Each year series editor Otto Penzler reads voluminously among the year’s crime and mystery stories, very broadly defined, and selects 50 he likes the best. These are passed along to a guest editor, this year Lee Child, who narrows the field to 20 for inclusion in the annual volume of The Best American Mystery Stories. Those not selected are noted in a list of the year’s “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories.” In a valuable section of contributors’ notes the authors are invited to comment on the origins of their stories.
This is the fourth consecutive year I’ve done a full-scale review of this annual anthology, 2007 and 2008 in these pages, 2009 in The Weekly Standard. While Penzler and his guest editors have always provided good reading, I’ve complained about the over-emphasis on usually excellent but sometimes empty and pretentious stories from literary magazines and the comparative shortage of stories with the attributes—deceptive and intricate plotting, surprise, detection—that make the mystery a unique genre. This year, things are looking up.
The principal magazine markets are better represented than has been the case recently. Three entries are drawn from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and one from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. (The honorable mention list includes another five from EQMM and four from AHMM.) Original anthologies account for half of Child’s 20 selections, literary journals for another five, and a posthumous single-author collection for one.
Five stories are standouts. Doug Allyn’s EQMM tale “An Early Christmas,” set in Northern Michigan, recounts the investigation of a lawyer’s death in a flaming car wreck. A genuine detective story, it superbly combines elements of theme, plot, character, and background. Score one for the genre magazines. The tale that immediately follows is equally distinguished but quite different. Mary Stewart Atwell’s “Maynard,” the very short but dense with incident account of a pregnant woman’s flight, challenges the reader with complexity and rewards with ultimate clarity. Score one for the literary journals, specifically Alaska Quarterly Review. John Dufresne’s “The Cross-Eyed Bear,” from the anthology Boston Noir, is a grimly powerful study of a priest who claims innocence of molesting an altar boy 20 years before. This great story and the author’s equally impressive contribution to the 2007 volume, “The Timing of Unfelt Smiles,” will spur me to seek out his novels. Another Boston Noir entry, Dennis Lehane’s “Animal Rescue,” whose enigmatic protagonist finds a puppy in a trash can, is a deftly crafted study of loneliness and human connection. Lynda Leidiger’s “Tell Me,” from Gettysburg Review, is a story not of a crime but of a crime victim whose head injury has impaired her sight and robbed her of mobility. Her loved ones are unsure how to deal with her condition. With an indeterminate ending, the painfully affecting tale casts the reader as detective.
Other good stories point up the volume’s laudable variety. The protagonist of Matt Bell’s dark and chilling “Dredge,” a very offbeat sort of detective story, puts a dead girl in his freezer and sets out to find her murderer. Jay Brandon’s legal whodunit “A Jury of His Peers,” set in 1842 San Antonio, is based on a remarkable incident in Texas history. The late Phyllis Cohen’s “Designer Justice” is another good courtroom story with an interesting surprise twist. Lyndsay Faye’s “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness” consolidates her reputation as one of the best newer writers of Sherlockian pastiche. Gar Anthony Haywood’s surprising “The First Rule Is” concerns a retired pro basketball star easily underestimated. Jon Land’s “Killing Time,” about a professional killer who takes the place of a middle-school teacher, is pure action thriller. Philip Margolin’s “The House on Pine Terrace,” in which a policewoman dates a rich man she earlier arrested in a call girl sting operation, is the kind of multi-twist novel-in-miniature that might have appealed to last year’s guest editor, Jeffery Deaver, who didn’t manage to select a single tale of his own sort. Chris Muessig’s “Bias,” a police procedural about the shooting of a gas station attendant, was an EQMM first story. Mike Wiecek’s whodunit “The Shipbreaker” has an unusual background of dismantling ships for scrap metal in Chittagong, Bangladesh.
Author Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s rare pure crime story “Ed Luby’s Key Club” apparently was written but went unpublished in the 1950s. Clearly intended as a serial, it concerns an innocent husband and wife framed for murder in a corrupt town run by a former Al Capone bodyguard. It’s not a great story but surely would have found a pulp magazine market at least. Possibly it was never submitted.
In Penzler’s foreword, he refers to the amateur detective who “has taken time off from his or her primary occupation of cooking, gardening, knitting, writing, hairdressing, or shopping,” a good-natured dig at the cozy school of contemporary mystery fiction. Albert Tucher’s “Bismarck Rules,” though not the least bit cozy, features an amateur detective with an unusual occupation, a prostitute who is hired to accompany an ex-con to his colonoscopy.
Other contributors of worthwhile stories are Gary Shytengart, Joseph Wallace, and Ryan Zimmerman. Only R.A. Allen’s “The Emerald Coast” recalled the reservations I’ve had about previous volumes. Small town crooks take out a serial killer in a dreary slice-of-life tale without much apparent point.
For variety of setting, tone, and type of story, along with an effort to live up to the title, 2010’s volume ranks first among the last four. For sheer literary quality, it ranks second only to the 2008 volume, edited by George Pelecanos.
