The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (52 page)

• Once in a while a story comes to you from an outside source. “Christians” found me several years ago, when Alabama writer and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham called to say she'd read my novel
Hell at the Breech.
This novel is based on a dark, little-known chapter in Alabama history known to locals as the Mitcham War. It took place in Mitcham Beat, the worst voting beat (district) in one of the poorest, most rural, most violent sections of one of the poorest, most rural, most violent counties in a poor, rural, violent state. There have been books other than mine about these events, which, in some circles in Clarke County, are still contested because a lot of truths are (and likely always will be) hidden, unknown. What's known is that poor sharecroppers and farmers waged a war against less poor townspeople. These countrymen called themselves Hell-at-the-Breech and wore white hoods and did terrible things until county officials, and even the governor, took notice and eventually put a bloody end to it. A lot of people died, some innocent, some not.

Ms. Windham had read my novel and liked it and said she had another Mitcham Beat story for me. As she told me about the young man the Hell-at-the-Breech gang had sent to kill a preacher, as she told how his supporters killed this young man instead, how they took him home to his mother, as Ms. Windham told me, “It was August, so they had to bury him quick,” I knew I was being given a gift. I listened, I took notes, I began to write.

Stephen King
is one of the world's most famous and popular authors, with more than 350 million books sold worldwide. Noted primarily for his horror and supernatural fiction, he has also written numerous crime and mystery novels and stories, westerns, and cross-genre works. In addition to countless awards for horror, supernatural, and science fiction, King has received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature. More than sixty motion pictures have been produced from his work, mostly notably
Carrie, The Shining,
and
The Shawshank Redemption.

Elmore Leonard
wrote more than forty books during his long career, including the bestsellers
Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty,
and
Rum Punch,
as well as the acclaimed collection
When the Women Come Out to Dance,
which was a
New York Times
Notable Book. Many of his books have been made into movies, including
Get Shorty
and
Out of Sight.
The short story “Fire in the Hole” and three books, including
Raylan,
were the basis for the FX hit show
Justified.
Leonard received the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He died in 2013.

Evan Lewis
received the 2011 Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for “Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man,” published in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
The adventures of Hobbs, who believes himself the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, continue in
Ellery Queen,
while an
Alfred Hitchcock
series features a modern-day descendant of Davy Crockett, a man bedeviled by the spirit of his famous ancestor. Lewis also spins yarns of pirates and cowboys, and has contributed articles on such detective writers as Frederick Nebel, Richard Sale, Norbert Davis, and Carroll John Daly. He resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Irene, his pulp collection, and a pack of pint-sized rescue dogs.

• The Portland I know—and have portrayed in my Skyler Hobbs stories—is fiercely proud of its image as a hip, clean, and progressive city on the cutting edge of social and environmental issues. Imagine my surprise to discover that as recently as the 1950s it was a hotbed of racketeering, bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, and political corruption.

That revelation came in Phil Stanford's rip-roaring 2004 exposé,
Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Rose City.
I came to the book a few years late, but hot on the heels of my umpteenth reading of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op series, culminating in his hardboiled masterpiece,
Red Harvest.

Yikes. The mayor, the police chief, and the judiciary all playing footsie with the Mob. It was as bad as Hammett's Poisonville. So the leap was easy: this was a job for the Continental Op. From there, the plotting and drafting of “The Continental Opposite” was a pure joy, and I am indebted to Linda Landrigan of
AHMM
for giving the story legs. The cleansing of Portland has just begun, so there are more adventures of the Op and the Opposite on the way.

Three childhood moments
Robert Lopresti
remembers vividly: reading the words “They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”; discovering the Nero Wolfe books while hiding in the mystery stacks from librarians who wanted to banish him to the Children's Room; and seeing
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
on a newsstand. Almost half of his sixty-plus published stories have appeared in
Hitchcock.
They have won the Derringer (twice) and Black Orchid Novella awards. His first novel,
Such a Killing Crime,
was set in Greenwich Village during the Great Folk Music Scare of 1963. His latest book,
Greenfellas,
is a comic crime novel about a top New Jersey mobster who decides it's his job to save the environment—by any means necessary.
Kings River Life Magazine
ranked it as one of the best mysteries of 2015, but he is proudest that a reader called it a book about “ethics as a last resort.” Exactly.

Lopresti is a librarian and professor at a university in the Northwest. You can read his multiple blogs at
www.roblopresti.com
.

• One Saturday evening I tuned in to the NPR show
Says You,
and the goal of the quiz was apparently matching great detectives with their nemeses. (Yes, that's the plural of
nemesis.
It doesn't look right to me either.) When they got to C. Auguste Dupin I thought,
Can they possibly mean the orang-outang?
They did (although the contestant guessed gorilla). It struck me as bizarre to treat the ape, who never physically appears in the story, as if he were an archcriminal—and then the idea for “Street of the Dead House” hit me so hard I stumbled and almost fell down.

It was great fun to give Edgar Allan Poe the steampunk treatment while trying not to contradict anything in the original story. Through dumb luck, I saw a notice that
nEvermore!,
a Poe-themed anthology, was looking for a few more tales. Many thanks to editors Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles for their helpful suggestions.

Dennis McFadden
lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including
The Best American Mystery Stories
(2011 and 2013),
Fiction,
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine,
The Missouri Review,
New England Review,
The Sewanee Review,
The Massachusetts Review,
Crazyhorse,
and
The South Carolina Review.
His first collection,
Hart's Grove,
was published in 2010; his second collection,
Jimtown Road,
won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.

