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Summary
Summary
"[Most of] these stories are portraits, in styles ranging from sly to harrowing, of how crimes occurred ... If you like all your characters living at the end of a story, this may not be the book for you." -- from the introduction by Scott Turow
Best-selling author Scott Turow takes the helm for the tenth edition of this annual, featuring twenty-one of the past year's most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense.
Elmore Leonard tells the tale of a young woman who's fled home with a convicted bank robber. Walter Mosley describes an over-the-hill private detective and his new client, a woman named Karma. C. J. Box explores the fate of two Czech immigrants stranded by the side of the road in Yellowstone Park. Ed McBain begins his story on role-playing with the line "'Why don't we kill somebody?' she suggested." Wendy Hornsby tells of a wild motorcycle chase through the canyons outside Las Vegas. Laura Lippman describes the "Crack Cocaine Diet." And James Lee Burke writes of a young boy who may have been a close friend of Bugsy Siegel.
As Scott Turow notes in his introduction, these stories are "about crime -- its commission, its aftermath, its anxieties, its effect on character." The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 is a powerful collection for all readers who enjoy fiction that deals with the extremes of human passion and its dark consequences.
Author Notes
OTTO PENZLER is a renowned mystery editor, publisher, columnist, and owner of New York's The Mysterious Bookshop, the oldest and largest bookstore solely dedicated to mystery fiction. He has edited more than fifty crime-fiction anthologies.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Quality writing from some of the biggest names in the genre marks the 10th collection in this series, though Turow concedes in the introduction that the 21 stories are more crime tales than mysteries. Walter Mosley contributes the collection's standout, "Karma," a classic noir exercise that brings the sweat and despair of the characters to life. Jeffery Deaver's "Born Bad" and Jane Haddam's "Edelweiss" are also solid entries, with nifty plot twists reminiscent of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the short stories of Roald Dahl. A number of stories share the same hook, though, which lessens the impact, and the editor's omission of even one fair-play whodunit will disappoint some readers. Series editor Otto Penzler provides his usual cogent, candid foreword. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
If you like all your characters living at the end of a story, this may not be the book for you, writes guest editor Turow in the introduction to the latest installment in this superb series, now in its tenth year. Indeed, homicide rests at the icy heart of these 21 taut tales, set in locales ranging from small-town Indiana and the Texas Hill Country to an ominous rock canyon on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Mystery fans will welcome the diversity of voices here, from veterans Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Elmore Leonard, and the late Ed McBain (Improvisation, the last short story he wrote, begins with the tantalizing line, Why don't we kill somebody? ) to lesser-known but no-less--impressive talents Alan Heathcock, Jeff Somers, and Mike MacLean. Among the best: Edgar winner Wendy Hornsby's Dust Up, in which a fierce female wildlife conservationist overcomes a trio of Mob thugs, and novelist Andrew Klavan's mordant Her Lord and Master, which serves up equal doses of sadomasochism and suspense. According to series editor Otto Penzler, the number of entries, culled from periodicals, literary journals, and e-zines, has increased nearly tenfold over the years (Penzler considered a quaint 500 in 1997). Copious contributors' notes reveal the fiendishly clever minds behind this criminal dim sum. A showcase series finishes its first decade on a resoundingly high note. --Allison Block Copyright 2006 Booklist
Guardian Review
