The Best
American Mystery series has been running since 1997, and since 1997
Otto Penzler has been editing it with a dedication bordering on the
suicidal. Each year he attempts to read every mystery story published
and in 2006, with colleague Michelle Slung, managed a staggering
fifteen hundred. From these they produced a top fifty, and from that
fifty, guest editor Carl Hiaasen chose the twenty stories in this book.
As always, Penzler's definition is broad: "... any short work of
fiction in which crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the
theme or the plot." The result is a eclectic mix in which stories from
literary magazines feature just as often as those from genre
anthologies.
Which
isn't to say there isn't much here for pulp fans. John Bond's T-Bird, a
tale of an insurance scam complete with femme fatale and Russian
gangster, is everything pulp/noir should be. Likewise for Take The
Man's Pay (Robert Knightly), which focuses on the mixture
of cunning
and cheerful brutality used by a group of Manhattan policemen to reach
the truth. Also highly recommended is Scott Wolven's Pinwheel, in which
a minor-league crook seems to lose everything, and yet retains an
obscure sense of honour. Meanwhile, Lawrence Block's Keller's Double
Dribble is as smooth and assured as Block's antihero, the
stamp-collecting hitman Keller. Other traditional mysteries are Queeny
(Ridley Pearson) and Solomon's
Alley (Robert Andrews); in the former
the narrator might not be entirely reliable, in the lattter, a homeless
protagonist observes more than people realise. Also a pulp-type story,
but slightly less successful, is Jim Fusilli's Chellini's Solution,
in
which the means of cuckolded Chellini's revenge arrive a little too
easily.
James Lee
Burke's A Season of
Regret also starts like a tale of revenge: a group
of bikers terrorise an old man with a past far more violent than the
bikers can imagine. However, this powerful story slides away from
Hollywood simplicities to deal with the problem of living wounded.
Another story that shifts sideways from traditional mystery is Louise
Erdrich's Gleason.
The banker Stregg, needing money for his mistress,
convinces the woman's brother to kidnap Stregg's wife. The black comedy
of the kidnapping, followed by the unforeseen ways it changes
everyone's life, made this one of the stand-out stories of the
collection. The other stand-out was Jakob Loomis by
Jason Ockert: two
strangers face each other across a yard, one handcuffed, the other with
bloodied shoes, carrying an axe. As they lie to each other about their
respective situations, a terrible fate is already approaching. The
story fits together like a Greek tragedy and yet manages moments of
laugh-out-loud humour.
Tragedies of a
different kind take place in Kent Meyers's Rodney Valen's Second Life,
Joyce Carol Oates's Meadowlands
and John Defresne's The
Timing of Unfelt Smiles. However, despite being well
written, the latter two stories had unsatisfying, too-pat
endings.
Meanwhile, at
the very edge of what might be termed a mystery, Peter Blauner's Going, Going, Gone
describes the nightmare of a father losing his six-year-old son on the
New York subway. While a nightmare of a different kind -- crystal
meth-fueled grief -- is provided by William Gay in Where Will You Go When Your Skin
Cannot Contain You. This story was also chosen by Stephen
King for The Best American Short Stories 2007, and for that reason I
feel guilty about not liking it more. Although occasionally striking, I
found the language too florid and inexact.
Back in more
conventional mystery environs, John Sandford (Lucy Had a List)
and Laura Lippman (One
True Love) describe female protagonists ferociously
determined to win against the odds, while David Means (The Spot) and Chris
Adrian (Stab)
describe couples -- a pimp and an underage prostitute (Means), two
children damaged by loss (Adrian) -- for whom killing needs no
cause.
While this
collection contains far more than pulp-style stories, it still claims a
territory of its own -- one of violence, secrecy and loss.
