Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

S. J. Rozan, a lifelong New Yorker, has won many major crime-writing awards, including the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony. She’s served on the national boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and as president of Private Eye Writers of America. In 2003 S. J. was a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and in 2005 she was guest of honor at Left Coast Crime in El Paso, Texas.

• When I wrote “Hothouse” I was aiming for old-school noir, a story in which a character’s earlier life reaches out and stops him from becoming the new person he wants to be. To echo that contrast, I wanted to work with the extreme contrasts of the conservatory in winter, the warm jungle damp, the smells and stillness inside, and the frigid, biting, roaring blizzard outside. And I had just gotten back from three weeks at an artists’ colony in Florida and I was pining for my cottage in the palms.

Hugh Sheehy’s short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Antioch Review, the Southwest Review, the New Orleans Review, and other magazines. He lives in Atlanta and teaches at Georgia State University.

• I hope it will amuse and excite readers from the Toledo area to find a story based on familiar landmarks, particularly a creepy skating rink parents have long trusted to preoccupy their children. And I hope the skating rink (and all the desolate places in Lucas County) will continue to drive the imaginations of myself and others. It’s difficult to say where the story comes from, or, you know, what it’s really about. I do remember conceiving of it, from beginning to end, in an instant. It was one of those epiphanies writers are always on the listen for, rarely getting. A striking order of characters, setting, plot, and phrase is revealed. So you sit and write the thing.

Elizabeth Strout’smost recent novel is Olive Kitteridge. Her previous novels are Abide with Me and Amy and Isabelle, which won two national awards and was nominated for others. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker and a number of other magazines. She is on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and makes her home in New York City.

• This story originated in my fascination with the Stockholm Syndrome, a condition deriving its name from a bank robbery that took place years ago in Sweden, where the women who were taken as hostages developed feelings of love for their captor. It is a situation that has long held my imagination and I knew someday I would use it in a story. As I began to write about the character Olive Kitteridge, I saw that she would be the one who could carry this off, and then it became a matter of finding the proper form for the story. Also, I am always interested in what people say and do in moments of great pressure, and so the idea of Olive being held in a hospital’s bathroom with her husband and two strangers was invigorating for me, and hopefully for the readers as well.

Melissa VanBeckwas raised on a cattle-and-wheat ranch in Klickitat County, the dry side of the Washington Cascade Mountains. The struggle to live on land where rain is an unreliable landlord is never far from her fiction. Melissa and her husband live in Spokane, where she works as a psychotherapist. Her fiction has appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Phantasmagoria, Whiskey Island, the Red Rock Review, and Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine. She is currently working on a novel.

• “Given Her History” is a story I waited a long time to tell. In part, I wasn’t certain I had the maturity to follow the young April-May from the violent death of her family through her spiral into sociopathy and subsequent redemption through Vivian. Doing that while maintaining her voice seemed daunting. Jake the dog and I were loyal throughout. The town I describe as it was in my childhood. John Day Dam was built across the neck of the Columbia River in 1968, and the town is now submerged. Although I know different, I imagine things continuing as they were — the people, the buildings, growing up, growing old — all under the waters of the Columbia. It took four years and many drafts before I finally got it right.

Scott Wolvenis the author of a short-story collection, Controlled Burn , and a forthcoming novel. False Hope. His stories have been selected seven years in a row for The Best American Mystery Stories series. Wolven teaches creative writing in the Professional Writing Program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.

• “St. Gabriel” allowed me to place a somewhat mysterious figure from the Bible into a story set against the background of the devastation of the Gulf Coast and more specifically, New Orleans, directly after the two hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. I worked in New Orleans for more than a year after the disaster and when I arrived, it seemed as if God had crushed things. The combination of devastated landscape and displaced people and death influenced my ideas of noir and how to weave that into storytelling. I’m sure I’ll write more stories about it in the future — and my heart goes out to the folks who lived there. They deserved much more help than they received. I felt lucky when Jen Jordan asked me to contribute a story to an anthology she was editing. Special thanks to Ben Leroy of Bleak House Books, DMC, M, and WSBW.