Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Joyce Carol Oatesis a winner and six-time nominee of the National Book Award and has thirty-five books selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Among her most recent books are The Gravedigger’s Daughter and the first volume of her Journals, both nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• “The Blind Man’s Sighted Daughters” is a nightmare mix of memory, invention, and that air of haunting mystery we feel in hearing of a smalltown crime that has never been “solved” — though clearly individuals associated with the crime, survivors and perpetrators and their families, have a very good idea what the solution should have been, if local police had been capable of discovering it. Specifically, the genesis of the story sprang to mind during a trip — by car, our usual mode of travel to upstate New York — when we were staying overnight in a small town near the Mohawk River. Vividly it came to me: what is life like, for the unmarried sister who stays behind in one of these forlorn upstate cities, now a caretaker for her once-murderous father, who has become an ailing blind man? What does she feel for the married sister who moved away, and who lives a very different life? It seemed to me that both sisters, in complicity with their once-murderous father, have been involved in criminal acts that will never be defined or resolved. The caretaker sister has in effect sacrificed her own life and is her father’s most unwitting victim.

Nathan Oates’s stories have appeared in the Antioch Review, Juked, Mississippi Review, Fugue, the Louisville Review, and elsewhere. He earned his M.A. from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. He is an assistant professor at Seton Hall University and lives in New York with his wife, the writer Amy Day Wilkinson, and their daughter, Sylvie.

• As is true of much of my work, “The Empty House” developed out of a story my father heard while traveling abroad. I knew immediately I wanted to write this story, but I wasn’t sure how to do so. At first I thought maybe it was the start of a novel, then imagined it to be the first in a linked collection, and over the course of a year I wrote subsequent chapters, then stories that connected, but it never felt right. My attempts were either too slight for the subject, or so bloated that the narrative energy was diffused. Through these failures, I figured out it was a short story, but how to make it feel complete remained a problem. I’d traveled twice to Guatemala in my early twenties and one night in a bar in Paris a Swedish woman told me that, for her. General America was like Disneyland: exotic little people running around in bright clothes. I was appalled, but of course I’d also been just a tourist, sitting in a bar full of Americans, with my camera and cash. Ever since I’ve been trying to write about my interest in Guatemala, particularly about America’s complicated role in the decades of civil war. When I began writing the narrator’s contemporary line I saw that “The Empty House” is about what happens to Ryan and the way that mystery, and the emptiness surrounding it, affects those who are left behind. From there it was only a matter of tears of revision, of swelling and shrinking the story until it found the right shape. I’d like to thank the following people for their support: my parents, my brothers, Robert Fogarty, and, of course, Amy.

Jas. R. Petrinwas born in Saskatchewan in 1947. He began his working life as a busboy, a tailor shop gofer, a truck driver, and once, briefly, “a guy in a bakery who poked the stones out of cherries with a pair of giant tweezers.” He went on to become a sheet-metal worker, then spent many years as a musician in various lounge acts and traveling bands before settling in as a telephone network job engineer and planner. Throughout much of this time he flirted with writing. In 1985 he sold a story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and has placed some sixty stories in those pages since then. He has won the Canadian Arthur Ellis Award and his work appears in many anthologies. His story “Mama’s Boys” was produced as a TV drama. He now lives in Mavillette, Nova Scotia, with his wife, Colleen, and is hard at work on a novel featuring Leo Skorzeny.

• When I thought up the aging moneylender Leo (Skig) Skorzeny, I worked hard, as a writer will, to imbue him with a credible nature. Not a sympathetic nature, especially, just a credible one. I wonder now if I overdid it. I say this because I’m alarmed at the number of people who tell me they have come to like him. I like him, but that’s permissible. A writer must empathize with his or her characters, or at the very least gull those characters into believing as much, or they may refuse to cooperate, become wooden and unresponsive and lurch around the pages like zombies. But Skig is not a nice guy. He doesn’t play well with others. In his first appearance (“Juice,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine ) he commits a grave breach of social etiquette which he carries with him throughout his subsequent escapades. He is capable of warm feelings, but to him regret and remorse are something weaker people are afflicted with. Skig’s world, the world he has always known, bristles with treachery, deceit, and violence.

As a reader I find a well-crafted tale akin to visiting the zoo. Here are all these creatures, some of them vicious, going about their day just beyond that sheet of safety glass. As a writer I like to show people my own collection of dangerous creatures. I thank Eleanor Sullivan, Cathleen Jordan, and Linda Landrigan for making it possible for almost twenty-five years. I thank Otto Penzler and George Pelecanos for this fresh and unique (to me) opportunity.

Scott Phillipslives in Missouri, after stays in Paris and Los Angeles and Wichita, where he was born. He is the author of three novels: The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway, and Cottonwood.

“The Emerson, 1950” started life as a series of unconnected vignettes that were intended to form the backbone of a novel about a newspaper crime photographer/smutmonger in postwar Wichita. The novel never quite came together, but I was sufficiently fond of the characters and incidents that I tore the book apart by the spine and put them into this story. (The business with the candlesticks is very loosely based on something that happened after my great-great-uncle Fred died in Wichita in 1965.)

Stephen Rhodesis the pen name for Keith Styrcula, a novelist and fourteen-year derivatives executive on Wall Street. A 1991 graduate of Fordham Law School, he is the author of two suspense thrillers, including the critically acclaimed financial doomsday thriller The Velocity of Money (William Morrow and Avon Books), which was translated into four languages (http://www.thevelocityofmoney.com). “At the Top of His Game” is an excerpt from his forthcoming thriller of the same name. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.

• The inspiration for “At the Top of His Game” was a career-long observation that the big gears of the Wall Street machine are engineered to enrich the morally corrupt while destroying the good-hearted — which is not to say that the good-hearted ever escape their dog years on the Street with a soul unscathed. Mark Barston is emblematic of this premise, and the seeming disintegration of his entire world over the course of a single weekend reflects the perils of a life devoted to high finance and its glistening, seductive suburbanite trappings. The core elements of “Game” are based on true events — accordingly, the first draft came quickly: just over ten days. Soon thereafter, though, a positive critique from Esquire’s fiction editor, Adrienne Miller, sent me tearing through several drafts over the course of the next year, working to create the pitch-perfect final version. The elusive ambition for me was to create a work of short fiction that was as satisfying as William Hauptman’s classic “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (published in The Best American Short Stories 1982 ), a story about an insurance-salesman-turned-Elvis-impersonator immediately following the King’s untimely death. (Hauptman’s story was jam-packed with enough plot, characters, and narrative to be the basis for a full book, yet it instead achieved its brilliant results in one-twentieth the length of a novel — a shining example of the magnificence of the short-story form.) Eventually, the breakthrough for “Game” was the privilege of working with Wall Street Noir editor Peter Spiegelman (Black Maps), who preserved Barston’s voice while perfecting the pace of the narrative and the convergence of plot twists that become his final redemption — well, kind of a redemption, sort of...