The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (53 page)

• I live in a beach town on the Oregon coast. Seven thousand of us live here year-round, but the town has over 150,000 hotel rooms. My daily runs take me past several of those hotels. Two days before Christmas, I ran past a nearly empty hotel parking lot as a little girl, no more than eight, got out of a van. She said loudly, “Will Santa know how to find us?” I never heard anyone answer her. But by the time I had gone to the end of the block, I had the entire scenario for this story in my head. That rarely happens, so I'm grateful to the little girl for her concerns. I never saw her again. I wish I had. I would love to thank her for the inspiration she gave me.

Most of
Georgia Ruth
's work is gently layered with situations that foster discourse. Because perspective influences behavior, her stories offer a psychological window to examine the motivation for a crime amid tangled relationships. Many of her tales explore historical conflict between cultures. Her most recent manuscript,
Rampart of the Phoenix,
is a historical suspense novel with roots in mythology.

Georgia Ruth lives in the storied gold-mining foothills of North Carolina, where she records and shares the folklore of neighbors who can trace family roots back to Wales and Ireland. Her former careers in family restaurant management and retail sales inspire an endless source of fictional characters and conflicts. Published short stories are listed on her website,
http://www.georgiaruthwrites.us
.

• In “The Mountain Top,” I pivot from a focus on the past to speculation on a future without national structure, where communities slide backward from protected individual freedoms to a lawlessness, dependent upon shared morality but susceptible to the power of a strongman.

When I jumped out of the workforce onto the shaky ledge of retirement, the national debt was out of sight. There were rumors that the Social Security program I had continuously supported for fifty years could not sustain itself. We moved to a log cabin in a remote area where we could reinvent ourselves. My husband discovered a love for gardening, and I was free to exercise latent writing skills. Like many others, I put fingers to keyboard to probe my thoughts. Fear and greed are the roots of “The Mountain Top,” but its theme is a fierce devotion to family.

Jonathan Stone
does most (but not all) of his writing on the commuter train between his home in Connecticut and his job as a creative director for a midtown Manhattan advertising agency. His seven published novels include
Two for the Show,
The Teller,
Moving Day,
and
Parting Shot.
His short stories appear in the two most recent story anthologies from the Mystery Writers of America:
The Mystery Box,
edited by Brad Meltzer, and
Ice Cold—Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War,
edited by Jeffery Deaver.

• I'm sure it's easy for a moderately astute reader to guess that George the mailman is based on our neighborhood mailman, also named George, now retired, who delivered our mail with a wave and a smile for as long as I can remember. I'm sure the moderately astute reader can also guess that the neighborhood itself is based on my own—a stable, staid, suburban cul-de-sac where many of us have raised our kids together and now grow old with one another. Even Muscovito is based on a neighbor who moved in, renovated a charming little cape into an architectural monstrosity, disrupted everything, and soon moved out—thank god.

What an astute reader would hardly guess, however, is that the story was written on sunny Caribbean mornings during a vacation on St. John, USVI, with my wife, my daughter, and her best friend, Liza. Writing a scene or two on the patio before anyone else was awake, then joining the girls for breakfast, then sunning, swimming, snorkeling, and snacking the rest of the day away—for a guy who normally grinds out fiction on a bouncing laptop on a cramped, jangling commuter train,
that,
my friends, is the way to write! (Then again, it's the cramped commuter train that makes possible the St. John vacation.) As for such a dark story coming from such a sunny clime? Hey, if you want sunny, you've got the wrong writer—and the wrong story collection.

Art Taylor
has won two Agatha Awards, the Anthony Award, the Macavity Award, and three consecutive Derringer Awards for his short fiction.
On the Road with Del & Louise: A Novel in Stories,
his first book, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. An associate professor of English at George Mason University, Taylor also writes frequently about mystery and suspense fiction for the
Washington Post,
the
Washington Independent Review of Books,
and
Mystery Scene.

• More so than with any of my other stories, I'm able to chart clearly the genesis of “Rearview Mirror” and the various factors that led me to write it: a trip with my wife, Tara, to New Mexico that followed much the same path as Del and Louise's travels; a
Washington Post
short story contest whose prompt was a photograph I describe almost exactly in this story's twelfth paragraph; and a challenge from my wife, who's also a writer, for us each to enter that contest, which got me writing this story in the first place. What I've never been able to figure out, however, is where Louise's voice came from. While I admire voice-driven stories (Eudora Welty's “Why I Live at the P.O.” and Ring Lardner's “Haircut” jump to mind as favorites), I don't often write them myself. But in this case Louise's voice appeared somewhere in my head and then found its way onto the page, and suddenly that voice was driving the story, with me simply following along the best I could, struggling to keep up.

Another journey I didn't map out beforehand: how these characters, who took their earliest steps in the pages of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
would embark on these more extensive, more elaborately developed travels in my novel in stories,
On the Road with Del & Louise
—venturing to Victorville, California, through Napa Valley and Las Vegas, and then up to Williston, North Dakota, before turning toward Louise's home state of North Carolina—adventures that together form the larger story of their evolving relationship, a quest to figure out who they are, what they mean to one another, and where they belong.

Maybe—as Del and Louise learn, and as I've learned myself—you sometimes just need to trust that whatever road you choose might ultimately take you where you need to go.

Susan Thornton
is the author of
On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner,
a memoir about the celebrated author of
Grendel.
Her fiction and poetry have appeared in
The Seattle Review, Puerto del Sol, The Literary Review, Paintbrush Journal, Dark Fire Fiction,
and others. A former journalist, editor, and technical writer, she now lives in Binghamton, New York, where she teaches French. Visit her blog at
http://susan-thornton.tumblr.com
.

