Items related to The Best American Mystery Stories 1999
In its brief existence, THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES has established itself as a peerless suspense anthology. Compiled by the best-selling mystery novelist Ed McBain, this year's edition boasts nineteen outstanding tales by such masters as John Updike, Lawrence Block, Jeffery Deaver, and Joyce Carol Oates as well as stories by rising stars such as Edgar Award winners Tom Franklin and Thomas H. Cook. The 1999 volume is a spectacular showcase for the high quality and broad diversity of the year’s finest suspense, crime, and mystery writing. "Keller's Last Refuge" by Lawrence Block, "Safe" by Gary A. Braunbeck, "Fatherhood" by Thomas H. Cook, "Wrong Time, Wrong Place" by Jeffery Deaver, "Netmail" by Brendan DuBois, "Redneck" by Loren D. Estleman, "And Maybe the Horse Will Learn to Sing" by Gregory Fallis, "Poachers" by Tom Franklin, "Hitting Rufus" by Victor Gischler, "Out There in the Darkness" by Ed Gorman, "Survival" by Joseph Hansen, "A Death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail" by David K. Harford, "An Innocent Bystander" by Gary Krist, "The Jailhouse Lawyer" by Phillip M. Margolin, "Secret, Silent" by Joyce Carol Oates, "In Flanders Fields" by Peter Robinson, "Dry Whiskey" by David B. Silva, "Sacrifice" by L. L. Thrasher, "Bech Noir" by John Updike
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Ed McBain's police procedurals, set in the 87th Precinct, have made numerous visits to the New York Times bestseller list and others. Mr. McBains lives in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Introduction
There used to be a time when a person could make a decent living
writing crime stories. Back then, a hardworking individual could earn
two cents a word for a short story. Three cents, if he was
exceptionally good. It beat polishing spittoons. Besides, it was fun.
Back then, starting a crime story was like reaching into a
box of chocolates and being surprised by either the soft center or
the caramel or the nuts. There were plenty of nuts in crime fiction,
but you never knew what kind of story would come out of the machine
until it started taking shape on the page. Like a jazz piano player,
a good writer of short crime fiction didn't think he knew his job
unless he could improvise in all twelve keys. Ringing variations on
the theme was what made it such fun. Getting paid two or three cents
a word was also fun.
For me, Private Eye stories were the easiest of the lot. All
you had to do was talk out of the side of your mouth and get in
trouble with the cops. In the PI stories back then, the cops were
always heavies. If it weren't for the cops, the PI could have solved
a murder - any murder - in ten seconds flat. The cops were always
dragging the PI into the cop shop to accuse him of having murdered
somebody just because he happened to be at the scene of the crime
before anybody else got there. Sheesh! I always started a PI story
with a blonde wearing a tight shiny dress who, when she crossed her
legs, you saw rib-topped silk stockings and garters taut against
milky white flesh. Boy. Usually, she wanted to find her missing
husband or somebody. Usually, the PI fell in love with her by the end
of the story, but he had to be careful because you couldn't trust
girls who crossed their legs to show their garters. A Private Eye was
Superman wearing a fedora.
The Amateur Detective was a private eye without a license.
The people who came to the Am Eye were usually friends or relatives
who never dreamed of going to the police with a criminal problem, but
who couldn't afford to pay a private detective for professional help.
So, naturally, they went to an amateur. They called upon a rabbi or a
priest or the lady who was president of the garden club, or somebody
who owned cats, or a guy who drove a locomotive on the Delaware
Lackawanna, and they explained that somebody was missing or dead, and
could these busy amateurs please lend a helping hand? Naturally, the
garage mechanic, or the magician, or the elevator operator dropped
everything to go help his friend or his maiden aunt. The Am Eye was
smarter than either the PI or the cops because solving crimes wasn't
his usual line of work, you see, but boy, was he good at it! It was
fun writing Am Eye stories because you didn't have to know anything
about criminal investigation. You just had to know all the station
stops on the Delaware Lackawanna.
