Release day! Today’s the day for the print version of the anthology, The Best Laid Plans, edited by Canadian mystery writer Judy Penz Sheluk. She’s collected 21 stories from popular short story writers, and if you like your crime and chills in small bites, you’ll enjoy this! Here’s a quick rundown of these entertaining tales.
About my story, “Who They Are Now”: When an aging sportscaster is murdered in his bed under cover of a vicious Florida hurricane, is someone after his priceless collection of baseball memorabilia? The Delray Beach police are on the case, aided by his neighbor, a feisty but no-longer-young Hollywood star.
For a recent Chicago jaunt, my suitcase held short story magazines not getting read in the flurry of daily life. Since the temperature in my daughter’s house was 63 degrees (the furnace repair man threw in the towel and refused to charge anything), my preferred keep-warm strategy was to wrap myself in a comforter with a cup of ginger tea and catch up with what’s hot between the covers of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Mystery Tribune.
This issue is a perfect example of the diversity of story
types the mystery/crime genre embraces, everything from the echoes of Raymond
Chandler and his P.I.’s in Bill Pronzini’s “Smoke Screen,” to John H. Dirckx’s
nifty police procedural, “Where the Red Lines Meet,” which every real estate
agent should read. Ditto “Open House,” by Reed Johnson.
O.A.Tynan’s “Jenny’s Necklace” and Jehane Sharah’s debut
story “The Screening” show people haunted by deaths that took place long ago.
The future of crime prevention is secure too, as a couple of feisty kids help
resolve some bad situations in Anna Scotti’s entertaining “Krikon the Ghoul
Hunter” and Michael Sears’s “The Honest End of Sybil Cooper.”
“Bug Appetit’ by Barb Goffman, nominated for an Agatha Award,
offers the author’s trademark comeuppance for characters too clever for their
own good! (If you’ve read Barb’s story, you appreciate the Asian insect buffet
in the photo. And, if you haven’t, you’ve got a pretty good guess about the
connection right now.)
Mystery Tribune (Fall 2018)
– Kindle edition available online
I love the mix of stories, essays and photo galleries that
make this magazine unique. Naturally, you know you’ll get a good story from
Reed Farrel Coleman, who leads off this issue with “The Devil Always Knows.” Joe
De Quattro’s “Still Life with Stalin” was one of my favorites here, as were the
photos by Philip Kanwischer.
I looked high and low for the Jan/Feb issue, because I
wanted to read Art Taylor’s award-nominated story, “English 398: Fiction
Workshop,” but that issue is buried somewhere. A pleasure to look forward to.
This current issue nevertheless contains some gems.
“Life and Death in T-Shirts” by British author Liza Cody was
fun, as was Susan Dunlap’s tables-turning “Aunt Jenna Was a Spy.” Paul D.
Marks’s “Fade Out on Bunker Hill” and Robert S. Levinson’s “All About Evie”
prove once again that Hollywood is the gift to mystery-writers that keeps on
giving. Even though I saw what was coming, I especially enjoyed the Peruvian
connection in John Lantigua’s “The Revenge of the Puma.” More great tales than
I have room for here!
Edited by René Appel and Josh Pachter – Fourteen of The Netherlands’ premier authors of crime and literary fiction contributed stories to this collection, with the editors—top-rated crime authors themselves—providing the fifteenth. Amsterdam Noir is the latest in Akashic Books’ long-running series of place-based crime anthologies.
If this enterprise is in part intended to impart a vision of the locale and its residents through the lens of crime, this collection is another success.
Whenever a story purports to represent a certain place, you can fairly ask yourself, could these events have unfolded this way anywhere else? Geography, history, and culture all affect what can and does take place in a city and the official and unofficial reactions to events.
Appel and Pachter assigned the stories to four broad
headings inspired by classic film noir, and below I briefly describe a story or
two under each of their headings. The collection includes both well established
authors, like Theo Capel, and writers new to the scene, like Karin Amatmoekrim.
Meet some of the very best Dutch crime writers, right here in these pages.
Out of the Past
Welcome to Amsterdam by Michael Berg is a story of revenge—a
revenge the wronged man never thought he could achieve. It’s pretty strong
stuff. Berg was the 2013 winner of the Golden Noose, the award for the best
Dutch-language crime novel of the year. Herman Koch, who wrote 2013’s
best-selling crime novel, The Dinner,
contributed Ankle Monitor, which launches with a brilliant first line: “Maybe
it was a mistake to go back to my old neighborhood on the very first day of a
weekend leave.” No stopping reading there.
