The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (61 page)

The author of thirty-five novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book, and a lyricist of a country-western album, Deaver has received or been shortlisted for dozens of awards. His
The Bodies Left Behind
was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers, and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller
The Broken Window
and a stand-alone,
Edge
, were also nominated for that prize. He has been awarded the Steel Dagger and the Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, as well as the Nero Wolfe Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award.
The Cold Moon
was recently named the Book of the Year by the Mystery Writers of Japan, as well as by
Kono Mystery Wa Sugoi!
magazine. In addition, the Japanese Adventure Fiction Association awarded
The Cold Moon
and
Carte Blanche
their annual Grand Prix. His book
The Kill Room
was awarded the Political/Adventure/Espionage Thriller of 2014 by Killer Nashville.

Deaver has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. He also recently received another lifetime achievement honor in Italy, the prestigious Raymond Chandler Award. He contributed to the anthology
Books to Die For
, which won the Agatha Award and the Anthony Award. Deaver has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony, a Shamus, and a Gumshoe. He was recently shortlisted for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Best International Author.
Roadside Crosses
was on the shortlist for the Prix Polar International 2013.

His most recent novels are
The October List
, a thriller told in reverse;
The Skin Collector
and
The Kill Room
, Lincoln Rhyme novels, and
XO
, a Kathryn Dance thriller, for which he wrote an album of country-western songs, available on iTunes and as a CD; and
Carte Blanche
, the latest James Bond continuation novel, a number-one international bestseller.

His book
A Maiden’s Grave
was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel
The Bone Collector
was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. And yes, the rumors are true: he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera,
As the World Turns.
He was born outside Chicago and has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University. Readers can visit his website at
www.jefferydeaver.com
.

• I was, to put it mildly, bookish as a child. I read constantly. (It didn’t hurt that I had absolutely no talent for sports whatsoever; fiction was a safer—and less shameful—way to while away the hours.) Two authors stand out in the well-populated pantheon of my young reader’s experience: J.R.R. Tolkien and Arthur Conan Doyle.

I can’t tell you how many times I read
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
(I can still recite a poem in Elvish, but please don’t tell anyone). Nor could I tally up the hours I spent, yes, in the company of Sherlock. I appreciated then, and still do, an intellectual protagonist: someone who had to outthink the villain and, ideally, prevail in a wholly unexpected way. (Aren’t we all tired of heroes who win simply because they shoot straighter or karate-kick higher?) Add a dash of exotic location, a different era, quirky characters, police procedure, and I’m on that tale in a London minute. Doyle delivered exactly what my story-hungry heart longed for.

When asked what were the inspirations for my own series protagonist Lincoln Rhyme, I answer not
Ironside
or Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window
(Rhyme is a quadriplegic) but Sherlock Holmes. Rhyme is a forensic scientist and criminalist who uses his brain to track down the perps, since he obviously can’t outshoot anyone. He’s also a curmudgeon, reclusive, and substance-dependent (Scotch). Oh, I gave him a Watson too, though Amelia Sachs is a touch different from John: she’s a former fashion model turned NYPD detective who drives a muscle car and shoots like nobody’s business.

When I was asked to be in
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes
, I did a lot of thinking about the direction to take, rereading many of the original stories, since I knew mine would be among those of so many fine writers—and some with a far better grounding in the Holmes catalog than I possessed. At some point during this research I decided that Doyle seemed to share a trait with me: I delight in creating my villains, and no one created better bad guys than Sir Arthur.

Ping.
There was the answer. I would imagine an antagonist in my story worthy of the rarely seen but undeniably evil and enigmatic Moriarty.

The result was “The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman,” a fairly typical story of mine, in which nothing is quite what it seems to be at first blush.

Brendan DuBois
is the award-winning author of seventeen novels and more than 135 short stories. His latest novel,
Blood Foam
, was published in May.

His short fiction has appeared in
Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
, and numerous anthologies, including
The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century
, published in 2000, and
The Best American Noir of the Century
, published in 2010. This is his sixth appearance in the annual
Best American Mystery Stories
anthology. His stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the MWA. He is also a
Jeopardy!
game show champion.

Visit his website at
www.BrendanDuBois.com
.

• When I saw that the Mystery Writers of America was soliciting short stories for an anthology based on the Cold War (
Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War
), I knew I was going to submit a story. All right, at the time I didn’t have a story, but I knew one would quickly come to me, and I was right.

I was a child of the Cold War, and growing up in Dover, New Hampshire, I was just a few miles away from two key military bases, Pease Air Force Base, the home of a nuclear-armed Strategic Air Force installation, and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, where nuclear-powered submarines were constructed and overhauled.

This was a time when
FALLOUT SHELTER
signs were located at my Catholic elementary school, where “duck and cover” drills had been conducted, and when the roaring sounds of B-52 bombers taking off at night during an exercise would shake the house.

With that background, a story idea immediately came to me, concerning the sinking of the submarine USS
Thresher
on April 10, 1963, with the loss of all hands. This disaster still reverberates among the residents of my home state, and my family has a connection: reactor control officer Lieutenant Raymond McCoole was a neighbor of ours, and survived because he had to take an ill wife to the hospital.

But suppose the
Thresher
wasn’t lost because of an accident? Suppose it was sabotage? And that’s where “Crush Depth” came from. It was an intriguing yet melancholy story to write, and I’m honored to have it appear in this anthology.

