Джеффри Дивер: The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

I originally started at the end, with Travis lying on the cold concrete with a bullet in his chest (I drew some inspiration for the scene from Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain,” in which he does some wonderful things with time and perspective). As Travis lay there, the events of the evening leading up to his being shot swirled through his mind, during which time the story slipped into flashback and came around full circle, ending where it began, more or less. I soon scrapped that idea, though, deciding it was better told in a linear fashion. Evidently my instinct was right, because Todd Robinson over at Thuglit, who had previously published another one of my stories, “The Long Drive Home,” loved it and included it in his journal’s farewell issue, Thuglit: Last Writes. I owe Todd a huge debt of gratitude for that. Now more than ever.

Peter Straubis the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and four collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales and its two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, ten Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and four World Fantasy Awards. In 2008 he was given the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers. He has won several lifetime achievement awards. His most recent publication is Interior Darkness (2016), a collection of selected stories.

• “The Process Is a Process All Its Own” is the first real product of a long, long meander through the interior of a novel very much in progress. It was short of tumble-dried on its way toward the finish line, so I was obliged to start over. From the first page. I wanted to see what I could come up with and, because neuropathy had buggered my typing, also wanted to experiment with dictation. The act of dictating into my phone somehow suggested the synesthesia that begins the story. Most of the middle came from material already written. The ending is the development of a situation that had been considered but not yet written. And not long after I started, I bought a large-key keyboard, because typing was easier than talking.

Wallace Strobyis an award-winning journalist and the author of eight novels, four of which feature professional thief Crissa Stone, whom Kirkus Reviews called “crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.” He’s also written for Esquire Japan, BBC Radio 4, Reader’s Digest, Salon, Slant, Writer’s Digest, Inside Jersey, and other publications. A lifelong resident of the Jersey shore, he was an editor for thirteen years at the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger, Tony Soprano’s hometown paper.

• When editor Patrick Millikin — a longtime bookseller at Arizona’s Poisoned Pen Bookstore — invited me to contribute to his collection The Highway Kind: Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads, my thoughts immediately went to that greatest of all road-rage stories, Richard Matheson’s classic “Duel.” I was intrigued at first with the idea of telling a similar story from the antagonist’s perspective — the hunter rather than the hunted. Once I began writing, though, the story veered off into unexpected directions, fueled by memories of my own long late-night commutes from a newsroom in North Jersey to my home at the shore. I began to riff on the idea of a cat-and-mouse game played out on a lonely stretch of highway in the middle of the night, with a driver so exhausted that his own senses are playing tricks on him, and where paranoia, fear, and danger are always waiting just up the road.