Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

• I’ve written about Anne DeWitt several times, and it’s always fun to see what she’s up to. High school principals always seem extremely powerful to the staff and students, but Anne takes this several steps further; she’s a survival expert who’s trained clandestine operatives, and she’s intensely goal-oriented. Travis High is going to be the best high school in North Carolina… or else. “Small Signs” is about Anne’s past rising up to bite her and how she reacts to the threat.

Rob Hartis the author of five novels: Potter’s Field , The Woman from Prague (selected as one of the best reads of summer 2017 by Publishers Weekly ), South Village (a best-of-2016 pick by the Boston Globe ), City of Rose, and New Yorked (nominated for an Anthony Award for best first novel). He also cowrote Scott Free with James Patterson. His short stories have appeared in such publications as Thuglit, Needle, Joyland, and Shotgun Honey. Nonfiction articles have appeared at Salon, the Daily Beast, Literary Hub, Nailed, and Electric Literature. He is the publisher at MysteriousPress.com and the online writing workshop director at LitReactor. Find him online at @robwhartand www.robwhart.com.

• Someone else noticed before I did: over the course of a few months I had published short stories involving a bagel maker defending his storefront, warring food trucks, and a restaurant scam. A friend asked when my collection of food-noir stories was coming out. When he said that, I was working on a story about the murder of a bouncer at a popular pastry shop. I was writing to a theme without knowing it. Which, in retrospect, is not surprising. I like crime fiction and I like food. And they’re both great vehicles for storytelling. Crime is a measure of people at their worst, and food speaks to a wide range of cultural and personal attributes. It turned into a challenge: how many food-noir stories could I write? This is my tenth. I knew I wanted to set a story in Chinatown, and I knew I wanted it to involve enigmatic deliveries. I’ve always loved walking into Chinatown restaurants and bodegas and feeling completely lost in the city where I grew up. Those vague notions percolated for months until I ran across a news story about a gambling parlor busted above a restaurant in Chinatown. The story clicked immediately.

David H. Hendrickson’sfirst novel, Cracking the Ice, was praised by Booklist as “a gripping account of a courageous young man rising above evil.” He has since published five additional novels, including Offside, which has been adopted for high school student required reading. He is at work on a new suspense series, scheduled to release in early 2019. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and numerous anthologies, including multiple issues of Fiction River. He has published over fifteen hundred works of nonfiction and been honored with the Joe Concannon Hockey East Media Award and the Murray Kramer Scarlet Quill Award. Visit him online at www.hendricksonwriter.com.

• During my family’s trip-of-a-lifetime to Africa, I was amazed at the breathtaking wonders of the Serengeti, from the stunning diversity of life in the Ngorongoro Crater to the hundreds of thousands of wildebeests and zebras gathered near the Mara River, where crocodiles awaited, including one giant beast estimated to be eighteen feet long and weighing over a ton.

At the same time I was saddened to hear stories about poachers and their impact, especially devastating on the rhinoceros population. In fact, during our entire trip our group spotted only a single rhino, and that one only barely discernible in the distance through the strongest of binoculars.

That trip inspired my novel No Defense (a seemingly oxymoronic combination of a hockey romance and Africa) as well as several short stories. When I heard that Fiction River: Pulse Pounders Adrenaline would consist of short thrillers, going back to Africa was the ultimate of no-brainers. If my imagination doesn’t make many more return trips to the Serengeti, I’ll be very disappointed.

Andrew Klavanis the author of such internationally best-selling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood; Don’t Say a Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas; and Empire of Lies. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He wrote the screenplays to A Shock to the System, which starred Michael Caine, and One Missed Call, which starred Edward Burns. His political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he currently does a popular podcast, “The Andrew Klavan Show,” at the Daily Wire. His most recent book is a memoir of his religious journey, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. His most recent fiction is the fantasy-suspense podcast “Another Kingdom.”

• The idea for “All Our Yesterdays” came to me more than twenty years ago, when I was living in London. I had meant to come to the city for a year but fell in love with the place and ended up staying for seven. Part of what I loved about London—and about the U.K. in general—was the deep presence of the past. Something about walking on ground the ancient Romans had trod gave me a peaceful feeling of being part of the great sweep of history. The notion that the love of the past might have a dark side as well led to the idea. I thought it would make a good movie and have pitched it many times without success. But now, with an increasing awareness of “time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” I feel the urge to get as many of my best ideas as possible down on whatever passes for paper. I’m delighted to find myself once again included in this anthology.

Martin Limónspent twenty years in the U.S. Army, ten of them stationed in South Korea. While still on active duty he began writing, typing on a Smith Corona portable typewriter (purchased in the PX) at his on-base quarters. After four years of trying, he published the first of what have now become over fifty short stories. His debut novel, Jade Lady Burning, featured 8th Army criminal investigation agents George Sueño and Ernie Bascom. It was published in 1992, shortly after he left the service, and it was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Since then George and Ernie have appeared in twelve more novels in addition to Nightmare Range, a short story collection. The most recent novel in the series, The Line, concerns a murder at the Joint Security Area on the Korean DMZ and is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2018.

• Juliet Grames at Soho Press challenged me to write a Christmas-themed story for inclusion in their collection The Usual Santas. At first I balked. Christmas stories seemed to be mostly set in quaint little towns in cozy little bungalows with plenty of snow outside and warm fires inside.

I write about military bases. And military crime.

But then I realized that even at overseas military bases, Christmas—inevitably—comes and goes. And what did commanders worry about most during those holidays? One word leapt immediately to mind: suicide. The military suicide rate rises before, after, and during the Christmas holidays, despite the army’s best efforts to keep it down. Back in the early seventies, at the 8th Army Headquarters in Seoul, the commanders also worried about an increasing holiday rate of black market activity. That is, soldiers and their dependents buying duty-free consumer goods in the PX or commissary and then reselling them on the Korean economy. Profit margins were two or three times what the GI shelled out in the first place.