The Best American Mystery Stories 2017
John Sandford
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
Doug Allyn: Puncher’s Chance
Jim Allyn: The Master of Negwegon
Dan Bevacqua: The Human Variable
C. J. Box: Power Wagon
Gerri Brightwell: Williamsville
S. L. Coney: Abandoned Places
Trina Corey: Flight
Jeffery Deaver: The Incident of 10 November
Brendan Dubois: The Man from Away
Loren D. Estleman: GI Jack
Peter Ferry: Ike, Sharon, and Me
Charles John Harper: Lovers and Thieves
Craig Johnson: Land of the Blind
William Kent Krueger: The Painted Smile
K. McGee: Dot Rat
Joyce Carol Oates: The Woman in the Window
Steven Popkes: The Sweet Warm Earth
William Soldan: All Things Come Around
Peter Straub: The Process Is a Process All Its Own
Wallace Stroby: Night Run
Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2016
Read More from The Best American Series®
About the Editors
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2017 by John Sandford
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The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Mystery Stories™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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ISSN 1094-8384 (print) ISSN 2573-3907 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-544-94908-9 (print) ISBN 978-0-544-94920-1 (ebook)
Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Cover photograph © SuperStock
v1.0817
These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Puncher’s Chance” by Doug Allyn. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Doug Allyn. Reprinted by permission of Doug Allyn.
“The Master of Negwegon” by Jim Allyn. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Jim Allyn. Reprinted by permission of Jim Allyn.
“The Human Variable” by Dan Bevacqua. First published in The Literary Review. Copyright © 2016 by Dan Bevacqua. Reprinted by permission of Dan Bevacqua.
“Power Wagon” by C. J. Box. First published in The Highway Kind. Copyright © 2016 by C. J. Box. Reprinted by permission of C. J. Box.
“Williamsville” by Gerri Brightwell. First published in Alaska Quarterly Review. Copyright © 2016 by Gerri Brightwell. Reprinted by permission of Gerri Brightwell.
“Abandoned Places” by S. L. Coney. First published in St. Louis Noir. Copyright © 2016 by S. L. Coney. Reprinted by permission of S. L. Coney.
“Flight” by Trina Corey. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Trina Warren. Reprinted by permission of Trina Warren.
“The Incident of 10 November” by Jeffery Deaver. First published in In Sunlight or in Shadow. Copyright © 2016 by Gunner Publications, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Gunner Publications, LLC.
“The Man from Away” by Brendan DuBois. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Brendan DuBois. Reprinted by permission of Brendan DuBois.
“GI Jack” by Loren D. Estleman. First published in The Big Book of Jack the Ripper. Copyright © 2016 by Loren D. Estleman. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ike, Sharon, and Me” by Peter Ferry. First published in Fifth Wednesday Journal. Copyright © 2016 by Fifth Wednesday Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Fifth Wednesday Books, Inc. and the author.
“Lovers and Thieves” by Charles John Harper. First published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Charles J. Rethwisch. Reprinted by permission of Charles J. Rethwisch.
“Land of the Blind” by Craig Johnson. First published in The Strand Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Craig Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Craig Johnson.
“The Painted Smile” by William Kent Krueger. First published in Echoes of Sherlock Holmes. Copyright © 2016 by William Kent Krueger. Reprinted by permission of William Kent Krueger.
“Dot Rat” by K. McGee. First published in Mystery Weekly Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Karen McGee. Reprinted by permission of Karen McGee.
“The Woman in the Window” by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in One Story. Copyright © 2016 by The Ontario Review Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Sweet Warm Earth” by Steven Popkes. First published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 2016 by Steven Popkes. Reprinted by permission of Steven Popkes.
“All Things Come Around” by William Soldan. First published in Thuglit. Copyright © 2016 by William R. Soldan. Reprinted by permission of William R. Soldan.
“The Process Is a Process All Its Own” by Peter Straub. First published in Conjunctions. Copyright © 2016 by Seafront Corporation, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Peter Straub.
