When not in the courtroom or at his computer, writing, he is rummaging through antiques stores in search of vintage fountain pens or on the back roads of Wyoming riding his BMW motorcycle at what he admits are “excessive rates of speed.”
About his story “The Confession,” McKee says, “These days it seems that life is cheap. The body count in fiction and movies is staggering, and the characters never seem to give this mayhem a second’s thought. In this story, I attempted to create a character, who, while a young man, kills another man and then struggles with the guilt of that act for the rest of his life. Perhaps I thought a character capable of shame might provide the story with an unaccustomed twist.”
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Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel The Tattooed Girl and the short story collection Small Avalanches. She has frequently written works of suspense and psychological horror, among them the novella Beasts and, under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, The Barrens, Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon, Double Delight, and Snake Eyes. Her short stories have been nominated for Edgar Awards, and one of her stories is included in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
■ “The Skull” is one of those stories generated by an image. A man labors, rather like an artist, to recreate the facial features of a murder victim. He might tell himself, as an artist must tell himself, that he is the only living person who can achieve this particular goal. There is something magical in his mission, unless there is something obsessive, too. By degrees, the “personality” of the skull exerts its power over him, which is, of course, the irresistible power of the unconscious to seduce us, as we are all vulnerable to seduction by obsessions. In a longer version of the story, pragmatically edited out at Harper’s, the forensic scientist endangers his marriage in his pursuit of the skull’s identity. When he travels to the murder victim’s home, he learns who she “really” was — or does he? “The Skull” he pursues with such single-minded devotion is, in a sense, his own skull, his impending mortality.
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George P. Pelecanos is an award-winning journalist, screenwriter, independent film producer, and the author of eleven highly regarded crime novels, the latest of which is Soul Circus. He is currently writing for the HBO television series The Wire and has recently completed his next novel, Hard Revolution, to be published in 2004. Esquire magazine called Pelecanos “the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world.”
■ “The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us” describes that time in our history when European immigrants flocked from their homelands to the American cities. Many were eased into the culture by seasoned relatives who had preceded them. Others found loneliness, prejudice, and confusion. My father’s family settled in D.C.’s Chinatown, which housed not only Chinese but poor immigrants of all backgrounds. These men and women typically worked as kitchen help, pushcart vendors, and day laborers. Like today’s immigrants, they did the kind of work that native-born Americans were no longer willing to do.
One night, a great-uncle of mine was walking through a pedestrian tunnel after coming home from his stint as a hotel busboy. A man attacked him from the shadows and attempted to rob him of his day’s wage. My uncle, a semiprofessional boxer, was in the habit of carrying a knife; what happened next haunted him for the rest of his life. The idea for this story comes, very loosely, out of that event.
Most Greeks came to this country with no formal education or knowledge of the English language; not only did they survive, they excelled. This is the story of one young man who slipped through the cracks. It is my attempt to get inside his head.
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Scott Phillips was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1961. He is the author of The Ice Harvest and The Walkaway and the forthcoming Cottonwood. He has been nominated for, and lost, the Edgar Award, the Hammett Prize, the CWA Gold and Silver Daggers, the John Creasey Memorial Dagger, the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award. He won a California Book Award for Best First Fiction. He has a wife and daughter, with whom he lives somewhere west of the Mississippi River.
■ Wayne Ogden is a character from my second novel, The Walkaway, and his grandfather Bill Ogden narrates Cottonwood, the novel I’m finishing now. When Dennis McMillan asked me to contribute a story set in the 1930s to Measures of Poison, I was stumped until he suggested I use a teen-aged Wayne as a protagonist; I was delighted for the chance to get back to that depraved voice and persona, and to see Wayne as a much younger and unformed character. Other characters in the story walked out of my novels as well: Mildred Halliburton appears very briefly in The Walkaway at the age of ninety-five, and Gleason the elderly bartender shows up in Cottonwood as a twenty-year-old. Bar owner Stan Gerard is the father of Bill Gerard, the strip-joint owner from The Ice Harvest. The climactic event in “Sockdolager” is loosely based on a real firebombing that happened in Wichita in the late sixties, and I’m told the perpetrator’s motivations were much as I’ve described Wayne’s herein.
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Daniel Stashower is the author of five mystery novels and two biographies. His most recent book is The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television, and he won an Edgar Award in 2000 for Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. Stashower is also a past recipient of the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction Writing. A freelance journalist since 1986, he has written articles for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic Traveller, and American History. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Alison, and his son, Sam.
■ When I was thirteen years old, I tried out for the part of Billy the Page in a revival of William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t get the part, so I went home and wrote a play of my own, entitled Sherlock Holmes Versus the Lizard People. It found Holmes and Watson struggling to fend off an invasion by a formidable army of lizard people, who, if memory serves, had the advantage of hovering spaceships and laser pistols. I was inordinately pleased with it, and in many ways “The Agitated Actress” is the same story again, only without the laser pistols.
