Gary Alexander: The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Every year, when I sit down to write the foreword to the new edition of The Best American Mystery Stories, two thoughts leap to mind. The first is: what can I write about that I haven’t written about in the previous volumes? The second is: does anyone actually read it anyway, or do they (wisely) go straight to the fiction?

Well, just in case this book has found its way into the hands of a completist reader, here are a few things you should know.

• Mystery is a very broad genre that includes any story in which a crime (usually murder) or the threat of a crime (creating suspense) is central to the plot or theme. Detective stories are one subgenre, others being crime (often told from the point of view of the criminal), suspense (impending man-made calamity), espionage (crimes against the state, which potentially have more victims than a single murder), and such sub-subgenres as police procedurals, historicals, humor, puzzles, private eyes, noir, and so on.

• If you are expecting to read a bunch of what mostly passes for detective stories these days, you will be disappointed. Almost no one writes distinguished tales of ratiocination; observation of hidden clues and the deductions a brilliant detective makes of them is largely a lost art. Most contemporary detective stories rely on coincidence, luck, a confession, or flashes of insight by the detective (whether private eye, police officer, or an amateur who has taken time off from his or her primary occupation of cooking, gardening, knitting, writing, hairdressing, or shopping).

• Mystery fiction today is primarily devoted to the notion of “whydunit” rather than “howdunit” or “whodunit.” Therefore, most tales are based on psychological scrutiny, whether by a detective, by the reader, or by the protagonist.

• The line between mystery fiction and literary fiction has become almost totally blurred. Such mystery writers as Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, James Ellroy, and others are certainly writing literary works. Such mainstream literary writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon, Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, Salman Rushdie, and others have written stories and books of mystery, crime, and suspense.

• This collection is devoted to the best-written mystery stories published in the 2009 calendar year. You can call them mysteries or crime stories or literary stories, and you will be right. The goal, as it is every year (and this is the fourteenth edition), is to collect the very best mysteries of the year, and I think we have succeeded — again.

The “we” referred to above includes my colleague Michele Slung, who examines thousands of stories every year to find the most worthy; Nat Sobel, the greatest agent in the world, whose impeccable taste has discovered dozens of first-rate tales that have been recommended for inclusion; the scores of editors of literary journals who keep me on their subscription lists and often point out work that merits extra attention; and of course, Lee Child, the guest editor. It is a cause of astonishment as well as gratitude that Child, an author who hits number one on bestseller lists in America, England, and who knows where else, was willing to take time out from a very full schedule to read the fifty stories I selected as the best of the year (or, at least, my favorites) and pick the top twenty, as well as write a superb, thoughtful introduction.

Also important, if less directly, to the ongoing success of this series are the previous guest editors, who have generously lavished so much time and attention on these annual volumes: the late Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen, George Pelecanos, and Jeffery Deaver.

While I engage in a nearly obsessive quest to locate and read every mystery/crime/suspense story published, I live in paranoid fear that I will miss a worthy story, so if you are an author, editor, or publisher, or care about one, please feel free to send a book, magazine, or tear sheet to me, c/o The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. If it first appeared electronically, you must submit a hard copy. It is vital to include the author’s contact information. No unpublished material will be considered for what should be obvious reasons. No material will be returned. If you distrust the postal service, enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard.

To be eligible, a story must have been written by an American or Canadian and first published in an American or Canadian publication in the calendar year 2010. The earlier in the year I receive the story, the more fondly I regard it. For reasons known only to the dimwits (no offense) who wait until Christmas week to submit a story published the previous spring, this happens every year, causing much gnashing of teeth as I read a stack of stories while my wife and friends are trimming the Christmas tree or otherwise celebrating the holiday season. It had better be an extraordinarily good story if you do this because I will start reading it with barely contained rage. Since there is necessarily a very tight production schedule for this book, the absolute firm deadline for a story to reach me is December 31. If the story arrives twenty-four hours later, it will not be read. Really.

O. P.

Everyone seems to know what a short story is, but there is very little in the way of theoretical discussion of the form. A tentative definition is often approached from two directions simultaneously: first, Edgar Allan Poe is quoted as being suspicious of the novel, preferring instead that which can be consumed at a single sitting; and then Mark Twain is quoted as saying — of a letter, not a story — “I’m sorry this is so long; I had no time to make it shorter.”

Some people attribute the second quotation to Pascal, but Twain is always a safe bet for quotes, and in either case the counterintuitive meaning is clear: it takes more time and greater effort to hone a narrative into a short form than to let it run a longer course. Combined with Poe’s concept of the “single sitting,” the short story is therefore seen as a delightfully well-crafted jewel, to be enjoyed by the connoisseur in the same way as a great meal or a glass of fine wine is enjoyed by a gourmet.

I’m not so sure.

To take issue with Poe first: his quote is full of self-interest. No one form has an inherent superiority over any other. All writers are scufflers at heart. We’re all trying to earn our daily bread, and we’ll do whatever sells. Poe’s “single-sitting-as-a-virtue” trope was driven by what the market wanted. He was trying to keep the wolf from the door by writing for periodicals, of which there was a huge and increasing number during his lifetime. Believe me, if he could have sold thousand-page novels, he would have, and today he would be remembered for extolling their manifest superiority over shorter fiction. But the market wanted bite-size pieces, so bite size pieces were what he wrote. Charles Dickens was in the same boat, but Dickens just broke up his (thousand-page) novels into chunks, and they were printed sequentially, to great acclaim, not least because the desire to know what happened next proved so powerful. Arthur Conan Doyle was somewhere between the two; the Sherlock Holmes canon is certainly mainly a series of short stories, but “Sherlock Holmes” is also a single, massive entity, loved and enjoyed for its totality rather than its episodic nature, as if the whole arc exists independently of its disjointed publication history, as one giant mega-novel.

And to take issue with the assumption behind the Twain quote: I absolutely guarantee that none of the stories in this anthology took longer to write than their authors’ various novels. Not even remotely close. Yes, each sentence is crafted and polished; yes, each story was read and revised and then reread and revised again — but so is every sentence and chapter in a novel, and novels are much longer than short stories, and the effort expended is entirely proportional.