John M. Floyd
’s short stories and features have appeared in more than two hundred different publications, including
The Strand Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Woman’s World
, and
The Saturday Evening Post.
A former air force captain and IBM systems engineer, Floyd won a Derringer Award in 2007 and was nominated for an Edgar in 2015. He is also the author of five collections of short fiction:
Rainbow’s End
(2006),
Midnight
(2008),
Clockwork
(2010),
Deception
(2013), and
Fifty Mysteries
(2014). He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Mississippi.

• The idea for my story “Molly’s Plan” began years ago, when I was employed with IBM. During most of my career there, I worked with bankers and banking software and spent a lot of time in the lobbies, back rooms, and computer centers of financial institutions. One of these was a big, ugly branch of a regional bank located at the very end of a narrow street that was always jammed with traffic. Its limited access triggered an idea in my devious mind, which was already seriously devious, even back then. My thought was, This bank would be really hard to rob—or at least really hard to escape from after the robbery. It would be so difficult, in fact, that no sane criminal would attempt it. As I later mentioned in the resulting story, “Smart rustlers tend to avoid box canyons.” Needless to say, the characters in my story—who consider themselves both smart
and
sane—do attempt it. The story itself was great fun to put together, and the setting is so similar to the one I remembered (my memory bank?) that I felt I was actually there during the writing process. Which makes me wonder, sometimes, about my own sanity . . .

Scott Grand
is the pseudonym for Zach Basnett, who lives on the California coast with his wife and cat. “A Bottle of Scotch and a Sharp Buck Knife” is his first published work and appeared in
Thuglit
, issue 11. His other short stories, “No Rest for the Wicked” and “Sight,” can be found in
Dark Corners Pulp Magazine
, Vol. 1, issues 1 and 2. His science fiction novella,
Proximity
, will be published this year. His other works include the self-published novellas
SPORT, 3 Day Life
, and
Only Child.

• In many ways, I don’t think I will ever have better friends then I did when I was twelve. Maybe it’s because we grew up together, learned how to talk shit and fight and set things on fire. I don’t really understand it; maybe that is an age before greed and selfishness and jealousy kick in. It could be I was just better back then. I hope to have captured those experiences of adolescence accurately, of friendship and loneliness and loss.

Steven Heighton
’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in
Best English Short Stories, Best American Poetry, Zoetrope: All-Story, Tin House, Poetry, London Review of Books, New England Review, TLR, Agni
, and five editions of
Best Canadian Stories.
His novel
Afterlands
appeared in a number of countries, was a
New York Times Book Review
Editors’ Choice, and was included on best-of-year lists in ten publications in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Heighton has been nominated for the W. H. Smith Award in Britain and has received four gold National Magazine Awards in Canada, where he lives. He was the 2013 Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence at McGill University and reviews fiction for the
New York Times Book Review.

• On rereading “Shared Room on Union,” I see that the mystery at its core is the mystery of marriage, or at least of marriages that endure for any length of time. Most enduring ones sooner or later include chapters where one or both partners act in cruel, faithless, bizarre, or otherwise unlaudable ways. Unforgiveable things—or at least unforgettable things—get said and done. How does a marriage metabolize such compound calamities and emerge intact, and, often enough, annealed and deepened? I can’t seem to answer the question in a pithy way that transcends truism and cliché; maybe that’s why I’ve explored the mystery through fiction, a mode of inquiry more suggestive than conclusive, and hence truer to human relationships.

As for the predicament at the heart of “Shared Room on Union”: short story writers can’t waste time if they mean to bare the hearts and minds of their characters (and, in this case, the workings of a relationship) within a few pages. Tipping a couple suddenly into an appalling situation seems as good a way as any to get them to show their souls quickly and for all time.

Janette Turner Hospital
grew up, was educated, and taught high school on the steamy subtropical northeastern coast of Australia. She married a fellow graduate of the University of Queensland, and she and her husband came to the United States as graduate students, not intending to stay; but life, careers, children, and grandchildren intervened. A sabbatical spent in an equatorial village in South India led to a short story, an “Atlantic First,” in March 1978. The village sojourn also led to a first novel,
The Ivory Swing
, which won Canada’s Seal Award and international publication in 1982. Hospital has published ten novels and four story collections in multiple languages and has won literary awards in Australia, Canada, and the U.K.
Forecast: Turbulence
, her most recent collection of stories, was a finalist for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australia in 2013. Her most recent novel,
The Claimant
, was published in Australia last year. Both books are forthcoming in 2015 in the United States. Hospital is Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of South Carolina but has also taught at MIT, Boston University, Colgate, and Columbia. She and her husband divide their time between the U.S. and Australia.

Website:
www.janetteturnerhospital.com

• A few years ago, I was riveted by two brief articles which appeared two days apart in a major national newspaper
.
The heading of the first one was “Man Claims to Be Boy Taken in 1955: Federal Officials Await DNA Results as Lead Revives NY Kidnap Mystery.” The opening paragraph read: “More than 50 years ago, a mother left her stroller outside a Long Island bakery and returned minutes later to find her two-year-old son had vanished.” The baby sister was still in the stroller. No trace of the two-year-old had ever been found, and the case had gone cold. The parents divorced a few years later. But now a Michigan man in his fifties was convinced that he was the kidnapped child. He made contact with the woman he believed to be his sister and an emotional bond was formed. They believed they were related. The man said he had “long suspected the couple who raised him were not his biological parents.” The FBI was conducting DNA tests. Two days later, a second article indicated that the man was
not
the kidnapped toddler and that the couple who raised him were indeed his biological parents.