Even more fun was writing an Innocent Bystander story. You
didn't have to know anything at all to write one of those. An
Innocent Bystander story could be about any man or woman who
witnessed a crime he or she should not have witnessed. Usually, this
was a murder, but it could also be a kidnapping or an armed robbery
or even spitting on the sidewalk, which is not a high crime, but
which is probably a misdemeanor. Go look it up. When you were writing
an Innocent Bystander story, you didn't have to go look anything up.
You just witnessed a crime and went from there. My good friend Otto
Penzler, who edits this series, insists that if any book, movie,
play, or poem has in it any sort of crime central to the plot, it is
perforce a crime story. This would make Hamlet a crime story.
Macbeth, too. In fact, this would make William Shakespeare the
greatest crime writer of all time. But if Penzler's supposition is
true, then spitting on the sidewalk would be a crime worthy of
witness by an Innocent Bystander.
Okay, the Innocent Bystander witnesses a heavyset gentleman
clearing his throat and spitting on the sidewalk. He mutters
something like "Disgusting!" at which point a dozen men in black
overcoats, all of them speaking in Middle European tongues, start
chasing him, trying to murder or maim him or worse. At some point in
the story, depending on how short it will be, the police could enter
as well, accusing the Innocent Bystander of having been the one who'd
spat on the sidewalk in the first place. It all turns out all right
when a blonde wearing a shiny dress and flaunting rib-topped gartered
silk stockings clears her throat and fluently explains everything in
eight different foreign languages, thereby clearing up all the
confusion as wedding bells chime.
It was better to be an Innocent Bystander than either a Man
on the Run or a Woman in Jeopardy, even though these three types of
crime fiction were kissing cousins. The similarity they shared was
that the lead character in each of them was usually an innocent boob.
The Innocent Bystander is, of course, innocent. Otherwise he would be
a Guilty Bystander. But the Woman in Jeopardy is usually innocent as
well. Her problem is that somebody is trying to do dire harm to her,
we don't know why. Or if we do know why, we also know this is all a
terrible mistake, because she's innocent, can't you see she's
innocent? If only we could tell this to the homicidal maniac who is
chasing her day and night, trying to hurt her so badly.
Well, okay, in some of the stories she wasn't all that
innocent. In some of the stories, she once did something sinful but
not too terribly awful, which she's sorry for now but which this
lunatic has blown up out of all proportion and is turning into a
federal case, shooting at her and trying to strangle her and
everything. It was best, however, to make her a truly innocent little
thing who didn't know why this deranged person was trying so hard to
kill her. It was also good to give her any color hair but blond.
There were no innocent blondes in crime fiction.
A Man on the Run was innocent, too, but the police (those
guys again) didn't think so. In fact, they thought he'd done
something very bad, and so they were chasing him. What they wanted to
do was put him in the electric chair or send him away for life. And
so, naturally, he was running. The thing we didn't know was whether
or not he really was guilty. We certainly hoped he wasn't, because he
seemed like a personable enough fellow, although a bit sweaty from
running all the time. But maybe he was guilty, who knew? Maybe the
cops - those rotten individuals - were right for a change. All we
knew for sure was that this man was running. Very fast. So fast that
we hardly had time to wonder was he guilty, was he innocent, was he
in the marathon? The only important thing a writer had to remember
was that before the man could stop running, he had to catch the guy
who really did what the reader was hoping he didn't do, but which the
police were sure he did do. At three cents a word, the longer he ran,
the better off the writer was.
Cops.
When I first started writing the Cop Story, I knew only one
thing about policemen: they were inhuman beasts. The problem was how
to turn them into likable, sympathetic human beings. The answer was
simple. Give them head colds. And first names. And keep their
dialogue homey and conversational. Natural-sounding people with runny
noses and first names had to be at least as human as you and I were.