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Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Story, Epoch, Story Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sonora Review, and the anthology Lit Riffs (Simon and Schuster, 2003). She earned her M.A. from New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program and has been awarded residency fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook, and the New York State Writers Institute. She is currently the editor of One Story magazine and teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, is forthcoming from Dial Press in March 2004.
■ My parents are both huge mystery fans. When I started writing fiction they told me: If you want to make any money doing this you have to write a mystery. “Home Sweet Home” was my first attempt. I wanted my murderer to be sympathetic. I also wanted to see if I could drift from point of view to point of view while solving the crime. Michael Koch, the editor of Epoch, gave his great insight to finish the piece. It’s an honor to be included in this anthology, among such talented writers. Mom and Dad — you were right — about this, and so many things.
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Scott Wolven is finishing an M.F.A. at Columbia University. He currently teaches creative writing at Binghamton University (SUNY) and lives in upstate New York with his wife. His story “The Copper Kings” was selected for The Best American Stories 2002. Other recent short fiction has appeared in the Crime Issue of the Mississippi Review and at Plotswithguns.com.
■ “Controlled Burn” started out just as the title (taken from a radio program on forestry and farm techniques) and some thoughts about the nature of fire. The story ended up being about a lot of things, a combination of the elements and various depths of mystery, of crime and the truth about lies. And the story is partially about working, especially at a woodlot or as a farmer, both of which I have heard described in typical New England Yankee fashion as
“an easy way to make a hard living.” The story went through a lot of revision, and I’m grateful to Toiya Kirsten Finley, fiction editor at Harpur Palate, for her great editorial comments.
This story is dedicated to my grandfather. Special thanks to all the men and women serving in our armed forces. Very special thanks to Ray and Renate Morrison, Colin Harrison, Anthony Neil Smith of Plotswithguns.com, David Bartine, Sloan Harris, and the remarkable team at WSBW.
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Monica Wood is the author of three novels, Secret Language, My Only Story, and the forthcoming Any Bitter Thing; a book of stories, Ernie’s Ark; and two books for aspiring writers, Description and The Pocket Muse: Ideas and Inspirations for Writing. Her short stories have been widely published and anthologized, most recently in Manoa, Glimmer Train, and Confrontation.
■ “That One Autumn” is part of Ernie’s Ark, a collection of linked stories. It is the only one in the book that takes place in the past. In the present, Ernie is nursing Marie through her cancer. They have a beautiful marriage, marred only, perhaps, by Ernie’s tendency to mythologize it. I decided to go back thirty years and find out where the myth began for them. That’s where the story was born. Tracey turns up later in the book, too, in case you’re curious about what happens to her.
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Other Distinguished Mystery Stories Published Recently
Alger, Derek
Remembering the Rain. The Literary Review
Allen, Dwight
End of the Steam Age. Greensboro Review, No. 70
Block, Lawrence
The Ehrengraf Reverse. The Mighty Johns, ed. Otto Penzler
(New Millennium)
Chan, C. M.
The Body in the Boot. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May
Chretien, William
The Worried Wife. Futures, April-May-June
Coover, Robert
The Invisible Man. Playboy, January
Dadmun, Bentley
Sisters. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April
Dejesus, Edmund X.
Troublemaker. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May
Gustainis, Justin
Bargain. Futures, July-August-September
Harrison, Colin
Good Seats. The Mighty Johns, ed. Otto Penzler (New Millennium)
Harun, Adrianne
Lost in the War of the Beautiful Lads. The Sun, September Helgerson,Joe
The Case of the Floating Pearl Diver. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery
Magazine, June
King, Tabitha
The Women’s Room. Stranger, ed. Michele Slung (HarperCollins/Perennial)
Lavid, Linda
The Accident. Southern Cross Review, January-February
Lehane, Dennis
Gone Down to Corpus. The Mighty Johns, ed. Otto Penzler (New Millennium)
Long, Laird
Sioux City Express. HandHeldCrime, September
Lupica, Mike
No Thing. The Mighty Johns, ed. Otto Penzler (New Millennium)
McBrearty, Robert Garner
Transformations. The Green Hills Literary Lantern, No. 13
Malae, Peter Nathaniel
Turning Point. Cimarron Review, Fall
Nayler, Ray
The Bat House. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April
O’Connell, Carol
The Arcane Receiver. The Mighty Johns, ed. Otto Penzler (New Millennium)
Stewart, Kevin
Red Dog. Shenandoah, Spring
Talley, Marcia
Too Many Cooks. Much Ado About Murder, ed. Anne Perry (Berkley)
Webb, Don
Our Novel. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May
Weisman, John
A Day in the Country. Playboy, August
Weston, Julie
Hunter Moon. River Styx, No. 62
Zeltserman, David
More Than a Scam. Mysterical Bizland
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Michael Connelly, The Best American Mystery Stories 2003
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