Doug Allyn: The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Elmore Leonardhas been writing fiction for the past forty-five years and claims he’s still having a good time assembling characters to see where they decide to take him. When asked if he knows how a book is going to end before he gets there. Leonard replied. “If I know that, why write the book?” His thirty-fourth novel, scheduled for early 1998 release, is set in Cuba one hundred years ago, at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Quite a number of his books, including Get Shorty, have been adapted for the screen.

• I wrote “Karen Makes Out” to see if I’d like Karen Sisco enough to develop a novel around her as a federal marshal. I liked her a lot and Out of Sight was published in the fall of 1996. We will next see Karen on the screen in the film adaptation of the book. No one, though, has yet told me who will play her part.

Michael Malonewas born in North Carolina and educated at Chapel Hill and Harvard. He’s taught at various colleges on various subjects from fiction-making to the rise and the fall of the great American musical. Among his novels are Dingley Falls. Handling Sin, Uncivil Seasons, Time’s Witness, and Foolscap. He’s also written on the movies, as well as screenplays and television shows.

• I’m not an instinctive short story writer. My characters keep trying to be in novels and their stories get away from me. Back in the seventies I had considerable luck with women’s magazines, writing a type of story about whimsical young men who’d had their consciousness raised, sometimes violently, by liberated young females, and I did a story for Playboy about Elvis right after he died but before anybody — except Southerners — expected he was immortal. But mostly I write long. So I was intrigued when Otto Penzler asked me to write a story about a murder for love. It was a mystery, which I love. It was an assignment, which is friendlier than an entirely blank page. Best, it was a theme of movie proportions — murder for love — and I immediately thought of a movie star to tell about.

As the vagaries of my career confess. I grew up infatuated with the movies. We had one small musty “art film” theater in my Piedmont town, and there as a teenager I fell in love every Saturday with a foreign woman — Jeanne Moreau, Simone Signoret, Melina Mercouri. Women worth dying for. Women who might kill you. The original image of “Red Clay” is a native goddess. Ava Gardner, one of the few American actresses with the epic beauty and grand gestures and sweeping self-destructiveness of a great star. Ava Gardner grew up in North Carolina and every Tarheel with any romance in his body sensed what an extraordinary gift we’d given the world in her. Stella Doyle in “Red Clay” is such a woman, on trial for murdering her husband. The story imagines an adolescent boy’s coming to share the truth of his father’s belief that any man who hadn’t desired Stella Doyle had missed out on being alive.

Mabel Maneyis a book artist and writer living in San Francisco. She is the author of the gay and lesbian Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys parodies: The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse, The Case of the Good-for-Nothing Girlfriend, and A Ghost m the Closet. Her short stories have appeared in many anthologies, including Girlfriend Number 1. Beyond Definition, and Out for Blood.

• I was in a cranky mood on the day Victoria Brownworth, a writer and editor, called me and asked if I could write a story for one of her mystery anthologies. Whenever I get tired of all the work it takes to get one girl and her small dog through the day, I think of my maternal grandmother, who sewed her own clothes, made bread from scratch, and made enough quilts to blanket the entire Great Lakes region. Then I feel crankier.

What better way to work oneself out of a bad mood than with a tidy little murder?

The setting is my grandmother’s basement in Appleton, Wisconsin, where I spent many a stifling summer reading by flashlight in the cool darkness. Although my grandparents bear little resemblance to the nice couple in the story, I must confess I’ve never forgotten my grandfather’s lesson on how to skin a catfish. “First, make sure your knife is sharp,” and so on. Despite the fact that my grandparents were devout Catholics, and so considered even the thought of murder a sin. I think they’d be pleased that their home was the setting for this story.

Besides, few tears will be shed for the corpse. If anyone deserves his fate, it’s our Mr. Feeley.

Joyce Carol Oatesis the author, under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, of several mystery /psychological suspense novels, including Snake Eyes, Nemesis, Soul/Mate, and, most recently, Double Delight. She has published mystery fiction in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Since 1978, she has lived and taught in Princeton, New Jersey.

• “Will You Always Love Me?” is one of a number of thematically related stories I’ve written in recent years that turn upon questions of love, fidelity’, and the acknowledgment of or denial of “truth”: Can our most intense love relationships withstand “truth”? Or is love, in a crucial sense, based upon the purposeful denial of certain elements of “truth”? The story leapt into my head after I’d heard just the skeleton of a tale of a woman haunted by her sister’s brutal murder many years before. So far as the woman knew, her sister’s murderer had been found and sentenced to life imprisonment. But, to me, that seemed only the start of another, more elusive and tantalizing story.

George Pelecanoswas born and raised in and around Washington. D.C., where he has lived his entire life. He is the author of six novels, including the Nick Stefanos mysteries, Shoedog, The Big Blowdown, and King Suckerman.

• “When You’re Hungry” is the only short story I have written, and my sole work of fiction that is set outside of my native D.C. I wrote this story in the fall of 1993, during a three-month stay in Brazil, when my wife and I were in the process of adopting our second child.

At the time, with a one thousand percent rate of inflation. Brazil was on the verge of economic collapse, with no safety net provided for its people. Every day, standing on the balcony of my apartamento in Recife. I witnessed mothers and their children sifting through garbage bins in search of something edible, or simply lying down in the street from hunger and its attendant fatigue. In restaurants, tiny hands attached to painfully thin forearms reached beneath dividers, begging for table scraps. Meanwhile, receiving my daily English newspaper, I first began to read of the so-called “revolution” being touted in America, where our own welfare system would be radically restructured or completely eliminated.

This story is told from an American’s point of view until it nears the end, where it switches, significantly, to the point of view of a Brazilian native.

As a toiler in the arena of crime/noir. I’ve often been tagged as a “dark” writer. “When You’re Hungry” truly earns that description. There is nothing more horrifying than the sight of a starving child.

S. J. Rozanis the author of the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, which includes China Trade, Concourse (winner of the 1995 Shamus Award for Best Novel from the Private Eye Writers of America), Mandarin Plaid, and No Colder Place. Chin/Smith stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, P.I. Magazine, and numerous anthologies; “Hoops” was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. S. J. Rozan is a practicing architect born, raised, and living in New York City.