The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 Read online

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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 thr
owing 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 your story at Christmastime, forcing me to stay home and read while my wife and friends are out partying, you better have written a hell of a story.

  Please send material to Otto Penzler, The Mysterious Bookshop, 129 West 56th Street, New York, NY 10019.

  O.P.

  >

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  Introduction

  CRIMES CAN OCCUR without mystery. Mysteries can occur without crime. Violent and irrevocable actions can destroy lives but bring other lives together in unforeseeable, unimaginable ways.

  In 1917, in the grim waterfront section called Black Rock, in Buffalo, New York, a forty-three-year-old Hungarian immigrant was murdered in a barroom fight, beaten to death with a poker. A few years later, in a rural community north of Buffalo, another recent immigrant to America, a German Jew, attacked his wife with a hammer and committed suicide with a double-barreled shotgun. Both deaths were alcohol-related. Both deaths were “senseless.” The men who came to such violent ends, my mother’s father and my father’s grandfather, never knew each other, yet their deaths precipitated events that brought their survivors together and would continue to have an influence, haunting and obsessive, into the twenty-first century. Families disrupted by violent deaths are never quite “healed” though they struggle to regroup and redefine themselves in ways that might be called heroic.

  It’s an irony that I owe my life literally to those violent deaths of nearly a century ago, since they set in motion a sequence of events that resulted in my birth, but I don’t think it’s an irony that, as a writer, I am drawn to such material. There is no art in violence, only crude, cruel, raw, and irremediable harm, but there can be art in the strategies by which violence is endured, transcended, and transformed by survivors. Where there is no meaning, both death and life can seem pointless, but where meaning can be discovered, perhaps even violence can be redeemed, to a degree.

  I grew up in a rural household in the Snowbelt of upstate New York in a household of family mysteries that were never acknowledged in my presence, and very likely never acknowledged even by the adults who safeguarded them. My father’s mother, whose deranged father had blown himself away virtually in front of her, had changed her surname to a seemingly gentile name, renounced her ethnic/religious background, never acknowledged her roots even to her son, and lived among us like one without a personal, let alone a tragic, history. In this she was quintessentially “American”— self-inventing, self-defining. Her life, like the early lives of my parents, seems in retrospect to have sprung from a noir America that’s the underside of the American dream, memorialized in folk ballads and blues and in the work of such disparate writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. It was as if, as a child, I inhabited a brightly lighted space — a family household of unusual closeness and protectiveness — surrounded by a penumbra of darkness in which malevolent shapes dwelled.

  The earliest books to cast a spell on me were Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, nightmare adventures in the guise of a childhood classic, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Both Carroll and Poe create surreal worlds that seem unnervingly real, like images in a distorting mirror, and both explore mysteries without providing solutions. Why does the Red Queen scream, at the mildest provocation, “Off with his head!”? Why are hapless creatures in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world always changing shape? Why does the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” kill an old man who hasn’t harmed him, and in such a bizarre manner? (Crushed and smothered beneath a heavy bed.) Why does the narrator of “The Black Cat” put out the eye of his pet cat and strangle his wife? Motiveless malignity! Individuals act out of impulse, as if to assure that irrevocable: the violent act and its consequences.

  Because I grew up in an atmosphere of withheld information — a way of defining “mystery” — I can appreciate the powerful attraction of mystery as art: it’s the formal, mediated, frequently ingenious and riveting simulacrum of the unexplained in our lives, the haphazard, hurtful, confusing, tragic. A crime or mystery novel is the elaboration of a riddle to which the answer is invariably less gripping than the riddle; a crime or mystery story is likely to be a single, abbreviated segment of the riddle, reduced to a few characters and a few dramatic scenes. It’s a truism that mystery readers are likely to be addicts of the genre, no sooner finishing one mystery novel than taking up another, and then another, for the riddle is, while “solved,” never explained. But it’s perhaps less generally known that writers in the genre are likely to be addicts as well, obsessively compelled to pursue the riddle, the withheld information, the “mystery” shimmering always out of reach — in this way transforming the merely violent and chaotic into art to be shared with others in a communal enterprise.

  Of contemporary mystery/crime writers, no one is more obviously haunted by a violent family past than James Ellroy (see the memoir My Dark Places), which accounts for the writer’s compulsion to revisit, in a sense, the scene of the original crime (the unsolved murder of his mother) though it can’t account, of course, for the writer’s remarkable and audacious talent. In an earlier generation, Ross Macdonald is the preeminent example of the mystery/detective novelist whose carefully plotted narratives move both backward and forward, illuminating past, usually family, secrets as a way of solving a case in the present. Michael Connelly’s isolato L.A. homicide detective Harry Bosch, as the son of a murdered woman, is temperamentally drawn to cold-case files, as are the haunted characters of Dennis Lehane’s most celebrated novel Mystic River and the narrator of his brilliantly realized short story “Until Gwen,” included in this volume. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins is a private “eye” in a racially turbulent, fastidiously depicted Los Angeles milieu of past decades in which the personal intersects, often violently, with the political. In this volume Louise Erdrich’s beautifully composed “Disaster Stamps of Pluto” is, in its most distilled form, a “whodu
nit” of uncommon delicacy and art, set in a nearly extinct North Dakota town in which the past exerts a far more powerful gravitational pull than the present. Edward P. Jones’s “Old Boys, Old Girls” is the life story of a man so marginalized and detached from his feelings that he seems to inhabit his life like a ghost, or a prisoner. (See Jones’s remarkable story collection Lost in the City for further portrayals of “young lions” like Caesar Matthews.) In the unexpectedly ironic “The Last Man I Killed,” David Rachel explores a Nazi past as it impinges on a banal and utterly ordinary academic career in a midwestern state university.

  While mystery novels are readily available to the public in bookstores and libraries, mystery stories are relatively hidden from view. Only a very few magazines regularly publish them — Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine come most immediately to mind; the majority of mystery stories are scattered among dozens of magazines and literary reviews with limited circulations. The inestimable value of The Best American Mystery Stories series is that the anthologies bring together a selection of stories in a single volume, with an appendix listing additional distinguished titles. While guest editors for the series appear for one year only, the series editor, Otto Penzler, remains a stable and galvanizing presence; any mystery volume with Penzler’s name on it is likely to be very good indeed, as well as a responsible and generous representation of the current mystery scene.