The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (64 page)

To find other distinguished mystery stories from 2012, click
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Tom Barlow
is the author of the story collection
Welcome to the Goat Rodeo
. Other stories of his have appeared in anthologies, including
Best New Writing 2011
, and magazines and journals, including
Redivider, Temenos, Apalachee Review, Hobart, Needle
, the
William and Mary Review
, and the
Hiss Quarterly
. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writer's Workshop for fantasy and science fiction. He has also written about personal finance for websites, including
Forbes.com
,
DailyFinance.com
and
Dealnews.com
. He writes because conversation involves a lot of give-and-take, and he's always thought of himself as more of a giver.

•     “Smothered and Covered” started, not surprisingly, with a visit to one of my favorite restaurants, Waffle House. At the time I was working a pressured job, which caused me often to be awake in the middle of the night. Knowing that I wouldn't fall back to sleep, I would occasionally head over to the Waffle House and dawdle over a 4
A.M
. breakfast. Looking at the other clientele, I realized that WH is one of the few places where those who desperately need to get out of the house in the middle of the night can nurse their demons for the price of a cup of coffee.

Knowing that one of those people was destined to become my main character, I searched for a conflict that could account for his malaise. I'd been thinking about the awful preponderance of fatal car accidents caused by drunk drivers and the guilt that must, or at least should, haunt those who survive, especially if the fatality is a loved one. How could he carry on with such a burden? How could a marriage survive?

That darkness led me to a noir style and voice, which seemed to capture a sense of inevitability. After agonizing for weeks over a proper ending, I spent one day trimming the fat from the story (for me, a crucial step in the process), only to discover that I already had an ending that worked well. I just hadn't recognized it as such. Older, wiser, and a devotee of Lunesta, I now trawl for characters during the daylight hours, usually at coffeehouses. I'm not sure, however, that the pickings are quite as rich.

 

Michael Connelly
is a crime-beat reporter turned novelist. He has written twenty-five novels in twenty years, most of which center on the pursuits of Detective Harry Bosch of the Los Angeles Police Department. He also has written several novels about Bosch's half-brother Mickey Haller, a criminal defense attorney, thus pursuing an exploration of crime and justice from both sides of the aisle, so to speak. Connelly is married and the father of a teenage daughter. He lives in Florida but spends a lot of his time in Los Angeles, the city he writes about.

•     The subject of the
Vengeance
anthology naturally lent itself to explorations of the fine line between punishment and retribution. When people take matters into their own hands, is it always vengeance, or can there be justice? It's a theme I have played with before, and I was happy to be asked to contribute to the collection edited by Lee Child. When I was a reporter I wrote about a major gold fraud in which hundreds of people lost their savings in a gold-buying scheme. There were many threats against the perpetrators' lives and I started with that, thinking, What if a victim made good on the threat or hired someone to make good on the threat? Would it be justice or vengeance? I remember these guys had really been callous in the extent they went to rip people off. They would crawl under their desks while on the phone with a customer and say they had just entered the gold vault to pick out their gold bars. The slight echo made under the desk sounded like they could actually be in a vault, and it helped them sell the fraud. Of course, there was no gold. They were just taking people's money. So that was the starting point of this story, and of course I wanted to bring Harry Bosch into it. It had been quite a while since I had written about Harry in the short form. It is always fun to do that.

 

O'Neil De Noux
's crime fiction has garnered several awards: the Shamus for best short story, the Derringer for best novelette, and the 2011 Police Book of the Year. His recurring characters include New Orleans Police detectives Dino LaStanza (1980s), Jacques Dugas (1890s), and John Raven Beau (twenty-first century) as well as private eye Lucien Caye (1940s). In 2013, De Noux was elected vice president of the Private Eye Writers of America. He also writes in other genres, including historical fiction, fantasy, horror, western, science fiction, and erotica.

•     Writing about New Orleans AK (After Katrina) is difficult, as the city changes just about every day. Some areas have come back faster than others; some will never return, buildings still gutted, slabs where houses once stood, restaurants torn from the piling. The only constant is the crime rate, which returned with a vengeance. This inspired me to write a story about a citizenry that acts as if its police department is an occupying army. New Orleans has always been the hardest city in America to police. It's a city of great promise and great disappointment, where the good times roll and crime is always around the corner. The New Orleans Police Department is understaffed, underpaid, undertrained, and held up to standards few humans can achieve. And most of the time the men and women in blue feel alone.

 

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.