Megan Abbott: The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

When I was a child I was surrounded by people who read mysteries and crime fiction: my father, my mother, their friends. Dad had a subscription to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. We watched Alfred Hitchcock on television. As a teenager I devoured Sherlock Holmes (we had a two-volume anthology), while Mom and Dad read Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh. I still have Dad’s 1957 volume A Treasury of Great Mysteries. I remember their delight with P. D. James’s creation of a female protagonist for her novel An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Deep in my heart I have always wanted to write a mystery story that would show up in an anthology my mom and dad would have been likely to buy. This dream has now been fulfilled.

Brian Tobinis the author of four novels: The Ransom, The Missing Person, Below the Line, and A Victimless Crime. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. In 2015 his short story “Teddy” was nominated for an Edgar Award. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Vickie.

• “Entwined” was inspired by an episode of This American Life in which the writer Darin Strauss recounted his teenage experience of having struck and killed a bicyclist who swerved into the path of his car. His account was compelling, not only for the quality of his prose but also for the acuity of his self-examination.

Plotting a story is usually difficult for me, involving many false starts and wrong turns. I was listening to This American Life during a morning walk. By the time I reached home, I had the story fully formed in my imagination.

Saral Waldorfis a medical anthropologist who has lived and worked in various countries in Africa (Uganda, Lesotho, Cameroon, Malawi, Benin) and elsewhere (Malta, Thailand, Turkmenistan), these places often serving as background for her short stories. She has published stories in Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly, Commentary, The Hudson Review, and The Southern Review .

• Growing up, I and my two sisters were brought up not on fairy tales but on mysteries, because my parents, Darwin L. Teilhet and Hildegarde T. Teilhet, wrote them jointly, separately, and under pseudonyms from the 1930s to the 1960s, and I am particularly honored to have made this slight contribution to a genre that they so assiduously loved and promoted. I also would like to thank editor Emily Nemens of The Southern Review, who took a stab in the dark and published my story, which explores an old theme in literature, the well-intentioned stranger in someone else’s “exotic” country who leaves either wiser or not.

The stranger, in this case, is Dr. Gaynor, a female white doctor running a district hospital in Chitipa, Malawi, and tells of her two brief encounters with Hastings, a young, locally born thief back from the capital to visit his mother. There is no real drama between the two — their first encounter is hardly noticeable and simply by chance — yet the deadliness of their final one is dictated, in some sense, by their being from different worlds with different demands and expectations.

I myself did live in Chitipa for two years as a somewhat aged Peace Corps volunteer sent to help set up and run the first AIDS clinic at the district hospital there, which served a population of 125,000. Although Dr. Gaynor and I shared some experiences, I luckily had a much more benign outcome, as related in a memoir kept of these years, The Condom Lady, which is now out for publishing review. I should note that one of my neighbors, the accountant Mr. Majonga, in Line #8, the hospital’s small row of tin-roofed cinderblock houses for middle management, was a mad mystery story fan who owned and traded almost as many worn and torn street-vendor-bought Agatha Christie and James Patterson paperbacks as I did.