Kiss Me Deadly
All three of these stories are about ill-conceived love and
all are written by women, interestingly. Silent Days by Karin Amatmoekrim
proves that just because a woman is old and alone doesn’t mean she is helpless.
Touch of Evil
Here you have Satan himself, a pedophile, an alcoholic
fratricide, and a man channelling Ted Bundy (for an international touch), plus
a hard-working police detective who unexpectedly comes out on top in Theo
Capel’s entertaining Lucky Sevens.
They Live By Night
Echoing that film’s theme of inescapable tragedy, most of
these stories are from the victim’s point of view, but Abdelkader Benali’s The
Girl at the End of the Line is told through the eyes of a Moroccan police
officer assigned to find the killer of a Muslim girl. Winner of a top literary
prize, Benali opens this story, “A farmer found her with her head facing
southeast, toward Mecca, as if in prayer.” It’s an effective reminder of the
pluralistic culture of Western European cities today and a strong intimation of
the layers of social complexity the story will probe.
By Ruth Ware – It was a big house, with big grounds, supervised by a noisy tiding of magpies. Harriet Westaway, barely eking a living as a psychic advisor on the Brighton Pier, receives a letter from faraway Penzance inviting her to the funeral and will-reading of her grandmother, the wealthy Hester Westaway. Trouble is, her grandparents are all dead.
Curiosity wins out and she shows up for the event. What starts as something she could explain as a misunderstanding draws her in deeper and deeper, and the search for her real family takes off. Liked it. The Death of Mrs. Westaway
****The Bolivian Sailor
By Donald Dewey – Sometimes a book arrives unexpectedly in the mailbox, or “over the transom,” as publishers used to say, as this one did. To my delight, there were many things to like about this book. Poor P.I. Paul Finley finds himself enmeshed in a deadly plot when a Bolivian seaman is murdered in a seedy motel. He keeps his sense of humor, though, if not his part-time gig teaching a college course in Practical Problems in Law Enforcement. Alas, quite a few of those problems are playing out in front of him. Fun! The Bolivian Sailor
***Low Down Dirty Vote
Edited by Mysti Berry – A timely collection of eleven crime and mystery stories on the theme of fighting voter suppression. Women, blacks, the elderly—in these stories, various groups are discouraged from voting because of presumptions about how they’ll cast their ballots. Most unexpected and amusing use of the vote appeared in Catronia McPherson’s tale about the comeuppance of a man in a crowded commuter train. Good job, all! Low Down Dirty Vote
***A Deadly Indifference
By Marshall Jevons – Harvard economics professor Henry Spearman travels to Cambridge, England, to help a friend wanting to buy the former home of economist Alfred Marshall and establish a foundation there. Marshall may be dear to some economic theorists, including Spearman, but the university faculty is dominated by leftists opposing Marshall’s legacy. Soon, intellectual sparring is replaced by violence and murder. Spearman engagingly calls on economics theory (sometimes a lot of it) to explain these events. Secondary characters, not required to trot out their supply-and-demand curves, are nicely drawn too. A Deadly Indifference
Here’s news I like to hear from an anthology editor.
Wrote Lyn Worthen, “I am proud to announce that Quoth the Raven, which was recently named the Best Anthology of 2018 by the Critters Workshop/Preditors and Editors Annual Reader’s Poll, is now on the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot.”
In Quoth the Raven,
poets and short story authors tell a contemporary tale, riffing on the style
and sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s “Berenice” inspired my story, “Tooth
and Nail,” and now some of my family members hesitate to be in a room alone
with me . . . Nevertheless.
Why Dark Fiction?
My fellow QtR
author, Tiffany Michelle Brown interviewed several of the collection’s 32
authors on why they are attracted to dark fiction. “Why do you think we like to
read about the things that terrify us?” she asked.
Emerian Rich, author of the story “My Annabel” says, “Horror
addicts like to be scared in a safe, non-harmful way. Creep me out, test my limits,
push me over the edge as long as in reality I am safe in my warm bed, able to
switch on the light and see the monsters are just in my head.”
Can this predilection be traced to the fight or flight
instincts developed over millennia? Susan McCAuley, author of “The Cask,” thinks
so. Our world today is relatively safe, she says, and “going to scary movies,
reading scary stories, and going on scary rides, helps fulfill a part of us that
isn’t being used very often, at least in countries where all our major survival
needs are met.”
Her theory may get some support from Donea Lee Weaver,
author of “The Ca(t)sualty,” who admits that, for her, the attraction of dark
fiction is “the adrenalin rush.” She says she may be covering her eyes, “but I’m
still peeking through my fingers, because I just have to know what happens
next.”
