The Best American Mystery Stories 2002 (Best American (TM)) - Hardcover

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9780618124947: The Best American Mystery Stories 2002 (Best American (TM))

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618124942 ISBN 13: 9780618124947

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

The acclaimed author of L.A. Confidential and American Tabloid serves as guest editor for this new collection of the finest mystery tales of the year, in an anthology that incorporates pieces of short fiction by Robert B. Parker, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Connelly, Stuart Kaminsky, and other notable authors.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Otto Penzler is the founder of the Mysterious Bookshops and the Mysterious Press and an Edgar Award winner. He lives in New York City.

Foreword

On a recent trip to one of the South"s literary meccas, Oxford, Mississippi, I
had the pleasure of spending a great deal of time with literary folks —
authors, booksellers, editors, publishers, professors — who take books and
writing very seriously. Included with visits to William Faulkner"s home, the
University of Mississippi"s special collections library, Square Books (at which
John Grisham happened to be doing a signing), were many hours spent with
good wine, cold beer, and conversation.
This wasn"t ordinary conversation, at least not to me. It was
among people who love literature as much as I do and who care about it
passionately. The talk swung freely: a writer is described as "a little full of
himself" but is then quickly conceded to be one of the best writers in the
state, a discussion immediately followed by a roundtable argument of which
of his books is the best and which is the worst, with more than one drinker —
oops, I mean conversationalist — cogently quoting beautiful lines from his
work.
The reason this discussion is appropriate (at least I think it is) is
that, without exception, those involved in the conversation love mystery
fiction. While one argued that Thomas Wolfe is a better writer than either
Faulkner or Hemingway (I excused him on the basis of his having consumed
nearly a case of Budweiser) and others tussled over whether Cormac
McCarthy is as good as or better than Faulkner (remember, this occurred in
Faulkner"s longtime home, so he was used as the measuring stick for all
American writers, although most of us know that Hemingway was the
greatest writer of the twentieth century, closely followed by Raymond
Chandler), there was agreement on one point. Mystery and crime fiction
ranks with the best literary production of these times, as it has for a long
time.
Every person engaged in these nightly confabs was acutely
familiar with this series of anthologies from Houghton Mifflin. A few of them
had work appear in its pages, and several were disappointed (permit me to
state it gently) that theirs hadn"t yet been selected. Not one of them is what
would be described as a "mystery writer." They were writing the best, most
powerful, passionate, realistic fiction that they knew how to do. Yet all had
written stories or novels in which murders or other criminal acts were
committed.
As has been true for the first five volumes in this series, the
twenty stories that make up this distinguished collection help broaden the
boundaries of mystery fiction, which I define as any work in which a crime or
the threat of a crime is central to the theme or the plot of the story. Detective
stories are merely one subgenre of this very wide-reaching literary form.
This year"s guest editor reflects that stretching of the borders.
James Ellroy, described by Joyce Carol Oates as "our American Dostoevski,"
began his career as a writer of traditional mysteries, albeit with a hard edge
and an original prose style. His first book, Brown"s Requiem, is a private-eye
novel. His second, Clandestine, is a police novel, as are his next several
novels. Although the police, and even private eyes, continue to have a place
in his work, many layers of politics, jurisprudence, and social history have
been added. He has helped blur the lines between mystery fiction and
serious fiction — as if they ever needed to be separated in the first place. The
suggestion that Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy,
Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Robert B. Parker weren"t writing
social commentary while also writing first-rate mystery fiction means only
that the reader missed much of the point.
On a different subject, more or less, a word needs to be said
about the possibility of perceived favoritism, or nepotism, or some -ism or
another.
In addition to this series for Houghton Mifflin, I also edit other
mystery and crime anthologies and have done so for many years. These
other books are different in that I commission stories specifically for them. In
2001, those mystery anthologies had specific themes of baseball (Murderers"
Row) and boxing (Murder on the Ropes). It seems to me only natural that I
would request stories from authors I admire, which is what I did.
As the end of the year approached, I was looking for the best
original mysteries of the year; I could not ignore the books I edited nor the
authors who wrote for them. Sure enough, they produced some of the best
mystery stories of the year, and several of these stories will be found on
these pages, as Ellroy agreed that they were outstanding and deserved to be
here.
The danger of having too many stories on a single theme is that a
collection can seem to be too heavily weighted with a single type of story.
Find three boxing mysteries in one book and you"re going to think there"s an
awful lot of boxing around here. The same would be true if there were great
anthologies about perfume or blues or zebras (there are already too damned
many about cats, if you ask me).
This is not an apology, mind you, but an explanation. The fact of
the matter is that the boxing stories in this book are truly wonderful, and so
are the baseball stories. If anything, I may have been a bit tougher on some
of the authors who wrote for those anthologies because I was overly aware of
their origins. In this year"s anthology — there"s no getting around it — you
will get a disparate number of sports stories. However, I believe they are
among the most original and memorable stories that have ever appeared in
the six years of this series.
One more thing. The only criterion for selecting a story for this
book is the excellence of the writing. Last year"s book contained stories by
only a handful of authors with whom I was familiar. It"s different this year, as
some of fiction"s greatest names appear between these covers. When you
read these triumphs of superb prose, you will instantly see that they are here
because of how good they are, not because of who wrote them.
Enormous thanks and gratitude go to James Ellroy for taking the
time to work so dedicatedly on this volume. His introduction conveys a great
deal with the same alliterative and flamboyant flair that distinguishes his other
work, most recently The Cold Six Thousand, which appeared on the New
York Times bestseller list last year.
And of course, thanks to my colleague, Michele Slung, the
world"s best reader, without whom this annual volume would require three
years to complete. She culls the mystery fiction from all the magazines and
books with original fiction all year long so that I can read the likely suspects
and bring the list down to the top fifty, from which the guest editor then
selects the final twenty.
Despite reading every general consumer magazine and hundreds
of smaller periodicals, as well as books and the electronic publishing sites
that offer original fiction, we live in fear that, unlikely as it may be, we"ll miss
a worthy story. Therefore, if you are an author, editor, publisher, or someone
who cares about one and would like to submit a story, you are encouraged to
do so. A tearsheet or the entire publication is fine.
To be eligible, a story must have been written by an American or
Canadian and first published in a U.S. or Canadian book or periodical during
the calendar year 2002. If it was initially published in electronic format, you
must submit a hard copy. The earlier in the year I receive a story, the more
I"m inclined to welcome it with a happy heart, since reading more than a
hundred stories when the rest of the world is celebrating Christmas and the
entire holiday season (as occurred last year) makes me very Scrooge-like.
Please send submissions to Otto Penzler, The Mysterious
Bookshop, 129 West 56th Street, New York, New York 10019. Thanks.

