The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (57 page)

David H. Ingram
’s love of writing began early in his life in his hometown of Ontario, Canada, when he won two short story contests while still in high school. After a detour into the theater, where for a couple of decades he was an actor, director, and music composer for a touring company, he returned to writing. His first mystery story, “A Good Man of Business,” was published in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
and won the Robert L. Fish Award for 2012. Since then he has had several short stories published, including one by the
Journal of Legal Education
in an online addition to its first fiction issue. Along with writing fiction, Ingram is a book reviewer for
Suspense Magazine
. He is currently marketing his first novel. He lives in Illinois with his wife, who is the minister of a church.

• I’m an eclectic history buff. My interests run from Alexander the Great and the Roman Caesars to current events. A subsection that has always fascinated me is how natural disasters and weather affect history. Having lived through a hurricane myself—a small one named David—I’ve read and researched historic storms, such as the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 and the Labor Day storm in the Florida Keys. The most devastating event was the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the deadliest storm in U.S. history. The death estimates vary widely, but the lowest estimate is six thousand, more than twice the toll of the next deadliest storm on record. In the storm’s aftermath, newspapers reported at first that the death toll was five hundred—not because they didn’t know that it was larger, but because they didn’t think the public would believe the actual number.

Arrogance played a large part in increasing the number of people who were killed. Forecasters in Cuba, a country recently acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War, correctly projected the hurricane’s path. However, the U.S. Weather Service considered Cuba to be a backward nation, in spite of the Cubans’ years of experience with hurricanes. The Weather Service projected that the storm would take an easterly track, and it clung to that forecast even as Galveston was being ravaged.

In a sense, the inhabitants of Galveston were like the passengers on the
Titanic
. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Galveston was the seat of financial power in Texas, rivaling New York City and Newport in the number of millionaires within its borders. People built homes only a few feet above sea level, confident that a low-pressure system off the coast would always turn away hurricanes. After the storm, Galveston never regained its prominence in financial dominance, losing that honor to Houston.

This was the first storm to have its devastation captured by motion pictures. A photographic team from Thomas Edison’s film company was nearby and made its way to Galveston after the storm. The footage can be seen on YouTube. If you want to know more about what happened, I heartily recommend Eric Larson’s wonderful book
Isaac’s Storm
.

I have my wife to thank for planting the seed that grew into “The Covering Storm.” While I was reading about the hurricane, she said, “Why don’t you use it as the setting for a mystery?” Why not indeed? Before the storm there was no shortage of hubris among Galveston’s upper crust. Its inhabitants were unaware of what was happening as the hurricane approached. I personalized these traits in the characters I created, and “The Covering Storm” is the result.

Ed Kurtz
is the author of
A Wind of Knives, The Forty-Two
, and
Angel of the Abyss
. His short fiction has appeared in
Thuglit, Needle, Shotgun Honey
, and numerous anthologies. He lives in Texas, where he is at work on his next project. Visit him online at www.edkurtz.net.

• “A Good Marriage” is an exploration of the limits of sin and penance, in this case of the domestic variety. Its protagonist is not an innocent man, and as such is the recipient of tremendous mistrust and no small amount of grave disapproval—but these punishments come with a cost far greater than the misconducts they reprove. The husband’s crime, however, is never acquitted, and indeed made worse in his failure to remain faithful (compounded by his fear to walk away from his wife’s terrorizing efforts to force a patently bad marriage to at least appear like a good one). It is a story about broken people breaking each other, taken to extreme conclusions, but apart from that I think perhaps uncomfortably familiar to many. And despite its horrific elements, “A Good Marriage” is at its heart a noir tale—and what could be more noir than the precarious dichotomy of closeness and distance in a marriage? Particularly one in which such intimate personal information could be used so destructively by one entrusted with said knowledge. There is, perhaps, no more dangerous an enemy than one that a person has already let into the walls of his or her proverbial fortress. When Michael Corleone said, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer,” one wonders whether his own troubled marriage came to mind! Sin and penance can and perhaps do often ebb and flow over the course of a given relationship’s years, should it endure enough of them. That was my starting point when writing this particular piece, and taken to the lengths it goes—well, perhaps take it as a gentle warning to sleep with one eye open, all you lovers out there.

Matthew Neill Null
is a writer from West Virginia, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a winner of the O. Henry Award and the Mary McCarthy Prize in short fiction. His stories have appeared in
Oxford American, Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, West Branch
, and
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011
. He has received writing fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the University of Iowa, the Jentel Foundation, and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, among others. His debut novel,
Honey in the Lion’s Head
, is forthcoming in spring 2016. His story collection,
Aleghney Front
, which includes “Gauley Season,” is also forthcoming in 2016.

• All great stories have a ghost in them—I’ve come to be convinced of that. Something to haunt the land, quicken the flesh, never appear. This story has two ghosts, the first one obvious. Beyond that, I was born in Summersville, West Virginia, in 1984. Rafting on the Gauley began about then, so you could say we grew up together. The use of water is fascinating—its manipulation, its political power, its final resistance to the plans of men. The lake beat me into the world by eighteen years. I’ll take any excuse to write about Lyndon Johnson, certainly the most interesting president of the twentieth century, perhaps any century. “A genuine peace cannot be founded in a desert,” he said. “A genuine peace cannot be founded among crowded nations that are starved for this elemental—yes, this divine—gift.” Great thanks to G. C. Waldrep and
West Branch
for taking a chance on my work.

Annie Proulx
has written short stories, novels, and essays. The work has been flattered with many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, Irish Times International Fiction Prize, Dos Passos Prize, National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and more. Several of the stories have been made into films, including
The Shipping News
and
Brokeback Mountain
. Proulx wrote the libretto for the
Brokeback Mountain
opera. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and currently lives in Washington State.

