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The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected--and most popular--of its kind. The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 includes Scott Turow * Edward P. Jones * Louise Erdrich * Dennis Lehane * Daniel Handler * Laura Lippman * George V. Higgins * David Means * Richard Burgin * Scott Wolven * Stuart M. Kaminsky * and others Joyce Carol Oates, guest editor, is a highly respected novelist, critic, playwright, poet, and short story writer. She is the author of numerous books, including the National Book Award winner Them and most recently the novel The Falls.… (more)
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You've got "literary" work like "Old Boys, Old Girls" from Edward P. Jones and "Until Gwen" from Dennis Lehane, a cunning play on newspaper police reports in "Officers Weep" from Daniel Orozco, a smart identity puzzle in "The Last Man I Killed" from David Rachel and an amusing parable on fame in our culture in Stuart Kaminsky's "The Shooting of John Roy Worth." Fantastic pieces all.
"There is no art in violence, only crude, cruel, raw, and irremediable harm, but there can be art in the strategies by which violence is
"I can appreciate the powerful attraction of mystery as art: it's the formal, mediated, frequently ingenious and riveting simulacrum of the unexplained in our lives, the haphazard, hurtful, confusing, tragic. A crime or mystery novel is the elaboration of a riddle to which the answer is invariably less gripping than the riddle; a crime or mystery story is likely to be a single, abbreviated segment of the riddle, reduced to a few characters and a few dramatic scenes....Writers in the genre are...obsessively compelled to pursue the riddle, the withheld information, the 'mystery' shimmering always out of reach -- in this way tranforming the merely violent and chaotic into art to be shared with others in a communal enterprise." p. xiv
Many will consider the jewel of the collection to be the longish story called “Jack Duggan’s Law,” written by George V. Higgins. Higgins, who wrote the mystery classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, died in 1999, and this story’s delayed publication in 2005 may make it the last of his works to see print.
But there are other treats as well. Stuart Kaminsky has a story called “The Shooting of John Roy Worth,” where we learn in the first few paragraphs that the town’s sign painter, probably mentally retarded and certainly mentally disturbed, intends to kill the only celebrity from the little town of Pardo, Texas. From there the story moves toward its conclusion quickly and inevitably. But Kaminsky’s rapidly drawn, convincing characters provide a surprise ending.
Scott Wolven’s story, “Barracuda,” describes in the best hard-boiled tradition an upstate New York subculture in which the usual human virtues of honesty, loyalty, and pity have no place.
Here’s the opening from a story by Dennis Lehane that he calls “Until Gwen”:
Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar, two Sundays a month, at the local VFW. But she feels her calling—her true calling in life—is to write.
That opening, which I would characterize as Elmore Leonard meets Garrison Keillor, might fool you into thinking that “Until Gwen” will be a comic story. But it keeps on getting darker and darker until, as Lehane himself admits in the biographical notes at the end of the book, “it ended up being arguably the darkest thing I’ve ever written.” And that, coming from the man who wrote Mystic River, is dark indeed.
On the other hand, Daniel Orozco’s story, “Officers Weep,” really is funny throughout. Orozco manages to present a mystery, a love story, and some urban social comedy while never deviating from the form of police reports, a sequence of them from two lines to two dozen lines long. It’s an ingenious narrative device, and Orozco captures the authentic sound of police lingo.
Rather, I picked up its companion, Best American Fantastic Tales, and this reads much better.