However much one may take issue with the contents of anthologies such as this, they do offer readers the chance to take stock. This one reminded me how exciting American crime fiction was from the early 70s to the late 80s, when a new generation of writers - James Crumley, Walter Mosley, Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, James Ellroy - tapped into the cynicism of post-Vietnam America to describe a dangerous, edgy world weirdly unfamiliar to mainstream fiction. Some of them, like James Lee Burke, were refugees from the literary world, frustrated by the fashionable avant-gardism of the 70s; others, like Ellroy, were crime fans determined to take crime writing to highbrow places it had never been before. But generations peak and decline. Few of those who emerged in the 70s and 80s are currently writing books as good as the ones that made their names. Some, like Burke and Paretsky, have opted to carry on ploughing the same furrow over and over, while others, like Ellroy, have become deluded by their own dreams of grandeur. So surely, it must be time for a new crop. And surely, one might suppose, this would be the place to find them . . . actually, scrap the disingenuous bit. You know from the defiantly old-school title that this collection's primary purpose will not be to showcase the new anything. You know it, too, from the fact that it's edited by determinedly middle-brow legal thriller writer Scott Turow. And you know it from the list of star names - Ed McBain, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Joyce Carol Oates and Walter Mosley. These are good writers, but scarcely new: McBain - who died last year - and Leonard both started publishing in the early 1950s, a bygone age in which it was still possible to make a living from writing short stories. Oates and Burke first made it into print in the mid 60s, and even Mosley has been around for the best part of two decades. So do the marquee names deliver? Well, up to a point. Both Burke and Leonard are represented by nostalgic stories that revolve around the legendary gangsters of their youth. Burke's "Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine" is the better of the two, a nicely judged story of a Houston childhood, reminiscent of Stephen King at his low-key best. The ever prolific Oates's offering is a faintly over-familiar tale of small-town sexual jealousy. Mosley's "Karma" is intriguing in that he uses it to introduce a contemporary New York PI, but this implausible femme-fatale yarn feels so old fashioned that it's a considerable shock when the protagonist pulls out a mobile phone. Elsewhere, there are stories from solid performers that turn on classic twists: nicely so in the case of Laura Lippman's entertaining "The Crack Cocaine Diet", and irritatingly so in Jeffrey Deaver's "Born Bad". There are a few new names. The stories by Scott Wolven and RT Smith are both well-worked backwoods tales, but in all there is very little indication here of anything approaching a new wave. Today, new crime writers are more often to be found on the web or in themed collections like Akashic's noir series ( Brooklyn Noir , Baltimore Noir , etc); names worth looking out for include Megan Abbott, Duane Swierczynski, Dave Zeltserman and Jason Starr. These are writers happy to work within the crime field, extremely genre-literate in a post-Tarantino kind of way, but there's a sense that for the most part they're knowingly catering to a minority audience of crime buffs. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that, over the past couple of decades, the boundaries between crime and literary fiction have blurred. You can see the effects of this everywhere: the new Updike is a thriller, the Cormac McCarthy before last likewise. More importantly, there is a whole list of fine American writers who deal with the hard-knock world in which crime is a constant backdrop, and who marry love of language with love of plot and story: I'm thinking of Pete Dexter, Daniel Woodrell, William Gay and Richard Price, just for starters. Simply put, they're literary novelists who write about crime. So 2006, after all, is an exciting time for crime fiction. Just don't expect to find too much of it in your bookshop's crime section, or in collections like The Best American Mystery Stories John Williams's latest book is Back to the Badlands: Crime Writing in the USA (Serpent's Tail). To order The Best American Mystery Stories for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-fictop09.1 So surely, it must be time for a new crop. And surely, one might suppose, this would be the place to find them . . . actually, scrap the disingenuous bit. You know from the defiantly old-school title that this collection's primary purpose will not be to showcase the new anything. You know it, too, from the fact that it's edited by determinedly middle-brow legal thriller writer Scott Turow. And you know it from the list of star names - Ed McBain, [Elmore Leonard], [James Lee Burke], Joyce Carol Oates and [Walter Mosley]. These are good writers, but scarcely new: McBain - who died last year - and Leonard both started publishing in the early 1950s, a bygone age in which it was still possible to make a living from writing short stories. Oates and Burke first made it into print in the mid 60s, and even Mosley has been around for the best part of two decades. - John Williams.
