Megan Abbott - The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

It was great fun to give Edgar Allan Poe the steampunk treatment while trying not to contradict anything in the original story. Through dumb luck, I saw a notice that nEvermore! a Poe-themed anthology, was looking for a few more tales. Many thanks to editors Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles for their helpful suggestions.

Dennis McFaddenlives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Best American Mystery Stories (2011 and 2013), Fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, The Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, and The South Carolina Review. His first collection, Hart’s Grove, was published in 2010; his second collection, Jimtown Road, won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.

• Plot is nice, and necessary, setting is essential, but for me, and for a lot of other writers, story begins with character. And this Lafferty guy is a character. It’s been said that if you can come up with a good one, you can use him or her again and again, and though I suspect that’s intended to mean in varying guises and disguises in varying stories, I took it a little more literally, no pun intended. Terrance Lafferty has been my main man in multiple stories now, and the next one’s already in progress. Other people seem to like him nearly as much as I do — he’s appeared in some pretty good places, Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine among them, and he was first introduced to mystery fans a few years ago in The Best American Mystery Stories 2013, when Mr. Penzler and Ms. Scottoline were kind enough to include “The Ring of Kerry.” I think people like him because he’s harmless. He’s by no means heroic. He could be any of us. All the trouble he gets into, all his predicaments, are generally self-inflicted, and happen only because he’s on that most elemental of quests — looking for love. Alas (and of course), he’s invariably looking in all the wrong places. He didn’t make his debut until a few years ago (in The Missouri Review, a story called “The Three-Sided Penny”), but he’s been with me a lot longer than that. Unlike most of my characters, based on people I’ve encountered over the years, Lafferty was a seed that grew and grew, inspired decades ago by one Sebastian Dangerfield — J. P. Donleavy’s ginger man. A tip of the hat to both of those gentlemen.

Michael Nolledits Read to Write Stories, a blog that offers weekly writing exercises and craft interviews. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Chattahoochee Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Indiana Review. His book In the Beginning, Middle, and End: A Field Guide to Writing Fiction is forthcoming. Noll earned his MFA from Texas State University, lives in Austin with his family, and is at work on a novel.

• I grew up on a hog farm in rural Kansas. Down the road, two old men lived with their mother, their house hidden by dense woods. A van sometimes raced by late at night, and then a little while later drove away again, so fast that the gravel popping under its tires woke us up. This was the 1980s, and not long after, people began getting arrested for cooking meth. My hometown’s population is only three thousand, so everyone knew almost everyone else, including the drug dealers. I didn’t understand what meth was, only that cooking it could blow up your kitchen and that tinfoil in the windows of a house was a bad sign. As a farmer, my dad applied nitrogen fertilizer to his fields with big tanks of anhydrous ammonia. If I should ever smell ammonia, he taught me in no uncertain terms, I should immediately get away. The tanks were prime targets for meth cooks, and they sometimes sat in our driveway at night.

I wanted to write a story about those innocent days when meth hadn’t yet become an epidemic, when meth dealers and users were regular people and not participants in a public crisis. To be clear, meth is terrible, and this story was informed in part by Nick Reding’s excellent book Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. But it was also inspired by the people in my hometown, kids who rode the school bus and played baseball with me, who were smart and funny and also, perhaps, stealing ammonia from anhydrous tanks, planning to make a little money and hoping not to end up blind or dead from suffocation.

Todd Robinsonis the creator and chief editor of the multi-award-winning crime fiction magazine Thuglit. He has been nominated three times for the Derringer Award, thrice shortlisted for The Best American Mystery Stories, selected for Writer’s Digest’s Year’s Best Writing 2003, and lost the Anthony Award both in 2013 (Best Short Story) and 2014 (Best First Novel, for The Hard Bounce ). His inclusion in this edition joyfully brings his Susan Lucci — like streak to a close. His newest novel, Rough Trade, was recently released.

• “Trash” arose from several elements within my personal periphery. Living in New York City, passing by the traditional massage parlor becomes a part of everyday life — a criminal underbelly of sex trafficking that is not only near-impossible to police but that exists just under the periphery of the bright and shiny tourist trap that the city has become. During a conversation with a friend who lives in Flushing, Queens (an area notorious for its numerous shady spas), she talked about the “tells” she’d developed in distinguishing the obviously questionable businesses from those that might actually be offering therapeutic services. Later that night, on the subway home, I saw one of the many “If You See Something, Say Something” posters intended to keep the city safe from terrorist acts. The story about a young man, not jaded enough yet to simply ignore the horrors around him, began to form.

Kristine Kathryn Ruschhas published mystery, science fiction, romance, nonfiction, and just about everything else under a wide variety of names. Her Smokey Dalton mystery novels, written under her pen name Kris Nelscott, have received acclaim worldwide. She’s been nominated for the Edgar and the Shamus (as both Nelscott and Rusch), and the Anthony, and she has repeatedly won Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine ’s Readers Choice Award for best short story of the year. Her short stories have been reprinted in more than twenty best-of-the-year collections, including two previous appearances in The Best American Mystery Stories .

Rusch also edits. Her anthology Women of Futures Past has just appeared, reprinting classic science fiction by important women writers. Along with John Helfers, she completed the first Best Mysteries of the Year anthology, which focuses on worldwide mystery fiction. With her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, she acts as series editor for the Fiction River anthology series. She also edits at least one mystery volume per year for that line.

Rusch often writes cross-genre fiction. Her character Miles Flint, from her Retrieval Artist series, has been chosen as one of the top ten science fiction detectives by io9 and as one of the fourteen science fiction and fantasy detectives who could out — Sherlock Holmes by the popular website blastr. Her most recent pure mystery novel, Spree, written under her Rusch name, was published in 2013. Her next Nelscott mystery will start a new series. That book, A Gym of Her Own, will appear in 2017.

• I live in a beach town on the Oregon coast. Seven thousand of us live here year-round, but the town has over 150,000 hotel rooms. My daily runs take me past several of those hotels. Two days before Christmas, I ran past a nearly empty hotel parking lot as a little girl, no more than eight, got out of a van. She said loudly, “Will Santa know how to find us?” I never heard anyone answer her. But by the time I had gone to the end of the block, I had the entire scenario for this story in my head. That rarely happens, so I’m grateful to the little girl for her concerns. I never saw her again. I wish I had. I would love to thank her for the inspiration she gave me.