• “Rough Deeds” is a somewhat modified chapter from my novel in progress,
Barkskins
. The character Charles Duquet has come to the forests of North America from the slums of Paris. He has a driving, relentless need to become wealthy and respected at any cost. Among his rough deeds is the killing of a timber poacher’s son. He gets as good as he gives in that no-holds-barred frontier world. His sons and grandsons become timber barons and forever wonder what happened to their ancestor, but only the reader knows the answer to the mystery of his disappearance.

Scott Loring Sanders
was raised in New Jersey but has spent the past twenty-five years in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He has published two young adult mystery novels, the first of which,
The Hanging Woods
, has found a small but loyal following among adult readers. He has been the writer in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, as well as a two-time fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His short stories and essays have appeared in magazines and journals ranging in scope from
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
to
Creative Nonfiction
to
Appalachian Heritage
. He recently finished his first adult novel and is currently at work on a collection of mystery stories. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech.

• I’m often intrigued by how a story actually becomes a story and the journey it takes once it leaves my hands. “Pleasant Grove” is a prime example of this, mainly because it didn’t start off as a short story at all. It was a piece of backstory for a novel I was working on (a failed novel, as it turns out) set in New Jersey. As the book dissolved, there were some scraps I liked and wanted to keep, including this one. I sent the story to a dozen or so of the usual suspects, all of whom promptly rejected it. I moved on to other things, and the story sat untouched for three years. When I learned of a small local literary magazine that had popped up in Floyd, Virginia, a town I’d once lived in, I revisited the piece with thoughts of sending it to them. I changed the setting from New Jersey to the rural mountains of Virginia, based Johnny’s house and property on the old farmhouse in Floyd where my wife and I lived when our son was born, and things finally clicked. I sent the story off and it was accepted five days later. Being a part of
The Best American Mystery Stories
has been a goal of mine ever since I threw caution to the wind, quit my corporate job with a Fortune 500 company, and focused solely on writing, in 2003. I’ve never once looked back or regretted that decision.

Nancy Pauline Simpson
describes herself as “a first-wave baby boomer who remembers both ‘Duck and Cover’ and the federal polio immunization program.” Memorable moments of her youth include being part of a Beatles press conference, drinking Heineken aboard a Dutch submarine, and playing the lead in
Star-Spangled Girl
at the Cavalier Dinner Theater in Norfolk, Virginia. She was born in Louisiana and has lived as far north as Virginia, where she graduated from Old Dominion University (“It was a mercy admission”), and as far west as Okinawa, Japan. She benefited greatly from living in an Asian culture almost as ghost-filled as the American South (“But I still need a waitress to put a rubber band on my chopsticks”). In fact, the first fiction she sold, to
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
, featured malevolent Asian spirits and themes gothic enough to take place in New Orleans instead of Naha. It seemed only natural to segue to the southern version of uncanniness when she returned to the United States. “Anybody who thinks the South does not lend itself to imagining supernatural things has never driven the two-lane highway from Savannah to Beaufort on a breezy night with Spanish moss twitching over the top of the car.”

Simpson is now the divorced mother of two grown daughters, one a physician and the other a pipeline engineer (“Yeah, I had to look it up too”). Her one marriage was to a career officer in the Marine Corps, who introduced her to Camp Lejeune, the setting for her first novel,
B.O.Q
., a mystery that features a female NCIS special agent.

In addition to her stories, which have appeared in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
, she has written a true-crime book,
Tunnel Vision
, about an unsolved triple homicide that took place at Camp Lejeune in 1981. She has also worked as a foreign correspondent for
Off Duty
magazine, based in Hong Kong, as a reporter and editor for stateside newspapers, and as an ESL instructor for Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina (“This one’s multiple choice: ESL means (a) Extra Sensory Lasciviousness (b) Eating and Surviving Lutefisk (c) English as a Second Language”).

• Suspense, like passion, requires pacing, and the payoff shouldn’t take so long that you start losing interest. That’s why the short story may be the very best vehicle for suspense. I think their brevity partly explains the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories. They immediately grab you, throw you to the ground, then release you while your heart’s still racing. Suspense (or passion) is just not as effective if the mood has been repeatedly interrupted by too many descriptions of scenery or, God forbid, moralizing.

Dennis Tafoya
is the author of three novels,
Dope Thief, The Wolves of Fairmount Park
, and
The Poor Boy’s Game
, and his short stories have appeared in various anthologies, including
Philadelphia Noir
.

• I love short stories, but I take almost as long to write a short story as a novel. I remember it was most of a year from when I first saw the sign for Satan’s Kingdom in Franklin County until I sent the story off to Steve Weddle at
Needle
. I think, left to my own devices, I’d never send anything out but just tinker endlessly. And the stories would probably be better for it, because whenever I read one of them, I see opportunities I missed and places I’d like to push harder and get more. Isn’t there always more to get?

It’s not hard to imagine that for the Congregationalists of seventeenth-century New England, the dark woods of western Massachusetts were literally the devil’s kingdom, a place for the banished and condemned. The story began to take shape when I learned that (according to local legend) authorities had been deliberately misspelling the name as Statan’s Kingdom to try to deter stoner kids from stealing the signs.

The protagonist of “Satan’s Kingdom” is the kind of character I most enjoy spending time with. He’s done things he’s ashamed of and no longer knows for sure whether he’s essentially good or bad. I think that a lot of us fall into this trap—we long for some crisis to arise that will reveal our truest nature, but we’re terrified that we’ll find ourselves more frail and frightened than heroic. So I think most of us just wait and see, year in and year out, until, like Larocque, we realize we’ve been hiding a long time.