The stories that Sonora Taylor, author of “Hearts are Just ‘Likes’” says she’s most drawn to aren’t just about a dark force, but how someone’s responding to that darkness” and is possibly unhinged by it. Understandably, the Poe work that inspired her story was “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
My own answer to Tiffany’s question is that “sometimes reading about—exposing oneself to—supremely terrifying things makes it easier to deal with the fearful events encountered in everyday life. Some experts suggest this accounts for the popularity among women of a certain kind of thriller. Reading about sexual violence helps readers contemplate not just the terror of such an event, but also its survivability. Maybe.”
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Raven artwork by rebeccarawrr, creative commons license.
The first draft of one of my novels was 135,000 words—1.5 times what was remotely saleable. Since I didn’t plan on writing solely for myself, I couldn’t risk being thrown in the circular file before my doorstop even reach an editor’s desk! So I began to cut. In the many subsequent drafts and rewrites, I’ve always had one eye on shrinkability.
When my editor—the stellar Barb Goffman—suggested I beef the novel up in some areas, I knew we weren’t just talking addition, we were talking subtraction too. A number of characters were easy to jettison altogether, but a few that had to be trimmed still spoke to me. The three most promising I’ve turned into published short stories, something J. Todd Scott may have done with a character from High White Sun (a short story in, I believe, Mystery Tribune).
One character I didn’t want to lose is a murdered Roman priest
who thinks his classic migraines are communications from God. Although his
death remains in the novel, his backstory is repurposed in “The Penitent,” published
last year in Bouchercon’s Passport to Murder.
A mafia fence launched his career by masterminding the 1990 Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston, a resume-enhancing crime unrelated to events
in the novel. That story became “Above Suspicion,” appearing in the current
issue (#26) of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine.
Another priest, Anglican flavor this time, intervenes in an
assault on my protagonist, no doubt saving her life. While this priest has only
a minor role in the novel, his giddy nonstop talking charmed my beta- (or
perhaps I should say gamma-) readers, and I worked him into a story—“What Saved
Them”—published in the U.S. 1 Summer
Fiction issue.
The transformation from novel excerpt to complete short
story turned out not to be as easy as I expected, and each presented its own
challenges. If you’re ever tempted to resurrect one of the darlings you’ve just
killed, here’s what I learned.
Four Tips for Authors
1. If the characters involved in the short story remain in
your novel (that is, if you haven’t gotten rid of them altogether), you need an
eagle eye for continuity. You can’t have your character driving a Porsche in
the story and relying on Uber in the story. More important, they cannot do anything in the story that would
affect the action of the novel.
2. Originally, I’d engaged in vigorous head-hopping in the
scene where the priest dies. I found I could park the novel’s point of view in
the head of the assassin, yet write the short story from the priest’s
perspective. Same events, two points of view. That was fun.
3. The story of the fence had a strong core from the get-go
because of the extensive detail about the ISG theft. I wrote new backstory—waybackstory—about
the character’s childhood in Fez. And of course more extensive setup and
denouement.
4. OK, it’s fun, but is it a story? The Anglican priest was a character. His story had to be developed from scratch using the dialog I’d salvaged. But who was he? How would he behave? What changed for him? The rescue of the woman would plausibly have a long-term impact on him and it became a source of reflection, laying the groundwork for his subsequent actions.
Because you don’t have a blank page when you deal with bits excised from other works, there are many more than the customary limits on your degrees of authorial freedom. Whether the resurrected short stories prove useful in marketing or whether they are just good stories in their own right, you can feel good about creative recycling!
Edited by Louise Penny – What an entertaining collection
this is! The stories cover a wide range of mystery/crime/suspense writing, with
a fair bit of edge. Edited by Louise Penny from a collection assembled under
the direction of Otto Penzler, the twenty stories, all published in 2017, first
appeared in US crime magazines, in literary magazines, in themed anthologies,
and in single-author collections by T.C. Boyle, Lee Child, Scott Loring
Sanders).
Says editor Penny, “A great short story is like a great
poem. Crystalline in clarity. Each word with purpose. Lean, muscular, graceful.
Nothing wasted. A brilliant marriage of intellect, rational thought, and
creativity.” This edition underscores her point on every page.
Though most of the stories run to about twenty pages, Lee
Child, with “Too Much Time,” doubles that length. He meticulously describes how
the redoubtable Jack Reacher digs himself in deeper and deeper with Maine
police while all the time working on an unexpected (by this reader) solution to
his precarious situation. Joyce Carol Oates also provides a near-novella with
“Phantomwise: 1972,” about a naïve college coed who makes consistently bad
choices and the men who exploit them.
