The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (62 page)

 

Nathan Oates
's stories have appeared in
The Antioch Review, Witness,
the
Alaska Quarterly Review,
and other literary magazines. His stories have been anthologized in
The Best American Mystery Stories 2008,
the seventieth anniversary issue of
The Antioch Review,
and
Fifty-Two Stories.
He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Seton Hall University, where he also directs the Poetry-in-the-Round reading series. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and kids.

• I wrote “Looking for Service” as I was finishing the first draft of a novel, thinking I could go back to the beginning and add this new voice, that the novel would now have two narrators, or maybe even three, or four. What I really wanted was a release from being caught in one character's head for so long, and maybe because of that desire for release, I wrote this story quickly, finishing a draft in two sittings. This is not that uncommon for me, and sometimes after these quick first drafts the basic structure is in place, if in need of major revision. Other times the results are terrible, and I put the stories away. This story was the rarest sort: when I read it over, it seemed nearly finished. Out of the detail of the
THANK YOU, GEORGE BUSH
sign jammed into his front yard, the narrator's personality—his bitterness, his anger, his tenderness—was clear, and the other characters, the situation, the setting, all seemed to fit naturally around him. The only part that didn't quite work was the ending. I wrote five different endings quickly, each progressively darker, until I finally got the characters down into that room beneath the brothel, and then, with the prompting of a few readers, I got that American girl up on the stage with that whip in her hand. Then I could see what the story was really about: the divides that separate us from people—divides of age, ideology, wealth—and the persistent desire to cross those divides, to care for the people on the other side, or to hurt them, or sometimes both. After finishing the story I saw—or, rather, my wife saw—that this wasn't part of a novel but a short story. As ever, I am indebted to my parents for their seemingly endless supply of stories that have so often provided the spark for my writing.

 

Gina Paoli
is a native of Colorado and grew up on the eastern plains, where the Rockies are only occasionally glimpsed as a purple mirage on the horizon. After completing a BA in English literature at Colorado State University, she took up residence in the university's home, Fort Collins. While she has traveled the world, she has never lived anywhere else. She has worked at various nondescript jobs, the last as a technical writer for a small high-tech company, but currently stays at home and tries to write around the schedule of her four-year-old daughter. She has been writing stories since she was very young, and while a few of her stories were published in smaller literary magazines many years ago, she has only recently begun to pursue publication again. She is now working to complete the first of a series of what can only be described as soft-noir suspense novels, while continuing to write and rework her short stories. Visit
ginapaoli.com
for more information and updates about her work.

• The central motif of “Dog on a Cow” came from a brief moment in Zora Neale Hurston's beautiful novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The incident takes place during a flood of the Mississippi River, and while the cow was only a bloated carcass in this case, the dog behaved just as viciously as the one in my story. I can't say why this terrible and bizarre image stayed with me, but it surfaced years later, converging with a roadside robbery, the hypnotic nature of driving the long, empty highways of the high plains, and another, no less traumatic flood on a much smaller river. The characters revealed themselves to me very slowly; their true natures didn't come into focus until I'd been through the story a half-dozen times. It took another four rewrites for the story to reach its final state.

 

T. Jefferson Parker
was born in Los Angeles and has lived in Southern California all his life. He has worked as a janitor, waiter, veterinary hospital emergency attendant, newspaper reporter, and technical editor. All of his nineteen novels are set in California and Mexico. He lives in San Diego County with his family. The T doesn't stand for anything.

• Vic Malic is a character in my 2006 novel,
The Fallen.
The protagonist of that story, an affable San Diego cop named Robbie Brownlaw, is thrown from a burning sixth-floor hotel room (while trying to rescue someone) but survives. He's addled, however, diagnosed with synesthesia, a neurological condition in which one's senses become transposed with each other. For instance, Robbie “sees” spoken words as colored shapes hovering in the air around the speaker. The guy who threw him from the hotel is a hulking and disturbed former professional wrestler named Vic Malic, whose old ring name was Vic Primeval. Robbie and Vic become friends, and this story is about what happens to Vic when he falls in love.