Kirkus Review
Twenty-one reprints with more than the usual virtues and vices. Novelist Turow's brief introduction draws such a persuasive genealogy for both plot-driven stories and epiphanies of theme or character that he makes as strong a case for Karen E. Bender's portrait of an aging swindler's last sea voyage and Emory Holmes II's sketch of a small-time lowlife sweating a police interrogation as he does for more traditionally structured anecdotes like Jane Haddam's teacher-and-student murder conspiracy and Laura Lippman's black comedy of two girls looking to score some street-corner diet medication. The variety continues in James Lee Burke's account of how Bugsy Siegel befriended a pair of Texas yo-yo players, Scott Wolven's baleful story of a kid coming of age in an Idaho crossfire, Sue Pike's demented stalker of the soap-opera star she's convinced has married her and R.T. Smith's Appalachian version of Rashomon. Long-running fans of the series will find not only the ubiquitous Joyce Carol Oates, who edited last year's annual, but series editor Otto Penzler's gravest flaw, his habit of cherry-picking stories from his own anthologies (five this year--by Jeffery Deaver, Andrew Klavan, Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley and Ed McBain--from Dangerous Women, 2005). "Blame the authors for having written too well," suggests Penzler, modestly overlooking his own role in picking the finalists from whom Turow selected. Despite the logrolling, a standout collection with no weak points except familiarity. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction First, a confession. I have little business being the guest editor of this volume. Although I have always read short stories of every kind with appreciation, I seldom write them. My rate of story production can be measured on a geologic scale, about one every decade. Looking at my predecessors in this role, I would describe all of them as distinguished practitioners of the form. Not so here. In other words, the opinions expressed are not seasoned by an insider's experience. But as is so often true with lawyers, a lack of qualifications will not keep me from speaking. Let me start, then, by reflecting on the traditional title of this series, Best American Mystery Stories. To be sure, some of the stories that appear here, like Walter Mosley's "Karma," are elegant small mysteries, if mystery is taken to have its traditional meaning as a story about the investigation of a puzzling crime. Characteristically, mysteries focus on the detection of the crime's perpetrator, or more broadly, discovering (or revealing) why that enigmatic crime occurred. Andrew Klavan's "Her Lord and Master" is a mystery in that second sense. But many other stories included here never raise those questions. Instead, what the fictions Otto Penzler and I have chosen hold in common is their subject matter. Every one is about crime -- its commission, its aftermath, its anxieties, its effect on character. Best American Crime Stories would be equally, if not more, apropos as the title of this book. In fact, more than any other theme, these stories are portraits, in styles ranging from sly to harrowing, of how crimes occurred -- the evolution of circumstances so that bad-acting becomes inevitable. "Vigilance" by Scott Wolven or "Ringing the Changes" by Jeff Somers are only two of many possible examples, both gritty and compelling. In fact, more than half the stories here culminate in the commission of one particular offense. So as not to spoil things, I will not name the crime, but let me say if you like all your characters living at the end of a story, this may not be the book for you. Yet, I would venture that crime is not the only point of intersection between these stories. If you were to compare most of them to those in the companion volume, Best American Short Stories, you might feel, more often than not, that they somehow seem different. Despite what some critics contend, the distinction is not in elegance of execution -- many of these stories, such as R. T. Smith's "Ina Grove," are technically masterful; nor in the depth of psychological insight -- Alan Heathcock's "Peacekeeper" is a moving revelation of the interdependence of an individual and a community; nor in the uniqueness of voice or vision. There are few American stylists as distinctive as Elmore Leonard, whose usual roadside magic is displayed in "Louly and Pretty Boy Floyd." The difference is that the majority of these stories proceed on different assumptions about what a short story is supposed to do when compared to what I'd call "mainstream" contemporary stories that might be taught in a literature class. If we are seeking the literary heritage of the majority of these stories, we must hark back to the nineteenth century and the quintessential form that was perfected by writers like Hawthorne and Poe in the United States and Guy de Maupassant in France (and sublimely mastered by Chekhov). The classic short story arose as a function of rapid increases in literacy and the far broader circulation that resulted from newspapers and magazines that were, in today's terms, hungry for content. Stories in that era evolved from being anecdotal and diffuse to aiming to create a dominant impression at the end. In pursuit of that goal, they took a conventional form some of us were taught to recognize in grade and high school. They had a beginning, a middle, and an end, meaning they presented a conflict, an exposition, and a resolution. I'll call them three-act stories for convenience. Mysteries are classic three-act stories, which is why naming these volumes Best American Mystery Stories is actually very fair. Most of the stories here adhere, at least roughly, to that framework. They are tales in which the reader wants to know about the situation as much as the character, where the traditional question of suspense -- "What happens