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:
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THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES
Table of Contents:
Foreword
Introduction by Ed McBain
Keller’s Last Refuge by Lawrence Block
Safe by Gary Braunbeck
Fatherhood by Thomas Cook
Wrong Time, Wrong Place by Jeffrey Deaver
Netmail by Brendan Dubois
Redneck by Loren 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 Harford
L.T.’s Theory of Pets by Stephen King
An Innocent Bystander by Gary Krist
The Jailhouse Lawyer by Phillip M. Margolin
Secret, Silent by Joyce Carol Oates
In Flanders Field by Peter Robinson
Dry Whiskey by David B. Silva
Sacrifice by L.L.Thrasher
Bech Noirs by John Updike
Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 1998
Introduction by Ed McBain
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.