life as a criminal. I wrote the story as a way of penetrating those twinned mysteries—maybe the only way I could penetrate them. Of course, it’s in the nature of fiction, perhaps all art, that when you gain access to a mystery, you are inevitably led beyond it to a still deeper mystery. In this case, perhaps it’s the mystery of a father’s complex need for his sons’ love and respect, something I’ve never experienced directly, having fathered only daughters (four of them). One of the many reasons we write and read stories and novels, I believe, is to experience what the narrow, happenstance circumstances of our lives have denied us. Though I’ve never robbed a bank, I’ve had secrets and been found out, like Connie, and I’ve accidentally uncovered a few of my parents’ secrets, like Connie’s sons, Jack and his two law-enforcement brothers. But I’ve never had to arrange my life so that it could be both forgiven by my sons and respected by them. Except in fiction.

James Lee Burke
was born in 1936 and has published thirty-three novels and two collections of short stories. His most recent work is the novel
Wayfaring Stranger
, a story of the Great Depression and Bonnie and Clyde and Benny Siegel and the Battle of the Ardennes and the postwar oil boom along the Gulf Coast. He and his wife of fifty-four years, Pearl Burke, live on a ranch in western Montana. They have four children, one of whom is the novelist Alafair Burke.

• I wrote this story as a tribute to the migrant workers and drifters and roustabouts I knew many years ago in the Deep South and the American West. High school and college history books contain little if any information about bindlestiffs and the IWW and individuals such as Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston and Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Flynn and Joe Hill and all those who fought the good fight for working people everywhere. The story was also meant as an allegory, and calls to mind Jesus’ last statement to his followers, namely, to love one another. The story is set in a magical land, one where the stars look like a snow shower arching over the mountains and where rocks creak and murmur to one another under the water. I hope my story measures up. The story of the American West is an epic one. Kerouac caught it better than anyone I can think of. I’d like to think I caught at least a small piece of it.

Patricia Engel
is the author of
It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris
and
Vida
, which was a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and Young Lions fiction awards. Her fiction has appeared in
The Atlantic, A Public Space, Boston Review, Harvard Review
, and numerous other publications and anthologies and has received various honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Miami.

• I was watching a documentary-style crime show on television about a girl who was kidnapped on her way home from a rock concert when I got the idea for “Aida.” I was touched in particular by the expressions on the parents’ faces as they spoke of their daughter, whose remains were eventually found. I was haunted by their words for a long time, and a series of images came to me, of a girl who’d been sheltered and protected from the world by her loving family, only to be stolen from her life forever. I was especially interested in showing how the brutal interruption of a tragedy, like an abduction, can affect a family whose emotional life already hangs in the balance, and how this particular family, which considered themselves a culture unto themselves, would respond to the loss. The voice of Salma, Aida’s twin, came to me early on, and I knew that their bond would be crucial to the telling. For me, the focus was less on the details of Aida’s disappearance and more on how the loss of a child can cause the family unit to disintegrate, and also how a small-town community responds or absolves itself of the crimes experienced by one of its own, or in this case by a family who were always considered outsiders.

Ernest Finney
writes stories and novels. His short fiction has received a number of awards, among them an O. Henry first prize for “Peacocks.” His books include four novels,
Winterchill, Lady with the Alligator Purse, Words of My Roaring
, and
California Time
, and three story collections,
Birds Landing, Flights in the Heavenlies
, and
Sequoia Gardens: California Stories
. He has just finished a novel with Dwight Smith of “The Wrecker” as its main character.

• I had nothing better to do, so when a friend asked if I wanted to take a ride, I got into the cab of his wrecker. For the next five hours I watched Jack work down some bank’s list, repossessing eight cars, three pickup trucks, and one powerboat despite various attempts to thwart him: one guy with a machete but most with fists or fingernails. My story “The Wrecker” grew out of that afternoon. Jamie, the babe, was part fantasy, part good luck.

Roxane Gay
is the author of three books,
Ayiti, An Untamed State
, and
Bad Feminist
. Her work has also appeared in
The Best American Short Stories 2012
, the
New York Times Book Review, Oxford American, West Branch
, and others. She lives and writes in the Midwest.

• My first novel,
An Untamed State
, is about a kidnapping, and when I wrote “I Will Follow You,” the idea of people being stolen from their lives was still very much on my mind. This story began with thinking about two sisters with an uncanny bond, and as I imagined their relationship, I wanted to know more about how that bond had developed, what they had seen and endured together, and how they were trying to move forward. I live in a small town with a courthouse at the center of the town square. One afternoon I found myself standing in front of the courthouse, watching people trickle in and out of the building, and I knew that one of the sisters had been married in a courthouse like that, surrounded by such a strange swath of humanity. I’m also a movie buff, so I knew the other sister would be involved with a guy who was so obsessed with movies he couldn’t really interact normally with anyone. I kept imagining the various elements of the story and the characters, and finally I put it all together.