“Night Run” by Wallace Stroby. First published in The Highway Kind. Copyright © 2016 by Wallace Stroby. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Foreword
The Best American Mystery Stories can now drink legally, turning twenty-one with this edition, and has been fortunate to have led a happy life through its early years. It was conceived at a lunch with my agent, Nat Sobel, a festive dining experience that we have shared every month for more than three decades. The series was fed by hundreds of the best writers in North America, and given a wonderful, caring home by Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
BAMS has had a blessed life from birth, eschewing the expectable growing pains of a newborn into a mature adult. The guest editor of the 1997 edition was the distinguished Robert B. Parker, and it made several bestseller lists. The next guest editor was America’s sweetheart, Sue Grafton, and that volume outsold the first. Sales, reviews, and, most important, the stories in each edition continued the excellence and success of the first books. Perhaps not surprisingly, the series hit a bump in the road when it hit its teenage years, the hardcover edition being dropped after 2008 because of reduced sales, leaving it exclusively a paperback. It quickly rebounded as it grew a little older, however, filling out and coming closer to realizing its potential by adding e-book editions.
It would be reasonable to expect a lot of changes over the years, and there have been some, but mostly behind the scenes so that readers would be unlikely to sense them. When
stories were being read for the first book, my invaluable colleague, Michele Slung, without whom it would take me three years to produce this annual volume, examined about five hundred stories to determine whether they were mysteries and whether they were worth consideration. When the Internet became a greater part of our lives, we learned of more literary magazines, more little regional publishers, and electronic magazines (e-zines) that published mystery fiction. She now reads all or parts of three to four thousand stories every year. She then sends me those she thinks I should read, a stack that I whittle down to the fifty best, which are sent to the guest editor, who selects the twenty that go into the book; the other thirty make the honor roll. I can think of no other substantive changes, which I regard as a good thing. As Tony Hillerman said to me about thirty years ago (yes, yes, I know it’s a cliché, but that was the first time I heard it, and I can still hear it with his little bit of a twang), If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
One thing that changes every year is the guest editor, and everyone who has agreed to perform this task has done it as an act of generosity and self-sacrifice. Once an author has achieved the fame and success that comes with being a national bestseller (as all the guest editors have been), the drain on his or her time and energy is almost unfathomable. To put aside their books, to risk losing the battle with their own deadlines, should earn them immeasurable thanks (which I am happy to send).
John Sandford (the pseudonym of John Camp) had a long career as a journalist, resulting in a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. He decided to write fiction full-time three years later, when his first novel, Rules of Prey, became a huge success. He has produced approximately forty novels, every one of which has been on a national bestseller list in one format or another, but he is best known for the Prey series, starring Lucas Davenport, the handsome, well-tailored cop who drives a Porsche.
It would be inappropriate not to thank the previous guest editors, who, like Mr. Camp, gave so much time and effort to make the books in this series as good as they could be. I’ve offered kudos to Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton, who were followed by Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen, George Pelecanos, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais, Lisa Scottoline, Laura Lippman, James Patterson, and Elizabeth George, and I am in debt to them all.
Presuming that you are familiar with these giants of the mystery world, you will quickly perceive that despite their literary excellence, they produce very different kinds of fiction, ranging from hard-boiled to traditional detective stories to international thrillers to crime stories and more. The literary genre described as “mystery” is large and embraces multitudes. I define it liberally to mean any work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is integral to the theme or plot, and you will find a great range of styles and subgenres in the present volume. Please don’t call or write to complain that many of these stories are crime or psychological suspense rather than detective fiction. I know. Tales of observation and deduction, the staple of the so-called Golden Age (between the two world wars), have become more difficult to write (Agatha Christie used up too many plot ideas!), and we have seen the “whodunit” and the “howdunit” pushed more to the side of the road that has become dominated by the “whydunit.” This change has often resulted in superior literature, with character development and exploration unheard of in the 1920s and 1930s.
The hunt for stories for next year’s edition has already begun. While Michele Slung and I engage in a relentless quest to locate and read every mystery/crime/suspense story published during the course of the year, I live in terror that I will miss a worthy story, so if you are an author, editor, or publisher, or care about one, please feel free to send a book, magazine, or tearsheet to me c/o The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. If a story first appeared electronically, you must submit a hard copy. It is vital to include the author’s contact information. No unpublished material will be considered, for what should be obvious reasons. No material will be returned. If you distrust the postal service, enclose a self-addressed stamped postcard, on which I will happily acknowledge receipt of your story.
To be eligible, a story must have been written by an American or Canadian and first published in an American or Canadian publication in the calendar year 2017. The earlier in the year I receive the story, the more it is likely to warm my heart. For reasons known only to the blockheads who wait until Christmas week to submit a story published the previous spring, this happens every year, causing much severe irritability as I read a stack of stories while everyone else I know is busy celebrating the holiday season. It had better be a damned good story if you do this, because I already hate you. Due to the very tight production schedule for this book, the absolute firm deadline is December 31. If the story arrives two days later, it will not be read. Sorry.
