The best American mystery stories

478 Pages·2005·1.62 MB·English

by  Joyce Carol Oates

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The Best American
Mystery Stories 2005

Ed by Joyce Carol Oates

No copyright 2on by MadMaxAU eBooks
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Contents

Foreword
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

RICHARD BURGIN
The Identity Club

LOUISE ERDRICH
Disaster Stamps of Pinto
DANIEL HANDLER
Delmonico

GEORGE V. HIGGINS
Jack Duggan’s Law

EDWARD P. JONES
Old Boys, Old Girls

STUART M. KAMINSKY
The Shooting of John Roy Worth

DENNIS LEHANE
Until Gwen

LAURA LIPPMAN
The Shoeshine Man’s Regrets

TIM MCLOUGHLIN
When All This Was Bay Ridge

LOU MANFREDO
Case Closed

DAVID MEANS
Sault Ste. Marie

KENT NELSON
Public Trouble

DANIEL OROZCO
Officers Weep

DAVID RACHEL
The Last Man I Killed

JOSEPH RAICHE
One Mississippi

JOHN SAYLES
Cruisers

SAM SHAW
Reconstruction

OZ SPIES
The Love of a Strong Man

SCOTT TUROW
Loyalty

SCOTT WOLVEN
Barracuda

Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2004

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Foreword

IT IS POSSIBLE, I suppose, that there is a smarter, harder-
working, more dedicated literary figure on planet Earth than
Joyce Carol Oates, but someone else will have to point out who
that might be. Don’t ask me to do it.

When I asked Ms. Oates to be the guest editor for this
volume, I didn’t quite know what I was getting into. (I could
rewrite that sentence to avoid ending it with a preposition, but
somehow it just sounds a bit off to say “I didn’t quite know into
what I was getting,” so I’ll just let it go.) It is the role of the
series editor for all the volumes in Houghton Mifflin’s
prestigious Best American series to select the year’s fifty best
stories, and then for the guest editor to select the top twenty
from that group. It was a little different this year. Ms. Oates
started reading before I did, and recommended stories before I
even found them. She wanted batches of stories throughout the
year, rather than all fifty at once, and we engaged in frequent (I
might even be tempted to say relentless) correspondence, our
respective fax machines humming at every hour, and eventually
telephone conversations while we debated the relative merits
of certain stories. This 2005 volume is certainly the most
collaborative one yet. I’m not entirely certain we followed all
the guidelines set by my editor at Houghton Mifflin, but I can
assure you that all of the time and energy were directed at a
single goal, which was to make the book the best it could be. I
hope you agree that we have achieved that.

Speaking of guidelines, this is a good time to point out
how great it is to work for a house like Houghton Mifflin. It is
well understood in the publishing world that if anthologies are
to have any chance of success, they must have some big names
among the contributors. Never — not once — has Houghton
Mifflin suggested that these annual volumes (this is the ninth)
should have bigger names. From the first day I started as the
series editor, it was about the writing. The best stories (or at
least those I most admired) were nominated, and the guest
editors have followed that directive.

It’s not about the most popular authors, and it’s not about
personal relationships (two close friends, both at my wedding
this past May, didn’t make the cut, though both are
accomplished writers, named Grand Masters by the Mystery
Writers of America, who have been selected for this series in
the past). It’s about finding the best stories, by whoever
happens to have written them.

It is not uncommon for excellent writers to become
famous, so although there are a few extremely popular writers
in this book (Scott Turow, Louise Erdrich, George V. Higgins), it
is doubtful that you know very many of the others. It is equally
likely, however, that you will.

Tom Franklin’s first appearance in book form was in the
1999 edition of Best American Mystery Stones, with a
masterpiece titled “Poachers”; he went on to publish a short
story collection with William Morrow titled Poachers and Other
Stories, followed by a novel, Hell at the Breech. Christopher
Coake had never been published in book form until “All
Through the House” was collected in BAMS last year; his short
story collection, We’re in Trouble, under the prestigious
imprint of Harcourt Brace, launches what should be a great
career. Scott Wolven, too, who makes his fourth consecutive
appearance in BAMS this year, had not been published in any
book before “The Copper Kings” was selected for the 2002
volume, and now he has a book issued by Scribner, Controlled
Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men. With the quality of the
stories contained between these covers, it is impossible to
imagine that some of the authors in BAMS 2005 won’t have
more of their work published in the satisfying permanence of
books.

