The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

by Oates, Joyce Carol

• ISBN13: 9780618517442
• ISBN10: 0618517448
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-10-05
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country"s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. Assembled by best-selling suspense author Nelson DeMille, The Best American Mystery Stories 2004 contains a spectacular array of stories by mystery veterans and talented newcomers. Follow a chain reaction that saves a woman"s life, visit a house haunted by a husband"s violent killing spree, enter the high-stakes world of Las Vegas gambling, watch the line between reality and dream blur, travel with a bored salesman driven to crime, and much more. Encompassingall aspects of the genre, this year"s selections are sure to quicken pulses, send chills down the spine, and keep readers continually guessing.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Introduction	p. xiii
The Identity Club	p. 1
Disaster Stamps of Pluto	p. 19
Delmonico	p. 33
Jack Duggan's Law	p. 49
Old Boys, Old Girls	p. 80
The Shooting of John Roy Worth	p. 103
Until Gwen	p. 113
The Shoeshine Man's Regrets	p. 129
When All This Was Bay Ridge	p. 141
Case Closed	p. 152
Sault Ste. Marie	p. 173
Public Trouble	p. 184
Officers Weep	p. 194
The Last Man I Killed	p. 203
One Mississippi	p. 217
Cruisers	p. 225
Reconstruction	p. 241
The Love of a Strong Man	p. 259
Loyalty	p. 274
Barracuda	p. 297
Contributors' Notes	p. 313
Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2004	p. 323
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction Crimes can occur without mystery. Mysteries can occur without crime. Violent and irrevocable actions can destroy lives but bring other lives together in unforeseeable, unimaginable ways. In 1917, in the grim waterfront section called Black Rock, in Buffalo, New York, a forty-three-year-old Hungarian immigrant was murdered in a barroom fight, beaten to death with a poker. A few years later, in a rural community north of Buffalo, another recent immigrant to America, a German Jew, attacked his wife with a hammer and committed suicide with a double- barreled shotgun. Both deaths were alcohol-related. Both deaths were "senseless." The men who came to such violent ends, my mothers father and my fathers grandfather, never knew each other, yet their deaths precipitated events that brought their survivors together and would continue to have an influence, haunting and obsessive, into the twenty-first century. Families disrupted by violent deaths are never quite "healed" though they struggle to regroup and redefine themselves in ways that might be called heroic. Its an irony that I owe my life literally to those violent deaths of nearly a century ago, since they set in motion a sequence of events that resulted in my birth, but I dont think its an irony that, as a writer, I am drawn to such material. 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 endured, transcended, and transformed by survivors. Where there is no meaning, both death and life can seem pointless, but where meaning can be discovered, perhaps even violence can be redeemed, to a degree. I grew up in a rural household in the Snowbelt of upstate New York in a household of family mysteries that were never acknowledged in my presence, and very likely never acknowledged even by the adults who safeguarded them. My fathers mother, whose deranged father had blown himself away virtually in front of her, had changed her surname to a seemingly gentile name, renounced her ethnic/religious background, never acknowledged her roots even to her son, and lived among us like one without a personal, let alone a tragic, history. In this she was quintessentially "American" - self-inventing, self-defining. Her life, like the early lives of my parents, seems in retrospect to have sprung from a noir America thats the underside of the American dream, memorialized in folk ballads and blues and in the work of such disparate writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. It was as if, as a child, I inhabited a brightly lighted space - a family household of unusual closeness and protectiveness - surrounded by a penumbra of darkness in which malevolent shapes dwelled. The earliest books to cast a spell on me were Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, nightmare adventures in the g

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