Otto Penzler - Murder At the Foul Line

Copyright of the collection © 2006 by Otto Penzler

Introduction copyright © 2006 by Otto Penzler

“Keller’s Double Dribble,” copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Block; “Nothing but Net,” copyright © 2006 by Jeffery Deaver; “Bank Shots,” copyright © 2006 by Sue DeNymme; “The Taste of Silver,” copyright © 2006 by Brendan DuBois; “Fear of Failure,” copyright © 2006 by Parnell Hall; “Cat’s Paw,” copyright © 2006 by Laurie R. King; “Mrs. Cash,” copyright © 2006 by Mike Lupica; “White Trash Noir,” copyright © 2006 by Michael Malone; “Galahad, Inc.,” copyright © 2006 by Joan H. Parker and Robert B. Parker; “String Music,” copyright © 2006 by George Pelecanos; “Mamzer,” copyright © 2006 by R. D. Rosen; “Shots,” copyright © 2006 by S.J. Rozan; “In the Zone,” copyright © 2006 by Justin Scott; “Bubba,” copyright © 2006 by Stephen Solomita

Basketball was a little different when I was growing up, which is just before James Naismith reputedly invented the game in 1891.

First, most of the players were white. I don’t know if they could jump, but I do know they didn’t jump. Dunking was something you did with a doughnut and a cup of coffee. There was such a thing as a two-handed set shot. I’m not making this up. Hook shots were common, and soon some of the better players developed a jump shot. Foul shots were frequently taken underhanded, with two hands guiding the ball toward the hoop. Eventually, to help speed the game up, the twenty-four-second clock was invented.

Second, players actually played by the rules, mainly because the referees called fouls and other violations. Traveling, for example, was called if a player carried the ball for two steps. Today it’s called only if he carries the ball to another city. Basketball was described accurately back in the Dark Ages as a noncontact sport. If you bumped into a player, you were called for a foul. Today the foul is called only if you hit someone repeatedly, generally with a blunt instrument.

Also, players seemed tall but human. Today the guys who used to be the “big” forward (now known as the power forward) are the speedy little guys who bring the ball up the court. The big guys seem descended from another planet.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some old fogey who thinks players were better when I was a kid. I’m an old fogey who thinks basketball players during the past quarter century or so are the best all-around athletes in the world. They just don’t play the same game. I’m not sure when it went from being a team sport to being a game played by five individuals to a side, but it was probably when ESPN’s SportsCenter started to show highlights every night and 95 percent of them were dunks (just as most baseball highlights on that show are home runs, and there’s nothing more boring than watching one long fly ball after another landing in the seats).

But perhaps the biggest difference in the game is the level of criminal activity. One of the big crime stories of the 1950s was when some Manhattan College, CCNY, and Long Island University players conspired to fix games so that certain gamblers could make a killing. The scandal rocked the sport for years, and those teams, then national powers, never recovered.

Today, of course, that would be looked upon as kid stuff. Now we’re really talking. Stars are commonly arrested for drug abuse, drunk driving, wife (and girlfriend) battering, barroom brawling, rape, and so many other acts of violence and criminality that it is difficult to keep track.

There was a time when I thought Kermit Washington’s brutal punch of an innocent and unsuspecting Rudy Tom-janovich, caving in his face, fracturing his skull, breaking his jaw and nose, and causing a potentially lethal spinal fluid drip from his brain, was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen on a basketball court, but that was before Ron Artest and fellow thugs on the Indiana Pacers brawled with fans in Detroit. Now, I’ll quickly concede that some guy who throws a cup full of beer into the face of a six-foot-eight-inch tower of muscle is so stupid that he probably deserves a good whipping, but still…

Even this pales when compared with Latrell Sprewell’s attempted murder of his coach. Not merely in the heat of the moment, mind you. He grabbed P. J. Carlesimo, put his big hands around his throat, and choked him until he was pulled away. He left, came back about twenty minutes later, and did it again! (Well, Sprewell explained later, it’s not like he couldn’t breathe at all .) Because he’s a star athlete, he didn’t do a single day in jail. Instead, he got traded to the New York Knicks and became a crowd favorite. When he left the team as a free agent, he spurned a $29-million offer, explaining that it wasn’t enough, that he had to feed his family.

Jayson Williams, a great basketball player and a charming man, was not convicted of killing his chauffeur.

In a never-ending headline story, Kobe Bryant was arrested for rape but admits only to being stupid and an adulterer. Allen Iverson, who has all the charm of a Mexican snuff film, was arrested with illegal weapons-again. Charles Barkley cold-cocked a pencil-thin opponent in the Olympics for no discernible reason. There was a perfectly good reason for him to throw someone through a barroom window. He’d been hassled by the idiot. When asked if he had any regrets about the incident, Barkley said yes. He was sorry they hadn’t been on a higher floor.

The notion, then, of mixing basketball and crime in this collection seems predictable-a natural combination, like ham and eggs, Laurel and Hardy, yin and yang. Or, to put it more darkly, it’s a predictably unnatural combination, like Michael Jackson and little boys, S &M, Paris Hilton and farm animals, and the team of buffoons (sorry, self-described “idiots”) known as the 2004 World Champion Boston Red Sox.

It would be difficult to think that a group of fiction writers, people who make up stories, could find a way to write about crime and criminals in a way that surpasses the real-life adventures we can all read about in the tabloids, but the assembled team of top-notch mystery writers has done just that. This Dream Team of outstanding authors has put together a game plan that will keep you at the edge of your seat right to the last second. Here is the lineup of superstars:

Lawrence Block has received the highest honor bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America, the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement, and received the equivalent prize, the Diamond Dagger, from the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. He has produced more than sixty novels, mainly about such series characters as the tough alcoholic private eye, Matt Scudder; his comedic bookseller/burglar, Bernie Rhodenbarr; and the amoral hit man who appears in this volume, Keller.

Jeffery Deaver is the author of twenty novels, many featuring Lincoln Rhyme, including The Bone Collector , which was filmed starring Denzel Washington. Deaver has been nominated for four Edgar Allan Poe Awards and an Anthony and is the three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year. Garden of Beasts won the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award by the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain for the best thriller in the vein of James Bond.