 

Thomas J. Rice
was born in rural Ireland, emigrated to the United States as a teenager, and graduated from Cornell University. Along the way he's been a farmer, breeder of border collies, construction worker, tractor driver, bartender, licensed carpenter, social activist, founder of a social justice institute, and storyteller. He's also been a sociology professor at Georgetown University. His writing has been published in a wide array of journals, editorial pages, and literary magazines, from
In These Times
to
New Orphic Review.
In 2010 he published a memoir about growing up in post–World War II Ireland called
Far from the Land.
He has recently completed a collection of Irish short stories. He lives in Andover, Massachusetts.

• I first wrote “Hard Truths” as a chapter in my memoir. The term refers to my mother's insistence on having me immediately accept the blame for my screw-ups: no excuses! Her reasoning: people you may want to impress will usually think less of you in the short term, but you'll immediately restore self-respect and others will trust your character in the long run. The other kernel of biography in the story is that both my parents were active in the IRA resistance movement against the Brits leading to Irish independence in 1921; both were imprisoned for their roles. My mother was actually one of the celebrated “Women of 1922,” a group of hunger strikers credited with bringing an end to the Irish civil war. The rest of the story is pure fiction, a drama I'd always wanted to play out with an ending that might have been. Still, I'm confident there were many women in the resistance capable of filling Kitty's shoes.

 

Kristine Kathryn Rusch
has published mystery, science fiction, romance, nonfiction, and just about everything else under a wide variety of names. Her Smokey Dalton mystery novels, written under her pen name Kris Nelscott, have received acclaim worldwide. She has been nominated for the Edgar and the Shamus (as both Nelscott and Rusch) as well as the An­thony Award. She has repeatedly won
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
's Readers Choice Award for best short story of the year.

Kristine often writes cross-genre fiction. Her character Miles Flint, from her Retrieval Artist series, has been chosen as one of the top ten science fiction detectives by
io9
and as one of the fourteen science fiction and fantasy detectives who could out-Sherlock Sherlock Holmes by the popular website
blastr.

WMG Publishing has the difficult task of releasing her entire backlist over the next few years (under all her pen names), as well as the next Smokey Dalton novel sometime in 2013. A novel based on her story “G-Men,” which was published in
The Best American Mystery Stories 2009,
will appear in 2013 as well.

• I grew up in Superior, Wisconsin, in the late 1960s and 1970s, moving out permanently in 1979. I visited several times, then didn't return for a long time. I was surprised to see how little of the town changed. When I finally went back a few years ago, the custodian let me into the high school to look around. The graduation list from that year was still on the office door. All of the last names were familiar—I had gone to school with their parents. While some of us moved away, most of the kids from my high school class stayed, raised their families, and lived their lives, trying to make Superior better.

I started thinking about what kind of outside murder could happen in a town like that, where everyone knows everything about everyone else through all the generations—the good and the bad. And the secrets. There are always secrets. And your neighbors always know them, even if they never discuss them. As I wrote, I vividly remembered what it was like to live in those dark, cold winters—and honestly, I'm glad I live on the breezy, sunny Oregon coast. I'm not hardy enough to go through those long winter nights again.

 

Lones Seiber
is a retired aerospace engineer living in Morristown, Tennessee. He received a BS in engineering physics from the University of Tennessee and worked for the Pratt Whitney Aircraft Research and Development Center in West Palm Beach as an experimental engineer on the RL-10 rocket program and later on the signature elimination project for jet engines.