Keeping all this firmly in mind, writing a sympathetic Cop Story
became a simple matter.
"Good morning, Mrs. Flaherty, is this here your husband's
body with the ice pick sticking out of his ear here?"
"Yes, that is my dearest George."
"Excuse me, ma'am, I have to blow my nose."
"Go right ahead, Detective."
"When did you catch that cold, Harry?"
"I've had it for a week now, Dave."
"Lots of it going around."
"My husband George here had a bad cold, too, was why he stuck
the ice pick in his own ear."
"What have you been taking for it, Harry?"
"The wife made me some chicken soup, Dave."
"Yeah, chicken soup's always good for a cold."
"Oh dear, just look at all that blood."
"Sure is a sight, ma'am."
"Didn't know a person could bleed that much from the ear, did
you?"
"No, ma'am, I surely did not."
"Mind your foot, ma'am. You're stepping in it."
"Oh dear."
"Hot milk and butter's supposed to be good, too."
"Medical Examiner should be here any minute, Harry. Maybe he
can give you something for it."
"I miss him so much."
Once you humanized cops, everyone could understand exactly
how good of heart and decent they were, and the rest was easy.
The hardest story to write was what was called Biter Bit. As
the name suggests, this is a story in which the perpetrator
unwittingly becomes the victim. For example, I make an elaborate plan
to shoot you, but when I open the door to your bedroom, you're
standing there with a pistol in your hand, and you shoot me. Biter
Bit. I once had a wonderful idea for a Biter Bit story. This writer
keeps submitting stories to the same editor who hates his work and
who keeps rejecting them with a little slip saying "Needs work." So
the writer writes a story titled "Needs Work," and he puts it in a
manila envelope rigged with a letter bomb, which he mails to the
despised editor, hoping to read in the next day's newspaper that the
man has been blow to smithereens. Instead, there's a letter from the
editor in the writer's mailbox, and when he opens the envelope, it
explodes.
I know.
It needs work.
I promise you that the stories in this collection do not need
work. You will shortly discover that today's crime story has come a
long way from the prototypes of long ago. Show me an advertising man
picking up a smoking gun beside the body of a gorgeous blonde
exposing gartered silk stockings, and I will show you a man writing
copy for the Model-T Ford. Show me a man kneeling on the fire escape
outside the window of an unaware girl doing her nails, and I will
show you a barber shop quartet singing "If I Could Shimmy Like My
Sister Kate."
But show me invention . . .
Show me wit . . .
Show me discovery . . .
Show me freshness . . .
And I will show you . . .
These.
Enjoy.
-- Ed McBain
Copyright (c) 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Introduction copyright (c) 1999 by Hui Corporation. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
There used to be a time when a person could make a decent living
writing crime stories. Back then, a hardworking individual could earn
two cents a word for a short story. Three cents, if he was
exceptionally good. It beat polishing spittoons. Besides, it was fun.
Back then, starting a crime story was like reaching into a
box of chocolates and being surprised by either the soft center or
the caramel or the nuts. There were plenty of nuts in crime fiction,
but you never knew what kind of story would come out of the machine
until it started taking shape on the page. Like a jazz piano player,
a good writer of short crime fiction didn't think he knew his job
unless he could improvise in all twelve keys. Ringing variations on
the theme was what made it such fun. Getting paid two or three cents
a word was also fun.
For me, Private Eye stories were the easiest of the lot. All
you had to do was talk out of the side of your mouth and get in
trouble with the cops. In the PI stories back then, the cops were
always heavies. If it weren't for the cops, the PI could have solved
a murder - any murder - in ten seconds flat. The cops were always
dragging the PI into the cop shop to accuse him of having murdered
somebody just because he happened to be at the scene of the crime
before anybody else got there. Sheesh! I always started a PI story
with a blonde wearing a tight shiny dress who, when she crossed her
legs, you saw rib-topped silk stockings and garters taut against
milky white flesh. Boy. Usually, she wanted to find her missing
husband or somebody. Usually, the PI fell in love with her by the end
of the story, but he had to be careful because you couldn't trust
girls who crossed their legs to show their garters. A Private Eye was
Superman wearing a fedora.