• While working as an editor at a research institute at Binghamton University, I read a great deal about sex trafficking and thought for a long time about how to dramatize this issue. My goal was to humanize my protagonist and to highlight her blamelessness, her courage, her determination. Because I teach middle school, when I think about victims of trafficking I think about my students—their strengths, their abilities, their weaknesses, their goals—and how they participate in all the drama of the human condition.

I have been to San Diego, Tijuana and Baja Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. I went to AAA for maps of California, Arizona, and Baja Mexico, and spent hours poring over books about the Sonoran Desert, peering at Google Earth, figuring out the setting and plotting the route of my heroine.

My literary model was Ambrose Bierce. I wanted to do an homage to him and his story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Bierce's story ends with the reveal and the death of his character. I added a coda to take the focus off my protagonist and place her drama in a larger social and political context.

I was strongly influenced by John Gardner, who had been my teacher and my lover. At the end of his life, John's last lecture to his students at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference centered on this message: “if you are not writing politically, you are not writing.” In crafting my story I took his challenge to heart: to write politically and to create a vivid narrative.

When I was a child I was surrounded by people who read mysteries and crime fiction: my father, my mother, their friends. Dad had a subscription to
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
We watched Alfred Hitchcock on television. As a teenager I devoured Sherlock Holmes (we had a two-volume anthology), while Mom and Dad read Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh. I still have Dad's 1957 volume
A Treasury of Great Mysteries.
I remember their delight with P. D. James's creation of a female protagonist for her novel
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman.
Deep in my heart I have always wanted to write a mystery story that would show up in an anthology my mom and dad would have been likely to buy. This dream has now been fulfilled.

Brian Tobin
is the author of four novels:
The Ransom, The Missing Person, Below the Line,
and
A Victimless Crime.
His short fiction has appeared in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
and
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.
In 2015 his short story “Teddy” was nominated for an Edgar Award. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Vickie.

• “Entwined” was inspired by an episode of
This American Life
in which the writer Darin Strauss recounted his teenage experience of having struck and killed a bicyclist who swerved into the path of his car. His account was compelling, not only for the quality of his prose but also for the acuity of his self-examination.

Plotting a story is usually difficult for me, involving many false starts and wrong turns. I was listening to
This American Life
during a morning walk. By the time I reached home, I had the story fully formed in my imagination.

Saral Waldorf
is a medical anthropologist who has lived and worked in various countries in Africa (Uganda, Lesotho, Cameroon, Malawi, Benin) and elsewhere (Malta, Thailand, Turkmenistan), these places often serving as background for her short stories. She has published stories in
Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly,
Commentary, The Hudson Review,
and
The Southern Review
.

• Growing up, I and my two sisters were brought up not on fairy tales but on mysteries, because my parents, Darwin L. Teilhet and Hildegarde T. Teilhet, wrote them jointly, separately, and under pseudonyms from the 1930s to the 1960s, and I am particularly honored to have made this slight contribution to a genre that they so assiduously loved and promoted. I also would like to thank editor Emily Nemens of
The Southern Review,
who took a stab in the dark and published my story, which explores an old theme in literature, the well-intentioned stranger in someone else's “exotic” country who leaves either wiser or not.

The stranger, in this case, is Dr. Gaynor, a female white doctor running a district hospital in Chitipa, Malawi, and tells of her two brief encounters with Hastings, a young, locally born thief back from the capital to visit his mother. There is no real drama between the two—their first encounter is hardly noticeable and simply by chance—yet the deadliness of their final one is dictated, in some sense, by their being from different worlds with different demands and expectations.

I myself did live in Chitipa for two years as a somewhat aged Peace Corps volunteer sent to help set up and run the first AIDS clinic at the district hospital there, which served a population of 125,000. Although Dr. Gaynor and I shared some experiences, I luckily had a much more benign outcome, as related in a memoir kept of these years,
The Condom Lady,
which is now out for publishing review. I should note that one of my neighbors, the accountant Mr. Majonga, in Line #8, the hospital's small row of tin-roofed cinderblock houses for middle management, was a mad mystery story fan who owned and traded almost as many worn and torn street-vendor-bought Agatha Christie and James Patterson paperbacks as I did.

A
LLINGHAM
, M
AYNARD

The Rostov Error.
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine,
October

A
LLYN
, D
OUG

Claire's Mirror.
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
May

A
RDAI
, C
HARLES

Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die.
Jewish Noir: Contemporary Tales of Crime and Other Dark Deeds,
ed. Kenneth Wishnia (PM Press)

B
OURELLE
, A
NDREW

Cowboy Justice.
Crossing Lines,
ed. Rayne Debski (Main Street Rag Publishing)

B
OYLE
, T. C.

No Slant to the Sun.
Harper's Magazine,
March

C
ALLAHAN
, T
OM

The Soldier, the Dancer, and All That Glitters.
Dark City Lights: New York Stories,
ed. Lawrence Block (Three Rooms Press)

C
ARCATERRA
, L
ORENZO

Tin Badge.
The Strand Magazine,
February/May

D
OLSON
, N
IKKI

Our Man Julian.
Thuglit,
September/October

D
OOLITTLE
, S
EAN

Driftwood.
Murder under the Oaks,
ed. Art Taylor (Down and Out Books)

E
STLEMAN
, L
OREN
D.