Lawrence Block: The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Ed Gorman’smost recent suspense novel is The Day the Music Died, which the Wall Street Journal said “wonderfully evokes the sorrows and pleasures of a certain Midwestern past.” Gorman has won the Shamus and been nominated for an Edgar and a Golden Dagger. The author of several crime novels and five collections of short stories, he is editorial director of Mystery Scene magazine .

I’ve always been fascinated by (and terrified of) how quickly one’s life can change. One mistake, one accident, and a life can be altered forever. I’m equally fascinated by the sense of the shadow world I knew back in my drinking days — petty crooks, grifters, ex-cons, thieves of every description, and all those fallen middle-class alcoholics like myself who seemed to be trapped in a David Goodis novel. I’ve expanded “Out There in the Darkness” into a novel called The Poker Club. It will be published next year.

Joseph Hansenhas published thirty-five books, the best known being the Dave Brandstetter mysteries. In 1982, he began writing stories for Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock . Not all are about Hack Bohannon, the ex-deputy sheriff who runs a stable on the central California coast, but most are. For much of his writing life he lived in Los Angeles, but when Jane, his wife of fifty years, died in 1994, he moved to Laguna Beach.

In 1991, I think it was, federal agents surrounded the cabin of a survivalist in northern Idaho to attempt to arrest him. The story made headlines. The man’s fourteen-year-old son was killed. But what haunted me was the absolutist, contrarian mind-set of the survivalist and the people among whom he lived. Down the years, I’d wonder how I could get them into a story. Bohannon’s sidekick, rodeo veteran George Stubbs, died, giving me an excuse to send Bohannon to Idaho to take his old friend’s body home for burial. Bohannon would stumble into an encampment of these outsiders, and how he saved himself would account for the plot.

David K. Harfordwas born and raised in the northwestern Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, where he lives today. From 1968 to 1969 he served as a military police investigator for the 4th MP Company, 4th Infantry Division, in Vietnam. “A Death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” the third in the Carl Hatchett series, draws from those days.

I’ve been a freelance writer for over twenty-five years — published so many magazine articles, I’ve lost count. Poetry, too. When I concentrated on my first love, the mystery short story, I realized there were no mysteries coming out of the Vietnam War years. Carl Hatchett was born then.

The trick to writing good military-related stories is to use jargon familiar to military people and at the same time slide in explanations for nonmilitary readers so they don’t feel lost or left out.

Gary Kristis the author of two New York Times Notable Books — the novel Bad Chemistry and the short-story collection Bone by Bone — as well as another collection, The Garden State . His second novel, Chaos Theory, will be published in 1999. He lives with his wife and daughter in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and can be reached atwww.garykrist.com.

I’ve always been interested in the way we tell tales to get what we want — tales that are sometimes misleading, sometimes blatantly deceptive, but hardly ever true. Two such tales are told in “An Innocent Bystander,” and although one is more clearly a manipulative fiction, each has its own ulterior motive.

During a twenty-five-year career as a criminal defense attorney, Phillip M. Margolinappeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, represented approximately thirty people charged with homicide, including a dozen who faced the death penalty. His novels frequently appear on the New York Times bestseller list. Heartstone , his first novel, was nominated for an Edgar, and his second, The Last Innocent Man , was an HBO movie.

Early in my career, I was appointed to represent a defendant who was being held on serious charges. I made it clear to him that there was no way that any judge would release him on bail. He promptly fired me and represented himself. The next day I ran into him in the courthouse lobby. He told me that he had persuaded the judge to release him. “The Jail-house Lawyer” is my tribute to these lawyer wanna-bes who, every so often, prove to be a lot sharper than we law school graduates.

Born and raised in upstate New York, Joyce Carol Oatesnow lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is a professor of humanities at Princeton University and co-edits the Ontario Review with her husband, Raymond Smith. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, she has published six mystery-suspense novels.

There’s a hybrid of genres to which I’m drawn that might be called “memoirist-fiction.” These stories evoke considerable emotion in me as I compose them. I seem to return to a past life, often adolescence, in a kind of waking dream; I see again places I’ve lived. I embark upon adventures I’d once had, or almost had; as in a dream, I’m led into experiences I can’t control, yet which possess a dream-logic. “Secret, Silent” grew out of a strange episode when I traveled by Greyhound bus to be interviewed (by a rather odd male administrator) for college. The seductive young woman may belong to another time. The domestic situation is analogous to my own, though somewhat altered. The distress over some problem with one’s clothing is familiar to anyone who has been an adolescent girl, as is the sense of dreamlike strangeness in being alone in an unfamiliar setting through a night. The ending is emotionally autobiographical.

Peter Robinsonwas born in Castleford, Yorkshire. His first novel, Gallows View (1987), introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks of the North Yorkshire Police, who has since appeared in nine more books and three short stories. Past Reason Hated and Innocent Graves both won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel. Wednesday s Child was nominated for an Edgar. He lives in Toronto.

I did a lot of research on the Second World War for In a Dry Season , especially research into conditions at home. One story made mention of the murder of an eccentric old woman in the village of Scarcroft, near Leeds. Old Miss Barker used to dress in nineteenth-century fashions, such as feather hats and buttoned boots, and was found beaten to death in her cottage; there was no apparent motive and her killer was never found. That started me on the story. The rest, of course, is pure invention. I was particularly interested in the contrast between a domestic murder and the wholesale, state-sanctioned slaughter of war.

David B. Silvalives in rural northern California. He is the author of more than one hundred short stories and the winner of the 1991 Stoker Award for superior achievement in the short story. The Disappeared is the most recent of his four novels.

“Dry Whiskey” is about my favorite subject: families. I am continually amazed at the complexity of family relationships. The people we know who have the greatest influence on how we turn out as adults, we often don’t understand at all. Will and his father never chose to be thrown together. It was their lot and they struggled to do the best they could with it. But like most families, their relationship was an evolution, with rules and roles changing with time. The words that went unspoken between them were far more telling than the words we read.

L. L. Thrasheris the author the Zachariah Smith series ( Cats-Paw, Inc. and Dogsbody, Inc. ) and the Lizbet Lange series ( Charlies Bones and the forthcoming Charlies Web ). “Sacrifice” is her first published short story, and it was nominated for the 1999 Edgar Allan Poe Award. She lives in Oregon with her husband and their two teenagers.