O. P.
Introduction
I’ve read a stack of stories—fifty of them, to be exact—sent to me after a preliminary selection by Otto Penzler, with instructions to pick twenty. I’ve done that. Some decisions were close, some were not; of the top twenty, I would rank most of the stories to be close, and the close calls probably extended to the top thirty. Dropping a third of those was tough.
Some of the previous editors pooh-poohed the idea of an intellectual tour of the history or theory of short story writing. I wouldn’t pooh-pooh doing a history, but I don’t know enough of the history of short stories to write about it with authority. Sure, I’ve read Poe and Hemingway and O. Henry and Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, Guy de Maupassant and Stephen King and Faulkner and O’Conner and Philip Dick and Kafka and Proulx and many more than I can remember—I majored in American history and literature in college, so I’m heavy on Americans and a little light on others—but there are more terrific short story writers than you can shake a stick at. That’s my take on the history.
Ah, but theory. As an occasional teacher of writing, I do have a taste for it.
Of fictionoid© literature, there are several varieties that most people wouldn’t usually consider as relevant to the short story . . . but I do.
The newspaper column, for example. A newspaper column is often about 750 to 800 words and is an unusual hybrid of fact and opinion, the opinion leaning hard on fiction. A good newspaper column generally has the structural aspect of a short story: a fast, mood-setting opener, the rapid development of an interesting character, a few hundred words of exposition, frequently for the purpose of jerking a tear or two, and a snappy ending.
They’re almost short stories, except for the problem of the facts, which can really clutter up a good piece of fiction. There’s an old newspaper line about taking care to stop reporting before you ruin a perfectly good story.
As a newspaper columnist for a few years, I wrote several hundred columns, some good, some bad, some okay. I wrote on demand, four of them a week. No writer’s block allowed—the space was always waiting for me. (My friend and fellow novelist Chuck Logan and I were once on a book-writing panel at a St. Paul–area college, and Logan was asked by an audience member what he did about writer’s block. Logan asked the woman what she did for a living, and the woman answered, “I’m the president of this college.” Logan asked, “What do you do when you get college-president block?” The answer, of course, is “Work harder.”)
The biographic profile of the kind you frequently see in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, or The Atlantic may also be similar to the short story. They begin with a catchy opener and the careful construction of character. Since the reporting often involves interviews with the character himself/herself, it usually produces a raft of fiction, intentional or unintentional. Then we get a few unexpected twists of fate and a snappy ending. A profile of Donald Trump, for example, even if carefully documented from the Donald’s personal speeches and tweets, would arguably comprise mostly fiction, and certainly the twists of fate. Whether th
e ending will be snappy, of course, we don’t yet know. My personal opinion is that it might tend more toward sloppy; we’ll have to wait to see.
Haiku, carefully
groomed, may be the tightest
form of short story.
And has much to teach the short story writer, in my opinion. Especially about an opening. Read haiku: it’s like taking your vitamin pills in the morning.
Then there’s the novel. The novel is not a long short story but uses all the techniques of the short story, except length. It may be—I think it is—an ultimately more important form of literature, because of some of the inherent difficulties of the short form, but novels are not “better” in the purely literary sense.
They are usually a bit lazier, because they have the space to be; they can allow the reader to breathe, and to contemplate between sittings. They can present more author-nuanced character. Most important, they create a world of their own, which is comprehensible even hundreds of years later. How many people have gained a greater knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars through Tolstoy’s War and Peace than they have through any number of histories? Tolstoy created a world that survives today.
Novels, then, are an object of their own.
The short story, I believe, is not usually an object that stands on its own. Unlike a novel, a good short story is an intense collaboration between reader and writer. A novel may create an entire new world; a short story usually depends on the intelligence and understanding of the reader, because the elements of the story—the characters, the scene-setting (the total environment of the story) and the plot, whatever it may be—are usually so condensed that the short story is almost like an extended haiku.
The story is dependent on author implications and reader inferences. To take Poe as an example, his creepy dungeons are painted in few words; the shiver they send up the reader’s spine depends on the reader’s imagination as much as Poe’s, and Poe knew that. He was a master at tripping off the guilty hidden thoughts and imaginings of his readers.
