Lawrence Block: The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

I started writing “Sacrifice” with just a glimmer of an idea: a little girl asks a PI to look for her missing doll. I liked the interaction between them, the contrast between innocence and experience. I had expected to write about the PI’s search for the doll, which would have some connection with a crime. I was on the second page when the little girl suddenly explained that the doll has two names, and the rest of the story became clear to me. This wasn’t a story about a missing doll; it was about a tragedy. It isn’t a story of innocence lost; it’s a tale of innocence maintained, of the core innocence of childhood that is untouched by even the most dreadful of experiences.

John Updike, born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932, graduated from Harvard College in 1954. After working for The New Yorker , he moved to the North Shore of Massachusetts and has been a freelance writer ever since. He is the author of eighteen novels, ten or so collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, and five books of essays and criticism.

Henry Bech appeared in a short story called “The Bulgarian Poetess” in 1964. Like me, he is a writer, but in other respects he lives a life I envy but have not lived. While looking through the two Library of America volumes of crime novels from the thirties, forties, and fifties, I got the idea of Bech as a noir hero. Murdering critics is something most writers, I suspect, have wanted to do, and once Henry got going, there was no stopping him. As a boy and young man, I read a great deal of mystery fiction. As an adult, I have always been leery of violence and character assassination, but I found that once you get going there is an intoxicating pleasure to it. Evildoers, beware!