Harlan Coben (Editor) - The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Contributors' Notes

Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2010

Brock Adams is the author of Gulf, a collection of short stories. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, A capella Zoo, and Eureka Literary Magazine, among many others. He grew up in Panama City, Florida, and studied at the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida, where he received his MFA. He lives with his wife, Jill, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where they both write and teach at USC Upstate.

"Audacious" had a simple beginning: I wanted to write a story about crowds. There's something fascinating about the level of anonymity that can exist even when surrounded by hundreds of people. I knew who Gerald was, and I knew who Audi was, but I had nothing of the story planned other than them sensing each other's loneliness in the midst of a crowd. They took it from there.

I'm amazed at the success that "Audacious" has had. When I wrote it, I had no idea if it worked at all. The others in my workshop panned it. They wanted to see Audi steal from Gerald. They wanted to see Gerald and Audi have sex. They wanted lots of things and I ignored them all, and the story works as it is: simple and sad. It taught me the most important thing I learned in school: you have to know when to listen, but sometimes you have to know when to ignore everybody else.

Eric Barnes is the author of the novel Shimmer (2009), an IndieNext pick that is a dark and sometimes comic novel about a person who's built a company based entirely on a lie. He also has published short stories in Raritan, Washington Square Review, North Atlantic Review, Tampa Review, and a number of other journals. He has been a reporter, editor, and publisher in Connecticut, New York, and now Memphis. Years ago he drove a forklift in Tacoma, Washington, and then in Kenai, Alaska, worked construction on Puget Sound, and froze fish in a warehouse outside Anchorage. He has an MFA from Columbia University and is the publisher of three newspapers covering business and politics in Memphis and Nashville.

I wrote the first version of "Something Pretty, Something Beautiful" a number of years ago, as part of a series of stories about Tacoma, where I grew up, and four friends who lived there. They are all very dark stories, and every time I reread one, I like them even more, yet am also slightly more disturbed that I was ever able to write them in the first place.

Lawrence Block has been doing this long enough to have collected lifetime achievement awards from Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the (U.K.) Crime Writers Association. He'll be publishing two books in 2011, A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Getting Off.

I'd written a couple of short stories about a young woman who picked up men for sex, went home with them, had a fine time in bed with them, and capped it off by killing them. I couldn't get her out of my head, and found myself wondering why she was doing this, and how she got this way, and where she was going with it. "Clean Slate" was the result.

Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented sixteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning for True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, which includes the recent Bye Bye, Baby. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film.

Both Collins and Mickey Spillane (who died in 2006) received the Private Eye Writers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Eye.

Mickey Spillane said to his wife, Jane, just days before his passing, "After I'm gone, there'll be a treasure hunt around heregive everything you find to Max. He'll know what to do." Mickey was the hero of my adolescence, and the direct inspiration for my career. So it's hard for me to think of a greater honor.

Jane, my wife, Barb, and I went through the voluminous files in Mickey's three offices in his South Carolina home. Among the treasures discovered were half-a-dozen incomplete Hammer novelsall running 100 manuscript pages or moreand three of these (thus far) have appeared: The Goliath Bone, The Big Bang, and Kiss Her Goodbye. We also discovered a number of shorter fragments that I felt would be better served as short stories.

"A Long Time Dead" was one of the most interesting of those fragments, and one that clearly appeared to be intended as a short story, not a novel. For the Spillane fan/scholar, this is particularly exciting, because Mickey published only a handful of Mike Hammer short stories in his lifetime. David Corbett is the author of four novels: The Devil's Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar), and Do They Know I'm Running?, published in March 2010 ("a rich, hard-hitting epic" Publishers Weekly, starred review). Corbett's short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and his story "Pretty Little Parasite" was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009. For more, go to www.davidcorbett.com.

When Luis was in San Francisco being feted because The Hummingbird's Daughter had been chosen for the One City One Book distinction, we met through a mutual friend, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, discovered we also had a mutual friend in John Connolly, and just basically hit it off. Then Luis, whose tastes are nothing if not eclectic, talked about collaborating on something in the genre realm, using his exhaustive knowledge of the border and Mexican arcana and my instincts for straight-ahead train-wreck plotting. It sounded like fun, but our other obligations kept us from doing anything but talking about it until Bobby Byrd, the editor of Lone Star Noir, approached Luis for a story and he (Luis) decided to throw me a bone. He had the main character, Chester Richard, already in mind, as well as the Cajun/zydeco musical background, the Port Arthur locale, and a few other impressionistic details. I added a few things of my own, we tossed a few other ideas back and forth, and then we agreed on a general story idea. I took first whack, Luis batted second, I did some minor cleanup, and we sent it on. It turned out to be strangely hassle-free, since Luis is both wildly imaginative and incredibly easy to work with.

Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of twelve novels and more than one hundred short stories. His latest novel, Deadly Cove, was published in July 2011. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous other magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000 and edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler. His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have also earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

As a former newspaper reporter, I had scores of opportunities to go with police officers on ride-alongs, where I sat next to them in the front seat of police cruisers and got a firsthand look at "serving and protecting" the general public. Among the things I learned: ride-alongs at night are more productive; always take an anti-motion-sickness pill before leaving the station (cops are aggressive when it comes to braking and accelerating); and when responding at high speed with lights on and sirens racing, just relaxeverything is out of your hands.