Most of the stories take place in the good old US of A, from
the sketchy surrounds of Paul Marks’s Venice Beach (“Windward”) to James Lee
Burke’s Cajun country (“The Wild Side of Life”), though a few are set in more
exotic climes: Africa in David H. Hendrickson’s Derringer-winning “Death in the
Serengeti,” the tropical and fictional island of St. Pierre (“Breadfruit” by
Brian Silverman), and the Republic of Korea (“PX Christmas” by Martin Limón).
The selected authors found clever and creative ways to
deploy the staple characters of crime fiction—unfaithful wives (“Waiting on
Joe” by Scott Loring Sanders), assassins (“Takeout” by Rob Hart) and serial
killers (“All Our Yesterdays” by Andrew Klavan). They deal with classic crime
situations too: trying to escape a difficult past (“Smoked” by Michael Bracken
and “Gun Work” by John M. Floyd) or the long tail of a super-secret job (“Small
Signs” by Charlaine Harris); prison breaks (“Cabin Fever” by David Edgerley
Gates), and the double or is it triple? cross (“Y is for Yangchuan Lizard” by
Andrew Bourelle and “Rule Number One” by Alan Orloff).
A couple of the scams were so deftly described that you may
find yourself grinning with the vigilante surprise of Michael Connelly’s “The
Third Panel” and the flim-flamming of an elderly man in TC Boyle’s “The Designee,”
in which you must decide how complicit the elderly “victim” is. It’s the best
story of his I’ve ever read. There’s also a thought-provoking twist in “Banana
Triangle Six” by Louis Bayard.
This talented collection of authors fills their stories with
great lines, though one of my favorites comes from “The Apex Predator,” by
William Dylan Powell, wherein the main character claims he learned in Uncle
Sam’s navy the “most useful tactical skill ever developed by humankind—and it’s
not swimming or fighting or tying knots. It’s the art of bullshitting someone
so you don’t get in trouble.”
If you’ve been glancing over the author names looking for
(and finding) many that are familiar, you may also have noticed the
near-absence of women authors. Joyce Carol Oates who has more than a hundred
published books is not a surprise in this list, nor is Charlaine Harris, who’s
been publishing mystery fiction since 1981. It’s a real mystery why no other
accomplished, newer authors appear here. Women are somewhat more prominent in
the list of “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2017” at the back of the
volume, where nearly a third are women (10 of 31).
Which publications brought these stories to light in the
first place (and where you might find next year’s winner’s now)? Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine published
four of the stories, Mystery Tribune
(two), and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery
Magazine, Fiction River, and Switchblade, one apiece. Also Level Best
Books’ anthologies (Noir at the Salad Bar
and Snowbound) produced a pair of
them.
Credited with inventing detective fiction and contributing to the popularity of the then-new genre of science fiction, Edgar Allan Poe was one of America’s earliest authors to devote energies to the short story—as he defined it, a composition that could be read in a single sitting. Yet, his heart’s desire was to be a poet. Had he not died so young—at age 40—he might have been a great one.
This year, around the 169th anniversary of Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore, Camden Park Press published Quoth the Raven, an anthology of poems and stories inspired by Poe’s work and sensibility, reimagined for the twenty-first century. Lyn Worthen was the collection’s hard-working editor. One of the short story authors, Tiffany Michelle Brown, interviewed seven of the collection’s 32 authors about their inspiration.
Brown: Imagine you’re in an old-timey elevator, a rickety one that boasts a well-worn, rusty cage. There’s a man in all black in the elevator with you, and he asks what your poem or story is about. What do you tell him?
Poet Tony Kalouria said she was inspired by the notion that unsolicited, unwanted advice is “for the birds.” Menacing, nay-saying birds, the spawn of Poe’s Raven.
Story-writer Susan McCauley used “The Cask of Amontillado” to inspire her story of murder and revenge, whereas my story sprung from Poe’s “Berenice.” In it, a woman sees her twin brother as the other half of herself and will stop at nothing to keep him close. In “My Annabel,” Emerian Rice told the story of two surgeons caught in a pandemic and their fight to stay alive for one another, and Sonora Taylor propelled Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” into the maelstrom of social media with “Hearts are Just ‘Likes.’”
“Considering the rust on this rickety cage,” said Stephen R. Southard, “I’m not sure we’ll even make it to our floors.” His story sprang from Poe’s tale about a balloon trip to the moon, which, naturally, left many unanswered questions. Poe intended future installments, but never completed them. “Someone had to write the sequel, so I did.”