• Plot is nice, and necessary, setting is essential, but for me, and for a lot of other writers, story begins with character. And this Lafferty guy is a character. It's been said that if you can come up with a good one, you can use him or her again and again, and though I suspect that's intended to mean in varying guises and disguises in varying stories, I took it a little more literally, no pun intended. Terrance Lafferty has been my main man in multiple stories now, and the next one's already in progress. Other people seem to like him nearly as much as I do—he's appeared in some pretty good places,
Fiction
and
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
among them, and he was first introduced to mystery fans a few years ago in
The Best American Mystery Stories 2013,
when Mr. Penzler and Ms. Scottoline were kind enough to include “The Ring of Kerry.” I think people like him because he's harmless. He's by no means heroic. He could be any of us. All the trouble he gets into, all his predicaments, are generally self-inflicted, and happen only because he's on that most elemental of quests—looking for love. Alas (and of course), he's invariably looking in all the wrong places. He didn't make his debut until a few years ago (in
The Missouri Review,
a story called “The Three-Sided Penny”), but he's been with me a lot longer than that. Unlike most of my characters, based on people I've encountered over the years, Lafferty was a seed that grew and grew, inspired decades ago by one Sebastian Dangerfield—J. P. Donleavy's ginger man. A tip of the hat to both of those gentlemen.

Michael Noll
edits
Read to Write Stories,
a blog that offers weekly writing exercises and craft interviews. His stories have appeared in
American Short Fiction,
Chattahoochee Review,
Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine,
and
Indiana Review.
His book
In the Beginning, Middle, and End: A Field Guide to Writing Fiction
is forthcoming. Noll earned his MFA from Texas State University, lives in Austin with his family, and is at work on a novel.

• I grew up on a hog farm in rural Kansas. Down the road, two old men lived with their mother, their house hidden by dense woods. A van sometimes raced by late at night, and then a little while later drove away again, so fast that the gravel popping under its tires woke us up. This was the 1980s, and not long after, people began getting arrested for cooking meth. My hometown's population is only three thousand, so everyone knew almost everyone else, including the drug dealers. I didn't understand what meth was, only that cooking it could blow up your kitchen and that tinfoil in the windows of a house was a bad sign. As a farmer, my dad applied nitrogen fertilizer to his fields with big tanks of anhydrous ammonia. If I should ever smell ammonia, he taught me in no uncertain terms, I should immediately get away. The tanks were prime targets for meth cooks, and they sometimes sat in our driveway at night.

I wanted to write a story about those innocent days when meth hadn't yet become an epidemic, when meth dealers and users were regular people and not participants in a public crisis. To be clear, meth is terrible, and this story was informed in part by Nick Reding's excellent book
Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.
But it was also inspired by the people in my hometown, kids who rode the school bus and played baseball with me, who were smart and funny and also, perhaps, stealing ammonia from anhydrous tanks, planning to make a little money and hoping not to end up blind or dead from suffocation.

Todd Robinson
is the creator and chief editor of the multi-award-winning crime fiction magazine
Thuglit.
He has been nominated three times for the Derringer Award, thrice shortlisted for
The Best American Mystery Stories,
selected for
Writer's Digest's
Year's Best Writing 2003,
and lost the Anthony Award both in 2013 (Best Short Story) and 2014 (Best First Novel, for
The Hard Bounce
). His inclusion in this edition joyfully brings his Susan Lucci–like streak to a close. His newest novel,
Rough Trade,
was recently released.

• “Trash” arose from several elements within my personal periphery. Living in New York City, passing by the traditional massage parlor becomes a part of everyday life—a criminal underbelly of sex trafficking that is not only near-impossible to police but that exists just under the periphery of the bright and shiny tourist trap that the city has become. During a conversation with a friend who lives in Flushing, Queens (an area notorious for its numerous shady spas), she talked about the “tells” she'd developed in distinguishing the obviously questionable businesses from those that might actually be offering therapeutic services. Later that night, on the subway home, I saw one of the many “If You See Something, Say Something” posters intended to keep the city safe from terrorist acts. The story about a young man, not jaded enough yet to simply ignore the horrors around him, began to form.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch
has published mystery, science fiction, romance, nonfiction, and just about everything else under a wide variety of names. Her Smokey Dalton mystery novels, written under her pen name Kris Nelscott, have received acclaim worldwide. She's been nominated for the Edgar and the Shamus (as both Nelscott and Rusch), and the Anthony, and she has repeatedly won
Ellery Queen's
Mystery Magazine
's Readers Choice Award for best short story of the year. Her short stories have been reprinted in more than twenty best-of-the-year collections, including two previous appearances in
The Best American Mystery Stories
.

Rusch also edits. Her anthology
Women of Futures Past
has just appeared, reprinting classic science fiction by important women writers. Along with John Helfers, she completed the first
Best Mysteries of the Year
anthology, which focuses on worldwide mystery fiction. With her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, she acts as series editor for the
Fiction River
anthology series. She also edits at least one mystery volume per year for that line.

Rusch often writes cross-genre fiction. Her character Miles Flint, from her Retrieval Artist series, has been chosen as one of the top ten science fiction detectives by
io9
and as one of the fourteen science fiction and fantasy detectives who could out–Sherlock Holmes by the popular website
blastr.
Her most recent pure mystery novel,
Spree,
written under her Rusch name, was published in 2013. Her next Nelscott mystery will start a new series. That book,
A Gym of Her Own,
will appear in 2017.