Megan Abbott: The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Of course not. Hastings, after a year’s stay in Nairobi — until interest in the doctor’s death died down — moved on from his medicine table to a small pharmacy, then expanded to own several more, not just in Lilongwe but also in Blantyre, in the south. He married the daughter of a highly placed government official and had many children, for his life wasn’t some work of fiction. His life, and Dr. Gaynor’s, they were part of God’s great plan at work, as Dr. Gaynor’s former assistant Robinson said often and indignantly to the doubters, even back when he, with his now-dead boss’s office key finally in hand, swept and kept Dr. Gaynor’s office safe until the new doctor from Holland arrived.

Megan Abbottis the Edgar Award — winning author of seven novels, including Dare Me, The Fever, and her latest, You Will Know Me. Her stories have appeared in several collections, including Detroit Noir, The Best American Mystery Stories 2015, and Mississippi Noir. She is also the author of The Street Was Mine, a study of hardboiled fiction and film noir. She was the 2015 winner of the International Thriller Writers and Strand Critics awards for best novel. “The Little Men” was nominated for a 2016 Edgar Award. She lives in Queens, New York.

• The idea for “The Little Men” sprang from real life, a decades-old bit of Hollywood lore. Years ago I read about the sad fate of one of the most successful and charismatic booksellers of Tinseltown’s golden age. His untimely death in 1941 took place in his apartment in one of those lovely courtyard bungalows that loom so large in Hollywood tales, from In a Lonely Place to Day of the Locust to Mulholland Drive. Over the years I remained haunted by the real-life story, and I’m generally a sucker for Hollywood tales anyway — especially ones with dark twists. So when Otto Penzler asked me to set a story with a bookstore/bookseller focus, I finally had my chance to dive deep into that jacaranda-scented world of golden-age Hollywood where everything is beautiful and, quite possibly, deadly.

Steve Almondis the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the New York Times bestseller Against Football. His short stories have appeared in the Best American and Pushcart anthologies. His most recent story collection, God Bless America, won the Paterson Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Story Prize. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Almond cohosts the podcast Dear Sugar Radio with Cheryl Strayed. He lives outside Boston with his wife and three children.

• “Okay, Now Do You Surrender?” emerged from one of those thought experiments endemic to the domesticated suburban husband: what would happen if one’s spousal missteps were monitored by mafiosi rather than marriage counselors? It would be idiocy to deny that personal authorial guilt played a formative role. I had no intentions of writing a whodunit, but the moment the mobsters waylaid our hero outside his workplace, the die was cast. We’re all living under surveillance at this point — and always have been. Our conscience does the legwork. It’s what sets us apart from the serpents and the badgers and the whatnots. I’m just happy to have found an unorthodox way to write about marital anguish. It remains one of the essential human mysteries.

Matt Bellis the author most recently of the novel Scrapper, a Michigan Notable Book for 2016. His previous novel, In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. He is also the author of two collections of fiction and a nonfiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II. His next story collection, A Tree or a Person or a Wall, is a fall 2016 publication. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

• The finding of the boy in “Toward the Company of Others” came to me after a couple months of writing about Kelly scrapping metal in the abandoned buildings of Detroit. I’d wanted to write about metal scrapping and about the urban abandonment in my home state for a while, but I knew very little else when I started. For most of those early weeks, Kelly didn’t even have a name: he was simply “the scrapper,” and I knew very little about him other than his occupation, his deep isolation and loneliness. I went forward with two rules: I would keep him acting, describing the work he did, and I would try to learn who he was by the way he saw the empty schools and churches and houses he gutted for steel and copper. (Most revealing in those days was the habit he had of seeing the abandoned parts of the city as the zone. ) I wrote this episode much the way the reader experiences it: I wrote Kelly scrapping the house, unaware there was a boy held in the basement; I then wrote a few sentences where it seemed that Kelly had already found the boy, splitting him into a person who had and had not yet done so, an awareness the reader (and the writer) would share for a moment; and then I wrote the saving of the boy. It was a surprise, but it changed everything else I wrote about Kelly: How would this loner be transformed by saving another person? What new responsibilities would he take on, and how would he discharge the duties they suggested? And if he came to love the boy in the days to come, might he learn that the boy was still in peril, and then how far would he be willing to go to keep the boy safe?

Bruce Robert Coffinbegan writing seriously in 2012, several months before retiring from the Portland, Maine, police department. As a detective sergeant with twenty-eight years of service, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine’s largest city. Following the terror attacks of 9/11 he worked for four years with the FBI, earning the Director’s Award (the highest honor a nonagent can receive) for his work in counterterrorism. Coffin’s short fiction has been shortlisted twice for the Al Blanchard Award. He is the author of the John Byron mystery series. He lives and writes in Maine.

• I wrote this story several years ago while trying to finish my first novel. As so often happens, ideas creep in and take hold of the creative reins. I’ve learned not to fight it when this happens. Setting the novel aside, I began to write the tale of an ill-contrived escape attempt from the former Maine State Prison in Thomaston. The story was written in only two sittings, followed by untold hours of rewrites and edits, until eventually it became “Fool Proof.”

Lydia Fitzpatrickwas a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2012 to 2014. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Hopwood Award winner, and she was a 2010–2011 fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is also a recipient of an O. Henry Award and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has appeared in One Story, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and Opium. Lydia lives with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles. She is working on her first novel.

• “Safety” came from a mix of memory and fear. The first line came from a memory: the gym in my elementary school had skylights and high ceilings, and all this dust floating up there in the light, and I remember being little, lying on my back during the wind-down, staring up into space, and feeling completely relaxed and safe. I wrote the first couple of lines hoping to tap into that emotion and transfer it to the reader before it’s broken by the sound of the gunshot.