Brown: What’s a story or poem – by any author – that has truly creeped you out (in the best way possible, of course)?
The Exorcist — book and movie! “I was considering therapy for almost a week, I was so traumatized. And pea soup was definitely off-menu for a very long time” (Tony Kalouria). Frankenstein. “It’s terrifying and heart-breaking at the same time. And the way it plays with ideas of gods and monsters is really quite genius.” (Donea Lee Weaver)
Emerian Rich chose The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. “I read it after watching the movie because I just adored the film. The book has this underlying chill that scared me more.” He said the house (or the bog) seemed to mesmerize characters into doing strange things or paralyze their thought process in some insurmountable way.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, said Susan McCauley. “I first read it in my early twenties and had to sleep with the lights on for several nights.”
Sonora Taylor picked the short story “Shadder” by Neil Gaiman. “ I read it in bed (having learned nothing since reading Poe’s “Hop Frog” in bed years before). Even though it’s short, even though I knew it was fiction, even though I had all the lights on, and even though my bed is up against the wall, I still felt the urge to look behind me at the end.”
Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, said Steven Southard. “It’s a re-telling, and update, of George Orwell’s 1984 and a chilling tale of how easy it may be to slip into totalitarianism.
My pick was The Silence of the Lambs, the first modern “thriller” I ever read. The scariest film would have to be Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It was decades before I didn’t think of it when in the shower. Or the deeply disturbing ending of George Sluizer’s The Vanishing. Nightmares.
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My fellow-authors in the anthology inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Quoth the Raven, have bonded via social media. Tiffany Michelle Brown, author of the story “My Love, In Pieces,” has interviewed a number of us regarding our experience looking at contemporary issues through a Poe-ish lens. Her interview with me is now posted on her website.
I loved Tiffany’s story because it grew from the seed of Poe’s gothic tale “Berenice,” as did my story, “Tooth and Nail.” Yet, they’re so different! She notes that when “Berenice” was first published by the Southern Literary Messenger, readers were so disturbed by its graphic content, they complained to the editor. When Poe published it subsequently, apparently he toned it down a bit. Hmph!
Edgar Allan Poe, king of 19th century mystery and the gothic horror tales, is credited with inventing the modern detective story, wrote stories about inventions, science, and adventure, and, as people may remember him best, was a master of the macabre. The 169th anniversary of his own mysterious death in Baltimore was this month. To mark the occasion, Camden Park Press published a notable anthology of short stories and poems inspired by Poe’s works, reimagined for contemporary times.
Lyn Worthen edited the collection and—beyond amazing—the submissions were due August 30, and the book became available in early October! In her introduction, she says “I believe it is the evocative imagery he paints in sometimes hypnotic lines of pen and ink that have captured our imaginations; the sensations of fear, loathing, grief, and despair that have bound his characters to our souls. . . .those same elements that the authors in Quoth the Raven have so thoroughly captured.”
Just in time for Halloween ordering and reading, here are some of my favorites:
“My Love, in Pieces,” by Tiffany Michelle Brown, inspired by Poe’s “Berenice.” The experience of writing it, she says, was “both thrilling and terrifying.”
“Marcela,” by Penelope Paling. As in Poe’s “Liegeia,” Marcela is more than happy to continue the tradition of haunting her husband’s subsequent loves.
There’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and other diabolical death traps. Then there’s Hugh J. O’Donnell’s “The Montressor Method.”
If you’re an ailurophobic with a special horror of black cats, this volume will give you nightmares! Perhaps you should read “The Ca(t)sualty” by Donea Lee Weaver and “The Black, Long-Haired Domestic” by John Kiste in the daytime.
And Kenneth C. Goldman’s funny tale, “Get the Door for Me, Will You, Edgar?” about the trials of a high school English teacher. A more horrifying situation would be hard to come by.
My own story in the collection, “Tooth and Nail” also is inspired by “Berenice,” and concerns a young woman’s obsession with her twin brother. She’s developed a bad case of meth mouth and fixates on the blindingly white teeth of her brother’s new fiancée. No good comes of this. The villain of the tale is “the red-haired Wil Griswold,” a name and description inspired by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who bore a grudge against Poe. After Poe’s death, Griswold wrote a scathing biography that started many of the rumors about the author’s depravity, drunkenness, and dissipation—which later scholarship proved to be false. As an Amazon Affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I receive a few pennies to put in a jar to pay my WordPress bills. If you click the photo below to order this book, you help me fill the jar. Thank you!
