Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

I threw these two issues together, posed a problem for my intrepid investigators, backed them up with a few other characters who I hoped would be interesting, and came up with “PX Christmas.” It’s not a story for the faint of heart, but I hope that the reader might come to realize that Christmas gifts come in all sorts of packages, even a few wrapped in horror and still dripping with blood.

Paul D. Markswon a Shamus Award for his novel White Heat, a mystery-thriller set in Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots. His story “Ghosts of Bunker Hill” ( EQMM, December 2016) was voted number one in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine ’s 2016 Readers Choice Awards and was nominated for a Macavity Award for Best Short Story. “Howling at the Moon” ( EQMM, November 2014) was shortlisted for the Anthony and Macavity Awards for best short story in 2015 and came in seventh in Ellery Queen ’s Readers Choice Awards. His short fiction also has been published in Akashic’s Noir series (St. Louis), Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Crimestalker Casebook, Dave Zeltserman’s Hardluck Stories magazine, Gary Lovisi’s Hardboiled Magazine , Weber—The Contemporary West, various anthologies, and many more. He is coeditor of the Coast to Coast: Sea to Shining Sea mystery anthologies. His novella, Vortex, was released in 2015. White Heat has been reissued and the sequel, Broken Windows, is due out in fall 2018.

Paul also has the distinction, dubious though it might be, of being the last person to have shot a film on the fabled MGM back lot before it bit the dust to make way for condos. According to Steven Bingen, one of the authors of the well-received book MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, “That 40 page chronological list I mentioned of films shot at the studio ends with his [Paul D. Marks’s] name on it.”

Paul has served on the boards of the Los Angeles chapters of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.PaulDMarks.com.

• Much of my work is inspired by Los Angeles, which I like to think of as another character in my stories. Growing up here, I’ve always had a fascination with Venice (where I lived for a time as a child and which I visited a lot as a teenager and over the years), both its history and the current carnival-like atmosphere that permeates every inch of it. Venice started as developer Abbot Kinney’s fever dream of creating an elegant resort mimicking the romance of Italy’s Venice, complete with canals and gondoliers. He wanted his Venice-by-the-Sea to be a cultural mecca. That didn’t last long. Neither did most of the canals, many of which were gone by 1929. Over the years the culture and glamour wore off, leaving behind a kitschy and slightly rundown beach town of leftover canals. By the 1950s it was a slum. In the 1960s it was a hangout for Jim Morrison and the Doors. In the ’70s and ’80s it was a haven for hippies and gangs. Today it’s a mix of free spirits, skateboarders, tourists, and gentrifying locals. That contrast between elegant and seedy, glamorous and gauche, old and new, trendy and trashy, rich and poor, intrigues me.

And despite its past-its-prime appearance, Venice has become the number one tourist destination in Los Angeles, at least according to some.

Most everyone knows the famous Venice boardwalk that runs along the shore, but one of my favorite spots is Windward Avenue, a street known for its long, arched colonnade that runs perpendicular to the shore and dead-ends into it. Windward doubled as a Tijuana street in Orson Welles’s great film noir Touch of Evil, and Venice’s oil wells of that time (the late 1950s) were where the oil-field scenes in Touch of Evil were filmed.

Venice is a little piece of the exotic on the edge of Los Angeles. That got me thinking about setting my story there and showcasing the colorful and sometimes dangerous streets of Venice Beach in my story “Windward” for Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea. So I gave Jack Lassen, my PI, an office (complete with 1950s bomb shelter) amid the old-world columns and archways of Windward. With a setting like that I needed a crime that would be equally intriguing, and what better fodder for crime than the façade of the movie business, where nothing is what it appears to be and a hero onscreen might be a monster offscreen?

Ultimately Venice is more a state of mind than a location. But either way, a great setting for a story.

Joyce Carol Oatesis the author most recently of the story collections Dis Mem Ber and Beautiful Days . She is visiting professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley (spring 2018) and visiting distinguished writer in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University (fall 2018). Stories of hers have appeared previously in The Best American Mystery Stories and in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She is the 2017 recipient of the International Festival of Literature and Art with Humor Award (Bilbao, Spain) and was inducted in 2017 into the American Philosophical Society.

• “Still she haunts me, phantomwise”—this line from a poem by Lewis Carroll about his great devotion to Alice Liddell, the seven-year-old daughter of Oxford University friends to whom he’d told the original story of Alice in Wonderland, has also haunted me for years. Indeed, the very word phantomwise is unique to this poem; I have never encountered it elsewhere.

In my story “Phantomwise: 1972” a nineteen-year-old named Alyce, a sophomore at an upstate New York university, finds herself the object of devotion of an older, much-acclaimed poet with an obsessive interest in the original “Alice in Wonderland” at the same time that she is, less benignly, an object of revulsion on the part of a young philosophy professor who has exploited her naiveté and regrets his involvement with her as a threat to his professional career. The story follows Alyce’s adventures in a wonderland, or perhaps a looking-glass world, in which she is simultaneously loved sincerely by one man and detested by the other; a world in which she is simultaneously treasured by one man (who wants to marry her) and an impediment to the other (who wants to annihilate her). Which Alyce prevails? The reader is welcome to decide.

Alan Orloff’sdebut mystery, Diamonds for the Dead, was a best first novel Agatha Award finalist, and his eighth novel, Pray for the Innocent, was released earlier this year. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Jewish Noir, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Snowbound: Best New England Crime Stories 2017, and The Night of the Flood. Alan lives in northern Virginia and teaches fiction writing at the Writer’s Center (Bethesda, MD). He loves cake and arugula, but not together. www.alanorloff.com.

• In “Rule Number One,” I tried to weave two threads together. First I wanted to explore the honor-among-thieves notion. Was it a workable trope? Or a bunch of tripe? In this story a crook gets involved in a heist with his aging mentor. Which proves stronger, the “criminal drive” or that special bond between student and teacher? Where does a crook’s loyalty really lie? With the profession itself, where ripping people off is admired? Or with his criminal partners?

The second thread was born from my fascination with the double-cross, the double agent, the Mission Impossible pull-off-the-latex-mask deception where nothing is as it seems. That dark place where morals are murky and shifting allegiances are standard operating procedure.