Джеффри Дивер - The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

The hunt for stories for next year’s edition has already begun. While Michele Slung and I engage in a relentless quest to locate and read every mystery/crime/suspense story published during the course of the year, I live in terror that I will miss a worthy story, so if you are an author, editor, or publisher, or care about one, please feel free to send a book, magazine, or tearsheet to me c/o The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. If a story first appeared electronically, you must submit a hard copy. It is vital to include the author’s contact information. No unpublished material will be considered, for what should be obvious reasons. No material will be returned. If you distrust the postal service, enclose a self-addressed stamped postcard, on which I will happily acknowledge receipt of your story.

To be eligible, a story must have been written by an American or Canadian and first published in an American or Canadian publication in the calendar year 2017. The earlier in the year I receive the story, the more it is likely to warm my heart. For reasons known only to the blockheads who wait until Christmas week to submit a story published the previous spring, this happens every year, causing much severe irritability as I read a stack of stories while everyone else I know is busy celebrating the holiday season. It had better be a damned good story if you do this, because I already hate you. Due to the very tight production schedule for this book, the absolute firm deadline is December 31. If the story arrives two days later, it will not be read. Sorry.

O. P.

I’ve read a stack of stories — fifty of them, to be exact — sent to me after a preliminary selection by Otto Penzler, with instructions to pick twenty. I’ve done that. Some decisions were close, some were not; of the top twenty, I would rank most of the stories to be close, and the close calls probably extended to the top thirty. Dropping a third of those was tough.

Some of the previous editors pooh-poohed the idea of an intellectual tour of the history or theory of short story writing. I wouldn’t pooh-pooh doing a history, but I don’t know enough of the history of short stories to write about it with authority. Sure, I’ve read Poe and Hemingway and O. Henry and Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, Guy de Maupassant and Stephen King and Faulkner and O’Conner and Philip Dick and Kafka and Proulx and many more than I can remember — I majored in American history and literature in college, so I’m heavy on Americans and a little light on others — but there are more terrific short story writers than you can shake a stick at. That’s my take on the history.

Ah, but theory. As an occasional teacher of writing, I do have a taste for it.

Of fictionoid ©literature, there are several varieties that most people wouldn’t usually consider as relevant to the short story... but I do.

The newspaper column, for example. A newspaper column is often about 750 to 800 words and is an unusual hybrid of fact and opinion, the opinion leaning hard on fiction. A good newspaper column generally has the structural aspect of a short story: a fast, mood-setting opener, the rapid development of an interesting character, a few hundred words of exposition, frequently for the purpose of jerking a tear or two, and a snappy ending.

They’re almost short stories, except for the problem of the facts, which can really clutter up a good piece of fiction. There’s an old newspaper line about taking care to stop reporting before you ruin a perfectly good story.

As a newspaper columnist for a few years, I wrote several hundred columns, some good, some bad, some okay. I wrote on demand, four of them a week. No writer’s block allowed — the space was always waiting for me. (My friend and fellow novelist Chuck Logan and I were once on a book-writing panel at a St. Paul — area college, and Logan was asked by an audience member what he did about writer’s block. Logan asked the woman what she did for a living, and the woman answered, “I’m the president of this college.” Logan asked, “What do you do when you get college-president block?” The answer, of course, is “Work harder.”)

The biographic profile of the kind you frequently see in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, or The Atlantic may also be similar to the short story. They begin with a catchy opener and the careful construction of character. Since the reporting often involves interviews with the character himself/herself, it usually produces a raft of fiction, intentional or unintentional. Then we get a few unexpected twists of fate and a snappy ending. A profile of Donald Trump, for example, even if carefully documented from the Donald’s personal speeches and tweets, would arguably comprise mostly fiction, and certainly the twists of fate. Whether the ending will be snappy, of course, we don’t yet know. My personal opinion is that it might tend more toward sloppy; we’ll have to wait to see.

Haiku, carefully

groomed, may be the tightest

form of short story.

And has much to teach the short story writer, in my opinion. Especially about an opening. Read haiku: it’s like taking your vitamin pills in the morning.

Then there’s the novel. The novel is not a long short story but uses all the techniques of the short story, except length. It may be — I think it is — an ultimately more important form of literature, because of some of the inherent difficulties of the short form, but novels are not “better” in the purely literary sense.

They are usually a bit lazier, because they have the space to be; they can allow the reader to breathe, and to contemplate between sittings. They can present more author-nuanced character. Most important, they create a world of their own, which is comprehensible even hundreds of years later. How many people have gained a greater knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars through Tolstoy’s War and Peace than they have through any number of histories? Tolstoy created a world that survives today.

Novels, then, are an object of their own.

The short story, I believe, is not usually an object that stands on its own. Unlike a novel, a good short story is an intense collaboration between reader and writer. A novel may create an entire new world; a short story usually depends on the intelligence and understanding of the reader, because the elements of the story — the characters, the scene-setting (the total environment of the story) and the plot, whatever it may be — are usually so condensed that the short story is almost like an extended haiku.

The story is dependent on author implications and reader inferences. To take Poe as an example, his creepy dungeons are painted in few words; the shiver they send up the reader’s spine depends on the reader’s imagination as much as Poe’s, and Poe knew that. He was a master at tripping off the guilty hidden thoughts and imaginings of his readers.

So what would be the essential working parts of an ideal short story?

The story must be tight and well written; a novel can take a few fumbles without much damage, but a short story really suffers from them.

The opening must be catchy and quick and set a mood — the story should be rolling with the first line. No space here for the dark and stormy night.

From C. J. Box’s “Power Wagon”: “A single headlight strobed through a copse of ten-foot willows on the other side of the overgrown horse pasture. Marissa unconsciously laced her fingers over her pregnant belly and said, ‘Brandon, there’s somebody out there.’ ”

Single headlight strobed/ten-foot willows/overgrown horse pasture/laced her fingers/pregnant belly/somebody out there.

All that bound in two sentences, thirty-six words.