Джеймс Грейди - The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

But although the play on the field in these leagues is that of children being introduced into what really is a family game, the tensions, pressures, and yes, even violence, off the field can sometimes mirror the worst aspects of the major leagues. During these times when there are often news stories about “rink rage” or “stadium rage,” where angry parents get into fights with each other or referees or umpires, I was curious how someone with a criminal past — desperate to keep this past secret — might react when confronted by an angry parent intent on doing harm.

All too often the real cases of parental violence at sporting events end up in court or in the hospital. In “A Family Game,” I’d like to think I came up with an original and satisfying story, where not only a bully gets his due, but a special family is protected and kept safe by a loving parent.

David Edgerley Gatesgrew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, A Matter of Crime, and Story. He was a 1998 Shamus nominee for “Sidewinder,” and another of his stories, “Compass Rose,” was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2000.

He lives in Santa Fe.

• A lot of my stories are drawn from historical incident, or some contemporary oddity that floats around in my head until I can make use of it, but “The Blue Mirror” is based more nearly on my own experience. Stanley Kosciusko is modeled on a real guy I worked in a garage with, years ago, who did in fact survive fifty missions as a tail gunner in Liberators, flying against the Germans, only to later die of cancer. Much of the other detail in the story, like the biker bar and the locale of the showdown, is real enough, too, but the methamphetamine turf war is generic, not specific.

The other thing about “The Blue Mirror” is that I didn’t spend a lot of time connecting the dots. I figured the private dick in the story ought to be at least as sharp as the reader, and if the reader could put it together, why wouldn’t Jack?

The late Cathleen Jordan bought this story for Alfred Hitchcock. Cathleen was a terrific person, and a canny and sympathetic editor. She had an eye for the exact detail and an ear for clunkers. Her taste was elastic, not arbitrary, and she did me many kindnesses. I’m far from being the only one who’ll miss her. To use Norman Mailer’s apposite phrase, Cathleen added a room to the house.

Joe Goreslived for a year in Tahiti and three years in Kenya, spent two years at the Pentagon writing biographies of army generals, and for twelve years was a P.I. in San Francisco. He is a past president of Mystery Writers of America and has won three Edgars. His novel Hammett, filmed by Francis Ford Coppola, won Japan’s first “Maltese Falcon” award in 1986. Other work includes scores of short stories and articles, three collections of his short fiction, and a massive fact book, Marine Salvage. He has also written ten screenplays, two TV longforms, and teleplays for most of the episodic TV mystery shows of the 1970s and 1980s, including Columbo; Kojak; Magnum, PL; Mike Hammer; and Remington Steele.

He and his wife, Dori, live near San Francisco and travel whenever they can get away.

• “Inscrutable” started with a parrot. My wife, Dori, has a friend named Carol Colucci who has three pet parrots. One of them is named Knuckles. The first time I heard this, I exclaimed, “Knuckles Colucci? He just has to be a Mafia hitman out of Detroit!” But at the time I was working on Cases, a novel fictionalizing my early years as a detective in San Francisco in the 1950s, and Knuckles sort of slid from my mind.

Fast-forward to 2000. My editor at Mysterious Press, Bill Malloy, asked me to contribute an original story to a projected twenty-fifth anniversary Mysterious Press anthology. Then Bill added the kicker. He wanted the DKA crew to appear in the story. By then I was working on the most recent DKA File Novel, Cons, Scams & Grifts, and all my DKA energies were focused on that. But I said I would try to come up with something.

A January night, pouring rain. Waiting in my 4-Runner for Dori with nothing to read. Suddenly, bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom, as they like to say on The Sopranos, three short stories leaped into my mind. One was “Summer Fog,” which appeared in another 2001 anthology, Flesh and Blood. The second was a golf story I’m working on right now. The third was “Inscrutable.” Ballard, Heslip, Giselle, and O.B. get involved in saving a Chinese grocer being threatened by... who else? A Mafia hitman out of Detroit named Knuckles Colucci!

I hope you have as much fun pecking all of the bird references out of “Inscrutable” as I had writing them in.

James Grady’s first novel, Six Days of the Condor, became a Robert Redford movie picked by the Washington Post as one of the ten most defining films of the twentieth century. Grady has published a dozen other novels across genre lines, and three of his previous short stories have received national awards, including an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2001, the Cognac (France) International Film Noir Festival gave Grady’s collective prose work its highest “master of noir fiction” award. Grady has also been an investigative reporter, as well as a script writer for both TV and feature films. He and his family live in Silver Spring, Maryland.

• Growing up in Shelby, Montana, I always felt embarrassed by my hometown’s bizarre claim to fame: its nearly suicidal self-promotional sponsoring of a heavyweight championship boxing match, a world event crash-landed in the middle of the great American nowhere. I always wanted to be a writer, but swore I would never — never! — touch that Dempsey-Gibbons debacle.

Then inspiration ran smack into absolutism, and the resulting big bang blasted characters and a twist of history out of the most savage and sentimental sections of my soul. While the mechanics of the resulting story are fiction, its heart is as true a piece of work as I’ve ever done.

Clark Howardgrew up on the lower west side of Chicago, a ward of the count} and habitual runaway who eventually was sent to a state reformatory for being, he recalls, “recalcitrant.” He later served in combat in the Korean War as a member of the Marine Corps and began writing shortly thereafter. Haring written 120-plus short stories, 16 novels, 5 true-crime books, and 2 short story collections, he is an eight-time Mystery Writers of America Edgar nominee in the short story and true-crime categories, and winner of an Edgar for best short story. He is also a five-time winner of the Ellery Queen Magazine Readers Award and has been nominated for the Shamus Award, for the Derringer Award, and twice for the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award.

• “The Cobalt Blues,” like much of my work, is drawn from my early memories of the streets of Chicago and the scores of colorful people who passed through my young life there. The character of Lewis is based on an old guy I knew when I was an after-school runner picking up next-day bets for an illegal bookie (in the days before off-track betting). This old guy’s whole life was lived by the starter’s bell at racetracks all over the country. Potts was based on a man I served with in the Marine Corps. He was a real hard-luck guy. After he was killed, another Marine said, “What’s the difference? With his luck, if he’d made it back, he probably would’ve got cancer or something anyways.”

I like to write stories about life’s losers who sometimes become winners just once before the end. Like the men do in “The Cobalt Blues.”