You know how much fun it is to read a book that you love
or see a movie that moves you and to share that with a friend
who comes back and tells you how much he loved it, too. That’s
one of the things that makes editing this series such a great
job. I get to recommend a lot of stories to a lot of people,
almost all of whom seem to be pretty happy about it, even
though the title of the book is a little misleading for the literal-
minded.

Few of these stories are detective fiction, a tale in which
an official police officer, a private eye, or an amateur sleuth is
confronted with a crime and pursues the culprit by making
observations and deductions. It has been my practice to define
a mystery story as any work of fiction in which a crime or the
threat of a crime is central to the theme or plot. There is
greater emphasis in these pages on why a crime was
committed, or if it will be done at all, than on trying to discover
the perpetrator, which has upset some readers. That simply
can’t be helped.

The nature of mystery fiction has changed over the years,
and there are simply fewer and fewer works of pure detection
than there were during the so-called golden age between World
Wars I and II, when Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery
Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, and their peers were constructing
ingenious puzzles and challenging readers to solve them before
Hercule Poirot, Gideon Fell, Ellery Queen, or Lord Peter
Wimsey did.

With authors focused more on the psychological aspects of
crime, whether from the point of view of the detective, the
victim, or the criminal, there appears to be greater strength of
characterization and style than there was in the more classic
form of pure detection. There are exceptions, of course, and
when they occur, there is a pretty good chance that those
stories will make it into these pages.

No mention of The Best American Mystery Stories is
complete without genuflecting to Michele Slung, the fastest
and smartest reader in the world, who combs every consumer
magazine, every electronic zine, and as many literary journals
as we can find. She scans hundreds — no, let me correct that —
thousands of stories to determine which are mysteries (if you
were searching for stories for this book, would you have
expected “Disaster Stamps of Pluto” to qualify by virtue of its
title? Or “Loyalty”? Or “Old Boys, Old Girls”?). She then culls
those that have the vibe of having been scrawled with a crayon,
and gives me the rest. She can read in a day what I’d need a
month to do; without her dedication and intelligence, this
annual volume would take three years to compile.

While I’m throwing thank-yous around, I’d like again to
note the huge contributions of the guest editors, who so
generously help make these wonderful books possible. It all
began with Robert B. Parker in 1997, followed by Sue Grafton,
Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy,
Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, as well as Joyce Carol Oates
this year, to all of whom I am forever indebted.

Although we are relentlessly aggressive in searching out
mystery fiction for these pages, I live in dread that we will
somehow miss a worthy story. If you are an editor, publisher,
author, agent, or just care about this type of literature, please
feel free to send submissions. To qualify for the 2006 collection,
a story must be written by an American or Canadian and
published for the first time in the 2005 calendar year in an
American or Canadian publication. Unpublished stories are not
eligible. If the story was published in electronic form, a hard
copy must be submitted. When this series began, I did not own
a computer. I do now, but I sure don’t want to read from a
screen, and there are just too many stories in e-zines to print
them all out. Please do not ask for critical analysis of work, as I
simply do not have time to do that, and please do not ask to
have your material returned. If you are totally paranoid and do
not believe that the postal service actually delivers mail,
enclose a stamped, self-addressed postcard to confirm delivery.

Save the postage if your story was published in Ellery
Queen‘s Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery
Magazine, as these are read cover to cover. I also see regularly
The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper’s Magazine,
Atlantic, Zoetrope, and mystery anthologies from major
publishers, but it can’t hurt to send your story anyway.

The earlier I see stories, the better your chance of getting
a thorough reading. Any stories received after December 31,
2005, will be discarded without being read. This is not because
I’m arrogant and unreasonable, or even just curmudgeonly. The
book actually has a deadline, which cannot be met if I’m still
reading in mid-January. If you publish in April and send me