He began writing short fiction seven years ago and, after successfully publishing several stories, returned to the University of Tennessee to audit junior and senior creative writing courses under Professors Allen Wier and Michael Knight. Based on the stories he presented in the senior workshop, he was invited to present stories in the graduate workshop. His fiction has appeared in
GSU Review
(now
New South
),
The Pinch, Lynx Eye, The Wordstock Ten, Roanoke Review,
the
TallGrass Writers
anthology,
Inkwell, Pearl,
and
Indiana Review.
His nonfiction has appeared in
American Heritage.
He won the 2005 GSU Review Fiction Contest, the 2007 The Pinch (River City) Fiction Contest, the 2008 Leslie Garrett Award for Fiction, the 2011 Warren Adler Prize for Fiction, and the 2011 Indiana Review Fiction Contest for the story “Icarus.” He has completed a novel based on “Icarus.”

• I was watching the movie
Exotica
by Atom Egoyan, most of the scenes, and even the premise, somewhat gloomy, when it flashed to a golden field of grain and a cobalt-blue sky, minute figures strung along the horizon searching for a missing girl. The visual impact of that scene became the inspiration and core of my story “Icarus.”

 

Charles Todd,
of the writing team Caroline and Charles Todd, who happen to be mother and son, have published fourteen novels of suspense in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, including
The Confession, A Lonely Death,
and
The Red Door.
The first in that series,
A Test of Wills,
was included in
The One Hundred Favorite Mysteries of the Twentieth Century.
The Bess Crawford mysteries opened with
A Duty to the Dead,
and the fourth,
An Unmarked Grave,
was published in the summer of 2012.
The Murder Stone
is a stand-alone, and Rutledge short stories can be found in many anthologies and in
Strand Magazine.
The fifteenth Inspector Rutledge book is in the works.

• “Trafalgar” began at a luncheon in Bury St. Edmund, England. One of our English friends, filling us in on the latest news from his family, added, “And the old dog died at noon that day,” as if its passing were the last straw in a litany of sadness. The line stayed with us because it was an epitaph in a way, and it had a certain poetic feel to it. We, too, had cared about the old dog. That eventually gave us the first line. The rest of the story came from a house and a bookstore we saw in Dartmouth, England, home of the Royal Naval College, while on board the
Explorer,
the Lindblad/National Geographic ship, and from a snippet of history that we hadn't heard before. There it was, taking shape, as so many things we write do, snowballing into characters and settings—and obviously turning out to be a Rutledge inquiry by its very nature. Mike Ashley had asked us to write another short story for him, this time to be included in
The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction,
which he was editing. This gave us the excuse to pursue that snowball to its logical end. As John Curran has pointed out in his intriguing works on Agatha Christie, this sort of gestation for a book or a story over a period of time is perfectly normal. What's fascinating is that given the same points of inspiration, two people can wind up at the same satisfactory conclusion without killing each other in the process. Nineteen books later, so far, so good.

 

Tim L. Williams
's work has been published in a variety of literary quarterlies as well as in magazines dedicated to the crime, mystery, horror, and dark fantasy genres. His story “Something About Teddy” was included in
The Best American Mystery Stories 2004.
“Half-Lives” is the fourth tale featuring Memphis private investigator Charlie Raines to appear in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Two previous works in the series, “The Breaks” and “Suicide Bonds,” garnered Shamus nominations from the Private Eye Writers of America. After years of knocking around the Midwest and the South, Tim returned to his native Kentucky, where he lives with his wife, Sherraine, and their two children, Carson and Madelyn. He is currently working on two novels, one a contemporary mystery featuring Charlie Raines, the other a historical crime novel set in a west Kentucky coal-mining town.

• “Half-Lives” was inspired by a drive through an industrial section of Memphis, a city that has in recent years become my second hometown. In a quarter-mile stretch I passed at least a half-dozen crumbling warehouses, all surrounded by relatively new security fences and barbed wire, which caused me to wonder what those fences could possibly be protecting and who they could be keeping out. Ultimately, the central mystery of the story, at least to my mind, is the question of why the largest sacrifices and the highest prices are demanded from those in our society with the least ability to pay them.