next?" -- is foremost. Laura Lippman's "The Crack Cocaine Diet" or Mike MacLean's "McHenry's Gift" are fine examples in which the denouement in both instances startled, and therefore delighted, me. Often, in stories of this species, we care as much about how the problem is worked out as we do the psychology of the main character. Ed McBain's "Improvisation" is a glimmering case in point, as you'd expect of a story that begins, "'Why don't we kill somebody?' she suggested." "Edelweiss" by Jane Haddam develops the sammmmme theme and, intriguingly, comes to a kindred resolution. This is not to suggest that psychological insight is incidental or absent in these stories. Instead, the assumption is that the resolution of conflict will provide a final and telling window into character, and therefore that plot and character are functions of one another. "Dust Up" by Wendy Hornsby and William Harrison's "Texas Heat" employ that strategy to winning effect. At the beginning of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Dubliners abandoned the traditional three-act form of short fiction. Joyce's epochal stories share the narrative approach of modernist poetry, and evolve toward, in Joyce's chosen term, an "epiphany," a moment of realization, for the reader first, and quite often, for the character, too. Emily Raboteau's brief gem, "Smile," is an exquisite exemplar of that approach. The narration evolves only as far as is necessary to achieve that insight. If you ask about the character's circumstances -- where she lives, what she does everyday -- they are often little changed. To the question, "What happened in the story?" the answer might be, at least outwardly, "Not very much." Karen Bender's potent and fully realized "Theft" provides a splendid illustration of this. As should be clear, I am a devotee of stories of both kinds, and therefore we've included stories of both schools. Moreover, it is certainly the case that the distinctions I've suggested are not hard and fast ones. For several decades now, the somewhat rigorous boundaries that existed forty years ago between high and low culture in American literature have been breaking down. Looking back, it is not unusual for some stories to appear in both the Best Mystery and Best Short Story volumes. Joyce Carol Oates's "So Help Me God" crosses the borders I've declared, which has been typical of her world-revered body of work for decades now. R. T. Smith's "Ina Grove" is a little bit of everything: it's a mystery by the definition I've included, a searching exploration of individual psychology, and a story with a beginning, middle, and end -- several of them in fact. It is also a work of imposing literary art. Indeed, several of these stories are really both fish and fowl. Joyce was determined to wring meaning from the warp and woof of typical daily experience, as opposed to the rare personal cataclysm that crime, for example, represents. Since all of these are crime stories, they are exiles from a pure-blooded Joycean kingdom, but Sue Pike's "A Temporary Crown" or Emory Holmes's "A.k.a., Moises Rockafella" are nonetheless moving portrayals of minds in the grip of decline that come to moments of haunting crystallization. Conventions are just that. They hold no special spell, except that they give readers a better chance to understand. They are boxes into which we conform our expectations in exchange for the opportunity to make out meaning more plainly. I get aggravated only by the assumption that stories of one kind are "better" than another. Although students of the short story have been worshipping at Joyce's shrine for nearly a century, it is still the three- act story that dominates American narrative. That remains the shape repeated consistently on television and in the movies, as well as in novels, not to mention at the water cooler. When your coworker starts out, "So I met this guy at the health club," what you want to know is what happened next. More to the point, whatever convention a story originates from, the ultimate measure of its success will be tied to its originality, whether in language (Raboteux and Smith), conception (like Jeffery Deaver's dazzlingly clever "Born Bad"), style (Leonard), or character. On the last point, consider the young Czech immigrants in C. J. Box's "Pirates of Yellowstone," who are of immediate interest because we have not seen them before. That is the great irony -- the ultimate function of convention is to provide readers with a series of conditioned expectations that the best work will in some regard then transcend and defy, leading us to new ground. James Lee Burke's "Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine" is an ostensible three-act, but it artfully turns in another direction. Each of these stories exhibits some commendably unique attribute that helps to convincingly project us into a coherent imagined world from which we emerge enlightened in some way about our condition as humans. Scott Turow Copyright (c) 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by Scott Turow. Excerpted from The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Foreword | p. ix |
Introduction | p. xiv |
Theft | p. 1 |
Pirates of Yellowstone | p. 18 |
Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine | p. 31 |
Born Bad | p. 45 |
Edelweiss | p. 63 |
Texas Heat | p. 81 |
Peacekeeper | p. 93 |
A.k.a., Moises Rockafella | p. 112 |
Dust Up | p. 129 |
Her Lord and Master | p. 144 |
Louly and Pretty Boy | p. 154 |
The Crack Cocaine Diet (Or: How to Lose a Lot of Weight and Change Your Life in Just One Weekend) | p. 169 |
Improvisation | p. 180 |
McHenry's Gift | p. 197 |
Karma | p. 205 |
So Help Me God | p. 240 |
A Temporary Crown | p. 266 |
Smile | p. 278 |
Ina Grove | p. 281 |
Ringing the Changes | p. 309 |
Vigilance | p. 320 |
Contributors' Notes | p. 345 |
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2005 | p. 356 |