Michelle Butler Hallett
is the author of the novels
Deluded Your Sailors, Sky Waves, Double-blind
, and the short story collection
The Shadow Side of Grace
. Her short stories have been anthologized in
The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Hard Ol’ Spot, Everything Is So Political
, and
Running the Whale’s Back
. Her novel
Double-blind
, a study of complicity and love narrated by an American psychiatrist working under MK-Ultra protocol during the Cold War, was shortlisted for the 2007 Sunburst Award.

• I write about power and morality, and I often write about captivities. “Bush-Hammer Finish” took spark from the terrible death of Canadian poet Pat Lowther in 1975. Married to an increasingly unstable man, Lowther was just getting serious critical attention for her work when her husband killed her as she slept. He beat in her skull with a hammer and then dumped her body in a creek that she liked. I knew and greatly admired Lowther’s work before I found out how she died. It haunts me. I’ve wanted to write about her somehow for years, but she was a real person who left behind children and friends who love and miss her. Writing about Pat Lowther as Pat Lowther felt like a terrible intrusion, something I had no right to do. Yet . . . yet the story did not free me. I know next to nothing about Vancouver in the early 1970s, but I do know a fair bit about present-day St. John’s, so I tried approaching a similar storyline in a context I better understood.

The beginning of evil is the moment when one person dehumanizes another. The misogyny at work in Lowther’s death, the idea that a woman can be a possession, something to be kept or thrown away, remains: a blight, a danger, a poison.

Charlaine Harris
has been writing novels and short stories for thirty-five years. She has won numerous awards in several genres, but she considers mystery her home base. Her best-known work, the Sookie Stackhouse novels, were adapted by Alan Ball into the HBO series
True Blood
. Charlaine has one husband, three children, two grandchildren, and several dogs. She lives in a house on a cliff in Texas.

• When I was showering one morning, I noticed that I had developed a procedure for getting clean, without conscious planning. Left shoulder first, then face, then right shoulder, and so on. I became aware that my routine was so fixed that I’d never even recognized it. I began wondering what it would take to blast that routine to smithereens. Since I’m naturally prone to imagine the worst possible scenario, I thought,
What if someone tried to kill me while I was trimming my hair?
Of course I’d be totally thrown off base. But what if there was a woman who wasn’t? What if the interruption was more of an annoyance than a complete surprise? What if she
expected
someone to try to kill her and she was quite capable of dealing with the situation? Anne DeWitt began to take shape in my mind. What kind of job would such a woman take, a job where she could exercise her formidable skills? Why, she’d be a high school principal, of course . . .

Joseph Heller
(1923–1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. He was neither a prolific nor a successful writer, with the notable exception of his satirical novel
Catch-22
(1961), which was an international bestseller and a popular motion picture. Its title has become part of the English language, referring to a perplexing circle in which the most logical decision is still an absurd, no-win choice. It tells the story of Captain Joseph Yossarian and his attempt to avoid serving in World War II by pretending to be insane. His plan is thwarted by the doctor’s argument that if he were truly mad, he would risk his life and seek to fight additional missions. Alternatively, if he were sane, he would be able to follow orders, so he could be sent to fight more missions.

• 
A note from Andrew Gulli, editor of
The Strand Magazine,
which first published this story:
Literary treasure hunts are glamorous and exciting—on the surface. I’ve gone on several, and whenever I’m asked what it’s like to find an unpublished gem, I often leave out the frustrations and disappointments. You start by searching the archives of a legendary—though now departed—writer, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find an undiscovered one. Then a few things might happen: the work will be unreadable, the manuscript incomplete, the handwriting hard to decipher, or, after you bypass these hurdles, the literary estate will decide it doesn’t want the gem (which you’ve dedicated weeks or months to searching for) ever to see the light of day. In the case of “Almost Like Christmas,” I was fortunate. I chose the story over seven other unpublished pieces by Heller that I found; the manuscript was typo-free; and Heller’s estate was so easygoing I thought I’d died and gone to editor’s heaven. On top of that, it’s classic Heller. Rich with the author’s trademark cynicism about the dark recesses of human nature, it also creates an atmosphere of tension and suspense that had me quickly turning pages to the tragic denouement.