The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (65 page)

•     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 written. 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.

•     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.