Рон Рэш - The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

The train was full and we couldn’t change seats so did our best to ignore him.

Realizing he wasn’t getting anywhere with us, he grew sullen and before disappearing into the night, bent close to me. “This city can be dangerous for stupid girls.”

“Then it’s good we’re not stupid,” I remember saying, but not being stupid doesn’t always save you from harm, as my main character sadly discovered.

Reed Johnsonis a fiction writer, translator, and scholar who holds an MA/PhD in Slavic languages and literatures along with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, and currently works as a preceptor in the Harvard writing program. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals like New England Review and online at The New Yorker, and he is writing a mystery novel set in Russia, where he spent nearly a decade of his life.

• When I was growing up, our family didn’t have much money, and we were often on the lookout for things to do that didn’t cost anything. One such free weekend activity was the open house. No doubt many of us have been to an open house with no intention of buying, and so we understand that there might be nothing real about this sort of real estate: the open house is a space for the imagination to roam, a place to picture alternate selves and alternate lives spent living there. At the same time, it’s rare that these houses turn out to be completely blank rooms on which we can project these imagined selves. The open house almost always contains the remainders and reminders of another set of lives — the lives, that is, of the current inhabitants. And in turn, these traces suggest other sets of dreams (or, as is sometimes the case with families moving out, failed dreams) that might collide with one’s own, creating interesting echoes and patterns of interference. In this sense, the open house is a lot like the story: a structured space that both constrains and spurs the imagination, an armature that gives shape to thoughts about how our lives might otherwise unfold.

Arthur Klepchukovfound words between Black Seas, Virginian beaches, and San Franciscan waves. He adores trains, swing sets, and music that tears him outta time. Art contributes to Writer Unboxed and has hosted Shut Up & Write(!) meetups since 2013. His literary fiction appears in journals like The Common, Necessary Fiction, and KYSO Flash. His crime fiction debuted in Down & Out.

• A few years ago, I reached out to my oldest friend, Kyle Stout, about catching up in San Francisco. He didn’t want to come to the city when it was about to rain. But it’s a damn fine town in the rain. I jotted down what could be a phrase or a title. After Kyle and I made a short film in an Oakland coffee shop, we were inspired to find other limited settings for our stories. BART, the Bay Area’s subway system, somehow felt appropriately grungy and fitting. With a setting in mind, “A Damn Fine Town” took shape at The Lemon Tree House Residency in Tuscany. The irony of writing abroad about traveling without traveling seeped into my character’s attitudes. I’d still love to make a short film version. So on your next train to the airport, keep an eye out for Mr. Suitcase or Kid Cape. And keep an eye on your luggage.

Harley Jane Kozakwas born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Nebraska, completed NYU School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program, and migrated to Los Angeles. She starred in a few dozen films ( Parenthood, Arachnophobia, The Favor, etc.), three soaps ( Texas, Guiding Light, Santa Barbara ), countless plays, and a lotta TV before taking a fifteen-year maternity leave and turning to crime fiction. Her first (of five) novels, Dating Dead Men, won the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Her short prose has appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Sun, Santa Monica Review, and eight anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of 2019.

• When Les Klinger and Laurie R. King invited me to contribute a story to their Sherlockian anthology series, I jumped at the chance, although not without trepidation. Fans of Watson and Holmes are a rabid bunch, rivaling those of Star Trek, Star Wars , and Shakespeare, and a writer ventures into those territories at her own risk. Probably that’s why I had a hard time coming up with a premise, plot, character — any doorway into a story. One night, a voice woke me from a dead sleep with the words “This is the first line of your Sherlockian short story.” I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down what the dream voice dictated. The next morning, I stared blankly at the scrawled words. It’s not every day you walk into your apartment to find your cat has turned into a dog. My big nocturnal “aha!” by daylight had all the literary weight of a grocery list. However, it’s not like I had any competing ideas, and also, I don’t like to argue with the voices in my head, so I started typing. The result was “The Walk-In.”

Preston Langis a native New Yorker and a product of its public schools. He’s published four crime novels so far.

• This story was written specifically for an anthology to honor the terrific journalist and crime writer William E. Wallace, so it seemed appropriate to focus on a struggling reporter getting into trouble. I realize now that in the first sentence, I boldly called out the hitman subgenre as unrealistic but then went on to write something much less believable than the average assassin story. It was fun to write.

Jared Lipof’s short fiction appears in The Los Angeles Review, The Emerson Review, and Salamander. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he’s at work on a novel.

• Rendering an actual human being in fictional form can be tricky. Even more so when it’s family. Relatives will read your work and say the events in the fiction did not occur exactly as described. They’ll remind you how it really went down, as if that was even the point. But when you use your recently deceased father as a template for a character, whatever pressure is relieved by his inability to give you notes is offset by the fact that you really wish he could read it. At which point you realize you were just trying to perform a magic trick. “He’s not dead if he’s in the story,” you tell yourself. And even though you’re wrong, it was worth a try. Special thanks to Jennifer Barber at Salamander, whose editorial instincts brought out the best possible version of this story.

Anne Therese Macdonaldis the author of the novel A Short Time in Luxembourg. Her short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Blue Earth Review, Belletriste, Dublin Quarterly, Matter: A Journal of Art and Literature, Words on the Waves, and most recently the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ anthology False Faces: Twenty-Six Stories About the Masks We Wear.

• “That Donnelly Crowd” evolved from a culmination of several events in my life, especially the years I hitchhiked through Ireland during the Troubles and my return during the Celtic Tiger. In the story, a young American woman is attracted to Joe Donnelly, a man caught between these two eras. He is from a family of terrorists but claims that he’s in Ireland to build a modern factory. Against this, I explore the tendency of Americans to cling to the fantasy of an ancestral Ireland over the reality of today’s modern country. Colleen, the American woman, is a troubled soul. Like so many of us, she succumbs to her own fantasy. She sees in Joe Donnelly what she wants to see, unencumbered by the reality before her, ignoring the little signs that tell her to run the other way.