O.P.
Introduction
The short story is the novel writ small. It"s reduced for revelation. Its features
are epiphany and lives in sharp duress. Miniaturization is difficult. It"s the
watchmaker"s trade revised for words.
I prefer the form of the novel. I dig the short story dictum of "every
word counts" in concert with the sweep of lives in deep duress. I"ve written
twelve novels and an equal number of short stories. The novels required years
of work. The short stories required more time per page, more time per
sentence, more time per word. An editor friend dragged me into the craft. I"m
glad he did.
The short story balances narrative line and characterization and
limits the scope of plot. The short story form teaches the novelist to conceive
more simply and condense the payoff. The short story form taught me to
think more surely and directly. The short story form taught me to assume the
reader"s perspective and curtail my reliance on plot. The short story form
taught me to gauge thematically and employ brevity to make my characters
pop.
My editor friend brought me to the medium kicking and
screaming. I owed him favors. My commitment to the short story paid off the
debt. The debt proved to be a gift disguised as hard work. The short story is
the novelist"s alternative universe. It"s a respite from sustained concentration
and a crash course in concentrating that much harder in the moment. It"s a
reprieve from the vast borders of scope and a primer on scope contained. It"s
the watchmaker"s trade taught to architects and large-scale engineers.
Plot and character must merge and meld quickly. Revelation must
grab and hold hard. A world must build from overt phrase and implication.
Balance must fall perfectly.
The mystery short story is a craft within a craft. The necessity for
plot makes that balance tough. Mystery fiction is crime fiction. Crime fiction
is mainstream fiction possessed of superior story-line and equal character-
development skill. Casting plot-nets wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide is relatively easy.
Constricting them to short story dimensions makes a novelist hurt. Yeah —
but the hurt is so goooooooood.
Concision. Precision. Distill the essence or succumb to your
reader"s derision. Sting with story, rap with revelation, plotz with your plots.
You can"t languor with language. You can"t dither in discourse.
You can"t indulge idle idylls. You have to see, select, say.
The form liberates as it impinges. Crime and mystery fiction has
always celebrated the extraordinary more than the prosaic. Personal honor
and corruption. Societies divided. Murder as moral default. The Big Themes
of crime and mystery fiction maul mainstream minimalism and minutiae.
They enrapture, edify, entertain. They often orbit in orgiastic excess. They
muddle as murky melodrama. They occasionally log in as literature — vibrant
and vulgarized.
The crime and mystery novel is that extraordinary world captured
large. The mystery short story is that world microscopically magnified.
A writer"s skill skirts that orbit of excess. Righteous writers
wrangle with murky melodrama and writhe their way out alive. Crime and
mystery fiction dissects and extols larger-than-life events. It"s a trap and an
option to fly.
Bad crime and mystery novels meander in murk. Their depictions
of large events play preposterous and make minimalism look good. Bad
mystery short stories are contrivances undermined by their size. They waft
wickedly worse as wastes of the watchmaker"s trade.
Yeah — but when they"re good, you get everything.
Bam — deft psychology meets a crystallized time and place.
Bam — you"re someplace all new. Pop — there"s the surface of lives in
stasis. Pop — they"re not what they seem.
You get a mystery. It may or may not pertain to a crime. You get
that time and place laid out in layers. You get suspense and surprise. You
watch characters ascend and deep-six. Fear fillets you. Heartbreak and hurt
hammer home. The story is short. It may be densely packed for its size. It
may hinge on a simple conceit or premise. You"re wrapped up rapidemente.
The good short story is a reader"s sprint and a knocked-back
cocktail. It hits strong, it"s over quick, it induces heat and lingers when it"s
done. The abbreviated form makes the reader"s role more interactive. There"s
a crime to be solved or a mystery plumbed. There"s a revelation within rapid
reach. The scant page count itself creates tension. You can read short
stories in one sitting. You should read them that way. Whap — you
circumnavigate quicksville. You get the big jolt, the instantaneous
assimilation. Then it"s yours to savor and mentally mess with over time.
Reading sprints will sap you, drain you, jazz you, move you,
scare you. The mystery short story will astound you with its diversity and
range. Many fine writers work the watchmaker"s craft in this book. Read,
sprint, and fall prey.

James Ellroy
Copyright � 2002 by Houghton Mifﬂin Company
Introduction copyright � 2002 by James Ellroy
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.