The Amateur Detective was a private eye without a license.
The people who came to the Am Eye were usually friends or relatives
who never dreamed of going to the police with a criminal problem, but
who couldn't afford to pay a private detective for professional help.
So, naturally, they went to an amateur. They called upon a rabbi or a
priest or the lady who was president of the garden club, or somebody
who owned cats, or a guy who drove a locomotive on the Delaware
Lackawanna, and they explained that somebody was missing or dead, and
could these busy amateurs please lend a helping hand? Naturally, the
garage mechanic, or the magician, or the elevator operator dropped
everything to go help his friend or his maiden aunt. The Am Eye was
smarter than either the PI or the cops because solving crimes wasn't
his usual line of work, you see, but boy, was he good at it! It was
fun writing Am Eye stories because you didn't have to know anything
about criminal investigation. You just had to know all the station
stops on the Delaware Lackawanna.
Even more fun was writing an Innocent Bystander story. You
didn't have to know anything at all to write one of those. An
Innocent Bystander story could be about any man or woman who
witnessed a crime he or she should not have witnessed. Usually, this
was a murder, but it could also be a kidnapping or an armed robbery
or even spitting on the sidewalk, which is not a high crime, but
which is probably a misdemeanor. Go look it up. When you were writing
an Innocent Bystander story, you didn't have to go look anything up.
You just witnessed a crime and went from there. My good friend Otto
Penzler, who edits this series, insists that if any book, movie,
play, or poem has in it any sort of crime central to the plot, it is
perforce a crime story. This would make Hamlet a crime story.
Macbeth, too. In fact, this would make William Shakespeare the
greatest crime writer of all time. But if Penzler's supposition is
true, then spitting on the sidewalk would be a crime worthy of
witness by an Innocent Bystander.
Okay, the Innocent Bystander witnesses a heavyset gentleman
clearing his throat and spitting on the sidewalk. He mutters
something like "Disgusting!" at which point a dozen men in black
overcoats, all of them speaking in Middle European tongues, start
chasing him, trying to murder or maim him or worse. At some point in
the story, depending on how short it will be, the police could enter
as well, accusing the Innocent Bystander of having been the one who'd
spat on the sidewalk in the first place. It all turns out all right
when a blonde wearing a shiny dress and flaunting rib-topped gartered
silk stockings clears her throat and fluently explains everything in
eight different foreign languages, thereby clearing up all the
confusion as wedding bells chime.
It was better to be an Innocent Bystander than either a Man
on the Run or a Woman in Jeopardy, even though these three types of
crime fiction were kissing cousins. The similarity they shared was
that the lead character in each of them was usually an innocent boob.
The Innocent Bystander is, of course, innocent. Otherwise he would be
a Guilty Bystander. But the Woman in Jeopardy is usually innocent as
well. Her problem is that somebody is trying to do dire harm to her,
we don't know why. Or if we do know why, we also know this is all a
terrible mistake, because she's innocent, can't you see she's
innocent? If only we could tell this to the homicidal maniac who is
chasing her day and night, trying to hurt her so badly.
Well, okay, in some of the stories she wasn't all that
innocent. In some of the stories, she once did something sinful but
not too terribly awful, which she's sorry for now but which this
lunatic has blown up out of all proportion and is turning into a
federal case, shooting at her and trying to strangle her and
everything. It was best, however, to make her a truly innocent little
thing who didn't know why this deranged person was trying so hard to
kill her. It was also good to give her any color hair but blond.
There were no innocent blondes in crime fiction.
