Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Over the years he has published twenty-five novels and one collection of short stories. The stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, the Southern Review, Antioch Review, and Kenyon Review. His novels Heaven’s Prisoners and Two for Texas were adapted as motion pictures.

Burke’s work has received two Edgar Awards for best crime novel of the year. He is also a Breadloaf fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and has been a recipient of an NEA grant. He and his wife of forty-six years, Pearl Burke, have four children and divide their time between Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.

• “A Season of Regret” was my literary attempt to show that a good man remains in conflict with the world regardless of the era in which he lives. The story is naturalistic in theme and indicates that criminals, political and otherwise, usually find banners and uniforms to hide behind. Albert Hollister carries a stone bruise in the soul, one that was visited upon him because of his humanity. Ultimately he is set free from the past, but in ways he will never be able to share with others.

His tragedy becomes ours. The wisdom he acquires cannot be passed on. This may seem a dismal thought, but I suspect that’s just the way it is.

John Dufresneis the author of three novels, two collections of stories, a book on fiction writing, and the forthcoming novel Requiem, Mass. He lives in South Florida.

• I decided to write about the direst crime I could imagine. A man kills his children. His wife and children. My job, then, was to try to figure out how and why a person would or could commit such an unspeakable act. I didn’t want to spend all my time in the murderer’s head, so I invented my hero, a man with the same interest in the crime as I had. And then the murderer killed his parents. What now? I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, while I was writing the story. My friend David Beaty was also in St. Petersburg and was also writing a story for the same anthology, Miami Noir. We wrote separately during the day, got together at night over vodka and shashlyk, or vodka and blinis, or vodka and vodka, and read our stories to each other. We walked in the steps of Raskolnikov, along the Gribodeva canal through Sennaya Ploschad, up to his apartment, and on to the unfortunate moneylenders’ apartment. We wrote some more. We read some more. And in this entertaining way, we helped each other tell the stories of some disturbed people possessed by demons. As it were.

Louise Erdrich, the critically acclaimed Native American writer, has written such best-selling novels as The Antelope Wife, Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace. She also collaborated on The Crown of Columbus with Michael Dorris, her late husband.

• Gleason’s description matches a former boyfriend of one of my teenage daughters. I imagined that he was just the sort of person whose meek and soulful demeanor masks his dark tendencies. Fictionalizing him helped give a shape to my paranoia, but as far as I know he went on to be a decent citizen.

Jim Fusilliis the author of four novels, including Hard, Hard City, which was named Best Novel of 2004 by Mystery Ink magazine. A journalist and critic, Jim writes about rock and pop music for the Wall Street Journal, and his reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His Pet Sounds, a highly personal look at Brian Wilson and the classic Beach Boys album, was published in 2005.

• My private-eye novels are written in the first person, set largely in the present New York City, and revolve around contemporary social issues. “Chellini’s Solution” is one of several short stories I wrote recently to open my fiction writing style. It’s set in 1953 in a small town in New Jersey, and it’s a third-person narrative. The protagonist isn’t a robust private investigator out to right wrongs. He’s quiet and deeply felt, an immigrant seemingly out of step here, and he’s driven to take action in defense of his family.

In the end, “Chellini’s Solution” wasn’t a radical deviation from what I had been doing — I can’t seem to write about anything but families on the verge of collapse — but it did allow me to see a new way to tell my stories. It was anchored in my experiences: I was born in Hoboken. New Jersey, in 1953, and Chellini is based on my grandfather, a barger who had a one-eyed bulldog named Mickey. Thinking of him infused the story with the sentimentality it needed. I love to write dialogue in that sort of hyperventilated half-English, half-Italian dialect I used to hear as a kid. Those voices, and Chellini’s walk, reconnected me to my childhood, and that’s where I found that unadorned purposefulness that’s at the heart of Chellini’s character.

William Gay’smost recent novel, Twilight, was published in the fall of 2006. He is the author of two other novels and a collection of stories. He lives in rural Tennessee, where he is at work on a novel.

• A friend of mine who’d lost someone was talking to me about the difficulty he was having dealing with loss. This got me thinking about the depth and nature of grief. Around the same time I saw a documentary about crystal meth. These two elements fused into The Jeepster’s adventures in the drug trade.

Robert Knightlywas born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 1940. He’s never resided outside New York City except for two years in the army. He was institutionalized at an early age: Catholic schools, the army, then the New York City Police Department in 1967. He worked in Brooklyn and Manhattan precincts as patrol officer and sergeant for most of the next twenty years. Having earned a law degree from Fordham University Law School at night, he joined the Legal Aid Society of New York in 1989 as a criminal defense lawyer, where he remains. In 2002, Aaron Spelling-TV Productions bought his script for an NBC pilot. He published his first short story in Brooklyn Noir in 2004 and is editor of Queens Noir, due from Akashic Books in 2007.

• “Take the Man’s Pay” came from my twenty years of watching NYPD detectives ply their trade. Every partner I had made detective eventually. (Me? I was not ruthless or pushy enough, I guess. They gave me lieutenant instead.) There are no better interrogators than NYPD detectives (not even Jack Bauer’s torturers on 24). I’ve verified this fact with my clients/ defendants. No matter how hardened the “perp,” how often incarcerated, invariably he spills his guts. If I ask why, my client will often reply, “They said if I told them what really happened, I could go home.” The interrogator plays on the fears of the arrestee, who may be held incommunicado in a precinct squad room for several days (unlike TV, no lawyers or visitors allowed). I call him “arrestee” rather than “suspect” to underscore the fact that once in, he’s not walking out. It’s quite unnecessary (and problematic) to subject the arrestee to the old “third degree.” Lies, half-truths, a physical manhandling no more severe than Detective Vera Katakura’s slapping the face of Hoshi Taiku work just fine. Once extracted by the detective, a confession is as fragile as an objet d’art. Never to be examined too roughly by a judge at a future suppression hearing into its legality or voluntariness. No servant of the System — cop, prosecutor, judge — wants to mess with a fait accompli.

Detective Morrie Goldstein’s interrogation of Hoshi Taiku, on the other hand, is about as legally correct as any arrestee will ever encounter. The character of Hoshi is based partially on my long-ago reading of Edwin O. Reischauer’s scholarly work The Japanese. But mostly on my childhood viewing of World War II movies like The Purple Heart (1944). Dana Andrews, a downed bomber pilot, and his crew, despite torture, have refused to confess to war crimes at their Tokyo show trial. And as they march in step from the courtroom to the strains of the U.S. Air Force song — “Off we go into the wild blue yonder,/Climbing high into the sun...” — the Jap general keels over at the prosecution table, having committed hara-kiri in expiation for his failure as an interrogator. Ergo, Hoshi, although the shoe here is on the other foot.