Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

Michael Brackenis the author of eleven books, including the private-eye novel All White Girls, and more than twelve hundred short stories in several genres. His short crime fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Espionage Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and in many other anthologies and periodicals. A recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for lifetime achievement in short mystery fiction, Bracken has won two Derringer Awards and been shortlisted for a third, and he has received numerous awards for advertising copywriting. Additionally, Bracken has edited six crime fiction anthologies, including the three-volume Fedora series and the forthcoming The Eyes of Texas. He lives, writes, and eats barbecue with his wife, Temple, in Central Texas.

• Each time we visit my wife’s parents, we spend much of the three-hour drive brainstorming story ideas while Temple notes them on a legal pad. Shortly before one such trip, I read the submission call for Noir at the Salad Bar, which sought stories that “feature food or drink, restaurants, bars or the culinary arts,” and during that trip my wife filled two handwritten pages with every food-related story idea we could imagine.

Then she suggested barbecue.

By the time we arrived at her parents’ home, I knew the story’s setting and primary characters. While Temple visited with family, I filled several more pages of the legal pad with notes, and I created a rough outline. But after inspiration comes perspiration, and the story required several drafts before becoming “Smoked.”

James Lee Burkeis the author of thirty-six novels and two collections of short stories. He and his wife, Pearl, live in western Montana.

• I wrote “The Wild Side of Life” in part as a tribute to Jimmie Heap, the man who recorded the original of the most famous song in the history of country music. The postwar era marked our entry into neocolonialism and the building of a petrochemical empire, but the vision of those who worked in oil exploration was confined to coastal swamps dotted with cypress and gum trees and live oaks strung with Spanish moss, and beer joints and honky-tonk bands on the levee and jukebox music that played until two in the morning.

People who used to pick cotton and break corn now worked on drilling rigs and strung pipe, and had money and felt an independence they’d never experienced. The southern oligarchy had been broken. Unfortunately, an equally dark reality lay just beyond our ken. Oil companies don’t pick fights, but they don’t take prisoners either. The bombing I describe took place in South America in 1956.

I’ve never gotten Jimmie Heap out of my head. Or Kitty Wells, who sang the rebuttal to Jimmie’s lament. It was a grand time to be around. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea what he’s talking about.

Previously a television director, theater technician, and law student, Lee Childis the author of the globally best-selling Jack Reacher series, evaluated by Forbes magazine as the strongest brand in contemporary fiction. He was born in Britain and lives in New York City.

• My U.S. publisher wanted to do a collected edition of all the Jack Reacher short stories and asked for a new story to anchor the volume. I wasn’t keen—I was in the middle of writing my next novel and didn’t have much time. But ironically I ended up very happy with “Too Much Time”—as a concise piece of work I thought it was one of the best things I had ever done.

Michael Connellyhas published thirty-one novels, most of which have been about the exploits of LAPD detective Harry Bosch or the Lincoln lawyer Mickey Haller. He is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America. He splits his time between the Los Angeles he writes about and the Florida where he grew up.

• In “The Third Panel” I got the chance to write about the painter who has had a great influence on me and my books, Hieronymus Bosch. I studied this fifteenth-century artist while in college, and what I found is that there are many different interpretations of his paintings, particularly his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. I have always been drawn to the third panel, because it depicts the wages of sin and in many ways is similar to a macabre crime scene. Though Harry Bosch does not appear in this story, his name and perhaps grim outlook are drawn from this panel. This is the world where he dwells. I enjoyed writing about it.

John M. Floyd’swork has appeared in more than 250 different publications, including Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine , Strand Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Mississippi Noir, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2015. A former air force captain and IBM systems engineer, he is also an Edgar Award nominee and a three-time Derringer Award winner. John’s seventh book, The Barrens, is scheduled for release in 2018. He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Mississippi.

• As soon as I received the invitation to submit a story to the Coast to Coast: Private Eyes anthology, I knew what kind of tale I wanted to tell. Back in 2013 I’d published a long story called “Redemption,” about a former gunfighter turned Pinkerton’s agent who quit both careers to open a private-investigation office with his brother in San Francisco in the 1880s, and I had for some time been considering doing a sequel to that story. After all, I’d grown up watching westerns and reading about private detectives, and I’ve always been fascinated by stories/novels/movies about reluctant gunfighters in the Old West— Shane, Unforgiven, Open Range, etc. And since I already had a main character I knew well, my only task was to give him a challenging new case and come up with some twists and turns. I finished “Gun Work” several weeks later, sent it in, and was pleased to find that the C2C:PI editors, Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks, liked it. Now I’m even more glad they did…

David Edgerley Gatesis the author of the Cold War thrillers Black Traffic and The Bone Harvest and the companion novella Viper. His latest book is Exit Wounds; the next is Absolute Zero. His short stories have been nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, Derringer, and International Thriller Writers Awards. Gates blogs regularly at www.sleuthsayers.org; his website is www.davidedgerleygates.com.

• “Cabin Fever” is one of those stories that started in my head with the weather, something ominous building on the horizon, and picked up momentum from there. It’s the fourth of my stories to feature Hector and Katie, and like the others, it’s much about physical landscape. Here’s a curious thing. I’d already written “Cabin Fever” when I happened on the Craig Johnson novel Hell Is Empty, which I hadn’t read before. Craig’s book has Walt Longmire in pursuit of an escaped con deep in the woods, trapped in a blizzard. Ideas gather shape in their execution. Two different guys pluck a similar situation out of the zeitgeist, independently, and then take off at right angles to each other. It’s a little odd, but there it is.

Charlaine Harrisis a true daughter of the South. Born in Mississippi, she has lived in Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. Her career as a novelist began in 1981 with her first book, a conventional mystery. Since then she’s written urban fantasy, science fiction, and horror. In addition to over thirty full-length books, she has written numerous short stories and three graphic novels in collaboration with Christopher Golden. She has been featured on bestseller lists many times, and her works have been adapted for three television shows. Charlaine now lives at the top of a cliff on the Brazos River with her husband and two rescue dogs. She has three children and two grandchildren.