A Man on the Run was innocent, too, but the police (those
guys again) didn't think so. In fact, they thought he'd done
something very bad, and so they were chasing him. What they wanted to
do was put him in the electric chair or send him away for life. And
so, naturally, he was running. The thing we didn't know was whether
or not he really was guilty. We certainly hoped he wasn't, because he
seemed like a personable enough fellow, although a bit sweaty from
running all the time. But maybe he was guilty, who knew? Maybe the
cops - those rotten individuals - were right for a change. All we
knew for sure was that this man was running. Very fast. So fast that
we hardly had time to wonder was he guilty, was he innocent, was he
in the marathon? The only important thing a writer had to remember
was that before the man could stop running, he had to catch the guy
who really did what the reader was hoping he didn't do, but which the
police were sure he did do. At three cents a word, the longer he ran,
the better off the writer was.
Cops.
When I first started writing the Cop Story, I knew only one
thing about policemen: they were inhuman beasts. The problem was how
to turn them into likable, sympathetic human beings. The answer was
simple. Give them head colds. And first names. And keep their
dialogue homey and conversational. Natural-sounding people with runny
noses and first names had to be at least as human as you and I were.
Keeping all this firmly in mind, writing a sympathetic Cop Story
became a simple matter.
"Good morning, Mrs. Flaherty, is this here your husband's
body with the ice pick sticking out of his ear here?"
"Yes, that is my dearest George."
"Excuse me, ma'am, I have to blow my nose."
"Go right ahead, Detective."
"When did you catch that cold, Harry?"
"I've had it for a week now, Dave."
"Lots of it going around."
"My husband George here had a bad cold, too, was why he stuck
the ice pick in his own ear."
"What have you been taking for it, Harry?"
"The wife made me some chicken soup, Dave."
"Yeah, chicken soup's always good for a cold."
"Oh dear, just look at all that blood."
"Sure is a sight, ma'am."
"Didn't know a person could bleed that much from the ear, did
you?"
"No, ma'am, I surely did not."
"Mind your foot, ma'am. You're stepping in it."
"Oh dear."
"Hot milk and butter's supposed to be good, too."
"Medical Examiner should be here any minute, Harry. Maybe he
can give you something for it."
"I miss him so much."
Once you humanized cops, everyone could understand exactly
how good of heart and decent they were, and the rest was easy.
The hardest story to write was what was called Biter Bit. As
the name suggests, this is a story in which the perpetrator
unwittingly becomes the victim. For example, I make an elaborate plan
to shoot you, but when I open the door to your bedroom, you're
standing there with a pistol in your hand, and you shoot me. Biter
Bit. I once had a wonderful idea for a Biter Bit story. This writer
keeps submitting stories to the same editor who hates his work and
who keeps rejecting them with a little slip saying "Needs work." So
the writer writes a story titled "Needs Work," and he puts it in a
manila envelope rigged with a letter bomb, which he mails to the
despised editor, hoping to read in the next day's newspaper that the
man has been blow to smithereens. Instead, there's a letter from the
editor in the writer's mailbox, and when he opens the envelope, it
explodes.
I know.
It needs work.
I promise you that the stories in this collection do not need
work. You will shortly discover that today's crime story has come a
long way from the prototypes of long ago. Show me an advertising man
picking up a smoking gun beside the body of a gorgeous blonde
exposing gartered silk stockings, and I will show you a man writing
copy for the Model-T Ford. Show me a man kneeling on the fire escape
outside the window of an unaware girl doing her nails, and I will
show you a barber shop quartet singing "If I Could Shimmy Like My
Sister Kate."
But show me invention . . .
Show me wit . . .
Show me discovery . . .
Show me freshness . . .
And I will show you . . .
These.
Enjoy.
-- Ed McBain
Copyright (c) 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Introduction copyright (c) 1999 by Hui Corporation. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication date1999
- ISBN 10 039593916X
- ISBN 13 9780395939161
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages457
- EditorMcBain Ed, Penzler Otto
- Rating
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