Doug Allyn: The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

One night, a great-uncle of mine was walking through a pedestrian tunnel after coming home from his stint as a hotel busboy. A man attacked him from the shadows and attempted to rob him of his day’s wage. My uncle, a semiprofessional boxer, was in the habit of carrying a knife; what happened next haunted him for the rest of his life. The idea for this story comes, very loosely, out of that event.

Most Greeks came to this country with no formal education or knowledge of the English language; not only did they survive, they excelled. This is the story of one young man who slipped through the cracks. It is my attempt to get inside his head.

Scott Phillipswas born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1961. He is the author of The Ice Harvest and The Walkaway and the forthcoming Cottonwood. He has been nominated for, and lost, the Edgar Award, the Hammett Prize, the CWA Gold and Silver Daggers, the John Creasey Memorial Dagger, the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award. He won a California Book Award for Best First Fiction. He has a wife and daughter, with whom he lives somewhere west of the Mississippi River.

Wayne Ogden is a character from my second novel, The Walkaway, and his grandfather Bill Ogden narrates Cottonwood, the novel I’m finishing now. When Dennis McMillan asked me to contribute a story set in the 1930s to Measures of Poison, I was stumped until he suggested I use a teen-aged Wayne as a protagonist; I was delighted for the chance to get back to that depraved voice and persona, and to see Wayne as a much younger and unformed character. Other characters in the story walked out of my novels as well: Mildred Halliburton appears very briefly in The Walkaway at the age of ninety-five, and Gleason the elderly bartender shows up in Cottonwood as a twenty-year-old. Bar owner Stan Gerard is the father of Bill Gerard, the strip-joint owner from The Ice Harvest. The climactic event in “Sockdolager” is loosely based on a real firebombing that happened in Wichita in the late sixties, and I’m told the perpetrator’s motivations were much as I’ve described Wayne’s herein.

Daniel Stashoweris the author of five mystery novels and two biographies. His most recent book is The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television, and he won an Edgar Award in 2000 for Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. Stashower is also a past recipient of the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction Writing. A freelance journalist since 1986, he has written articles for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic Traveller, and American History. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Alison, and his son, Sam.

When I was thirteen years old, I tried out for the part of Billy the Page in a revival of William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t get the part, so I went home and wrote a play of my own, entitled Sherlock Holmes Versus the Lizard People. It found Holmes and Watson struggling to fend off an invasion by a formidable army of lizard people, who, if memory serves, had the advantage of hovering spaceships and laser pistols. I was inordinately pleased with it, and in many ways “The Agitated Actress” is the same story again, only without the laser pistols.

Hannah Tintigrew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Story, Epoch, Story Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sonora Review, and the anthology Lit Riffs (Simon and Schuster, 2003). She earned her M.A. from New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program and has been awarded residency fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook, and the New York State Writers Institute. She is currently the editor of One Story magazine and teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, is forthcoming from Dial Press in March 2004.

My parents are both huge mystery fans. When I started writing fiction they told me: If you want to make any money doing this you have to write a mystery. “Home Sweet Home” was my first attempt. I wanted my murderer to be sympathetic. I also wanted to see if I could drift from point of view to point of view while solving the crime. Michael Koch, the editor of Epoch, gave his great insight to finish the piece. It’s an honor to be included in this anthology, among such talented writers. Mom and Dad — you were right — about this, and so many things.

Scott Wolvenis finishing an M.F.A. at Columbia University. He currently teaches creative writing at Binghamton University (SUNY) and lives in upstate New York with his wife. His story “The Copper Kings” was selected for The Best American Stories 2002. Other recent short fiction has appeared in the Crime Issue of the Mississippi Review and at Plotswithguns.com.

“Controlled Burn” started out just as the title (taken from a radio program on forestry and farm techniques) and some thoughts about the nature of fire. The story ended up being about a lot of things, a combination of the elements and various depths of mystery, of crime and the truth about lies. And the story is partially about working, especially at a woodlot or as a farmer, both of which I have heard described in typical New England Yankee fashion as “an easy way to make a hard living.” The story went through a lot of revision, and I’m grateful to Toiya Kirsten Finley, fiction editor at Harpur Palate, for her great editorial comments.

This story is dedicated to my grandfather. Special thanks to all the men and women serving in our armed forces. Very special thanks to Ray and Renate Morrison, Colin Harrison, Anthony Neil Smith of Plotswithguns.com, David Bartine, Sloan Harris, and the remarkable team at WSBW.

Monica Woodis the author of three novels, Secret Language, My Only Story, and the forthcoming Any Bitter Thing; a book of stories, Ernie’s Ark; and two books for aspiring writers, Description and The Pocket Muse: Ideas and Inspirations for Writing. Her short stories have been widely published and anthologized, most recently in Manoa, Glimmer Train, and Confrontation.

“That One Autumn” is part of Ernie’s Ark, a collection of linked stories. It is the only one in the book that takes place in the past. In the present, Ernie is nursing Marie through her cancer. They have a beautiful marriage, marred only, perhaps, by Ernie’s tendency to mythologize it. I decided to go back thirty years and find out where the myth began for them. That’s where the story was born. Tracey turns up later in the book, too, in case you’re curious about what happens to her.

I use the first person plural here to refer to not only the personal “we,” but also to the culture at large.

An effort at which, I’ll readily concede, I have failed on several past occasions.

I know they simply must be considered “events” because in at least three of the ads they were identified variously as events of the “special,” “important,” and “not-to-be-missed” variety.

Charlie Rose is, of course, simply the finest interviewer currently working in television; next to him, Barbara Walters’s true gossipmonger colors can be seen in all their vivid brightness. Some might argue that Ted Koppel matches Rose’s skill, and while this may certainly be true insofar as simple technique is concerned, the broader scope of Rose’s interviewees and his encyclopedic knowledge in so many diverse areas clearly give him the edge. I won’t even deign to mention Larry King and his all-consuming celebrity nasal/anal interface.