Richard Burgin - The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

Few of these stories are detective fiction, a tale in which an official police officer, a private eye, or an amateur sleuth is confronted with a crime and pursues the culprit by making observations and deductions. It has been my practice to define a mystery story as any work of fiction in which a crime or the threat of a crime is central to the theme or plot. There is greater emphasis in these pages on why a crime was committed, or if it will be done at all, than on trying to discover the perpetrator, which has upset some readers. That simply can’t be helped.

The nature of mystery fiction has changed over the years, and there are simply fewer and fewer works of pure detection than there were during the so-called golden age between World Wars I and II, when Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, and their peers were constructing ingenious puzzles and challenging readers to solve them before Hercule Poirot, Gideon Fell, Ellery Queen, or Lord Peter Wimsey did.

With authors focused more on the psychological aspects of crime, whether from the point of view of the detective, the victim, or the criminal, there appears to be greater strength of characterization and style than there was in the more classic form of pure detection. There are exceptions, of course, and when they occur, there is a pretty good chance that those stories will make it into these pages.

No mention of The Best American Mystery Stories is complete without genuflecting to Michele Slung, the fastest and smartest reader in the world, who combs every consumer magazine, every electronic zine, and as many literary journals as we can find. She scans hundreds — no, let me correct that — thousands of stories to determine which are mysteries (if you were searching for stories for this book, would you have expected “Disaster Stamps of Pluto” to qualify by virtue of its title? Or “Loyalty”? Or “Old Boys, Old Girls”?). She then culls those that have the vibe of having been scrawled with a crayon, and gives me the rest. She can read in a day what I’d need a month to do; without her dedication and intelligence, this annual volume would take three years to compile.

While I’m throwing thank-yous around, I’d like again to note the huge contributions of the guest editors, who so generously help make these wonderful books possible. It all began with Robert B. Parker in 1997, followed by Sue Grafton, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, as well as Joyce Carol Oates this year, to all of whom I am forever indebted.

Although we are relentlessly aggressive in searching out mystery fiction for these pages, I live in dread that we will somehow miss a worthy story. If you are an editor, publisher, author, agent, or just care about this type of literature, please feel free to send submissions. To qualify for the 2006 collection, a story must be written by an American or Canadian and published for the first time in the 2005 calendar year in an American or Canadian publication. Unpublished stories are not eligible. If the story was published in electronic form, a hard copy must be submitted. When this series began, I did not own a computer. I do now, but I sure don’t want to read from a screen, and there are just too many stories in e-zines to print them all out. Please do not ask for critical analysis of work, as I simply do not have time to do that, and please do not ask to have your material returned. If you are totally paranoid and do not believe that the postal service actually delivers mail, enclose a stamped, self-addressed postcard to confirm delivery.

Save the postage if your story was published in Ellery Queen‘s Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, as these are read cover to cover. I also see regularly The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper’s Magazine, Atlantic, Zoetrope, and mystery anthologies from major publishers, but it can’t hurt to send your story anyway.

The earlier I see stories, the better your chance of getting a thorough reading. Any stories received after December 31, 2005, will be discarded without being read. This is not because I’m arrogant and unreasonable, or even just curmudgeonly. The book actually has a deadline, which cannot be met if I’m still reading in mid-January. If you publish in April and send me your story at Christmastime, forcing me to stay home and read while my wife and friends are out partying, you better have written a hell of a story.

Please send material to Otto Penzler, The Mysterious Bookshop, 129 West 56th Street, New York, NY 10019.

O.P.

Crimes can occur without mystery. Mysteries can occur without crime. Violent and irrevocable actions can destroy lives but bring other lives together in unforeseeable, unimaginable ways.

In 1917, in the grim waterfront section called Black Rock, in Buffalo, New York, a forty-three-year-old Hungarian immigrant was murdered in a barroom fight, beaten to death with a poker. A few years later, in a rural community north of Buffalo, another recent immigrant to America, a German Jew, attacked his wife with a hammer and committed suicide with a double-barreled shotgun. Both deaths were alcohol-related. Both deaths were “senseless.” The men who came to such violent ends, my mother’s father and my father’s grandfather, never knew each other, yet their deaths precipitated events that brought their survivors together and would continue to have an influence, haunting and obsessive, into the twenty-first century. Families disrupted by violent deaths are never quite “healed” though they struggle to regroup and redefine themselves in ways that might be called heroic.

It’s an irony that I owe my life literally to those violent deaths of nearly a century ago, since they set in motion a sequence of events that resulted in my birth, but I don’t think it’s an irony that, as a writer, I am drawn to such material. There is no art in violence, only crude, cruel, raw, and irremediable harm, but there can be art in the strategies by which violence is endured, transcended, and transformed by survivors. Where there is no meaning, both death and life can seem pointless, but where meaning can be discovered, perhaps even violence can be redeemed, to a degree.

I grew up in a rural household in the Snowbelt of upstate New York in a household of family mysteries that were never acknowledged in my presence, and very likely never acknowledged even by the adults who safeguarded them. My father’s mother, whose deranged father had blown himself away virtually in front of her, had changed her surname to a seemingly gentile name, renounced her ethnic/religious background, never acknowledged her roots even to her son, and lived among us like one without a personal, let alone a tragic, history. In this she was quintessentially “American”— self-inventing, self-defining. Her life, like the early lives of my parents, seems in retrospect to have sprung from a noir America that’s the underside of the American dream, memorialized in folk ballads and blues and in the work of such disparate writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. It was as if, as a child, I inhabited a brightly lighted space — a family household of unusual closeness and protectiveness — surrounded by a penumbra of darkness in which malevolent shapes dwelled.

The earliest books to cast a spell on me were Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, nightmare adventures in the guise of a childhood classic, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Both Carroll and Poe create surreal worlds that seem unnervingly real, like images in a distorting mirror, and both explore mysteries without providing solutions. Why does the Red Queen scream, at the mildest provocation, “Off with his head!”? Why are hapless creatures in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world always changing shape? Why does the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” kill an old man who hasn’t harmed him, and in such a bizarre manner? (Crushed and smothered beneath a heavy bed.) Why does the narrator of “The Black Cat” put out the eye of his pet cat and strangle his wife? Motiveless malignity! Individuals act out of impulse, as if to assure that irrevocable: the violent act and its consequences.