The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (62 page)

This story was so disturbing and tragic and poignant in so many ways that it haunted me and still does. I read these articles a year before my retirement, when I was still teaching an MFA fiction class. I ran off photocopies of the articles and distributed them to the class. I often used what my classes called my “story prompts”—a device that has led to a number of publications for my students. Their assignment was to select a point of view and write a fictional version of the kidnapping/identity confusion from that perspective. As always, I received finely written and nuanced stories, but all from the perspective of one or other of the parents or from the point of view of the man who believed he was the missing child.

As so many writers have noted, there are ideas that will not let you go. They become obsessions. They show up in dreams. What haunted me were the black holes in the account, the permanent absences: the abducted child; the kidnapper/killer; the absence of closure (the never knowing what happened).

By this time I had actually written three novels about psychopaths, the first of these (
Oyster
) prompted by the cult messiah David Koresh and the horrific conflagration at Waco, Texas. I was trying to understand what made so many people willing to submit all to a darkly charismatic figure. I read voraciously in the scholarly literature on psychopathology. I realized it was impossible to portray a psychopath from inside because there
is no inside.
It is like reporting on an earthquake or a tsunami. All the fiction writer can do is chronicle the devastation on all sides and seek to pay tribute to the survival strategies and the stricken inner lives of those left behind. I confess, to my own regret and dismay, that as a fiction writer I have become morbidly obsessed with psychopaths, both violent (cult messiahs, terrorists) and nonviolent (Bernie Madoff, a fictional clone of whom is a major character in
The Claimant
). The kidnapper/killer (?) in this short story is the closest I have been able to come in an attempt to get inside the mind of such a person; though of course that is sleight of hand. The reader is never really inside the mind of the killer but is inside the mind of the man who needs not only to construct an alternative narrative of his own life but to construct his supposed kidnapper and killer.

To me, the greatest mystery is how anyone manages to survive catastrophic loss and trauma, and I am fascinated by the narrative strategies used.

Richard Lange
is the author of the short story collections
Dead Boys
and
Sweet Nothing
and the novels
This Wicked World
and
Angel Baby
, which won the 2013 Hammett Prize. His stories have appeared in
The Sun, The Southern Review
, and
The Best American Mystery Stories
and as part of the
Atlantic
’s Fiction for Kindle series. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently working on a novel.

• A number of years ago I started a novel that never got off the ground. One of the characters from that book, a security guard living in a skid-row hotel, stuck with me, and one day I started writing about him again. That story eventually became “Apocrypha.” So, in the end, something positive came out of that earlier failure. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

“Apocrypha” is a story about an invisible man engaged in a life-and-death struggle in a place most of us pass through—car doors locked, windows rolled up—as quickly as possible on our way to somewhere else. It’s these men and these places that fascinate me and that I keep returning to in my work. In this milieu, people live so close to the edge that the smallest misstep can be ruinous or even fatal. Just thinking about it scares me, and what scares me inspires me. I’m glad that I got to save the lost soul in “Apocrypha.” I only wish that I could save them all.

Dennis Lehane
grew up in Boston. Since his first novel,
A Drink Before the War
, won the Shamus Award, he has published eleven more novels, which have been translated into more than thirty languages and become international bestsellers:
Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River; Shutter Island; The Given Day; Moonlight Mile; Live by Night;
The Drop;
and his most recent book,
World Gone By.
Lehane was a staff writer on the acclaimed HBO series
The Wire
and a writer-producer on HBO’s
Boardwalk Empire.

Three of his novels—
Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone;
and
Shutter Island
—have been adapted into award-winning films. In 2014 his first screenplay,
The Drop
, based on his short story “Animal Rescue,” was produced as a feature film starring Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini in his final role.

Lehane and his wife, Angie, currently live in Los Angeles with their two children, a fact that never ceases to surprise him.

• As I remember it—and a writer’s memory is about the last person’s you should trust—Michael Connelly and I were approached by Steve Berry about a unique collection of stories he envisioned. We’d take our series protagonists and have them work together, which would mirror Michael and me working together. Michael said he couldn’t imagine Patrick Kenzie in L.A., so he thought it best and more believable if Harry Bosch were led to Boston on official business. So Michael took pole position and started the story with Harry arriving on the East Coast. At some point he and Bosch reached the place where Bosch’s path crossed with Patrick’s, and that’s where I jumped in. From there, I can’t explain how we decided when and where we’d toss the potato back into the other’s hand, but making prose is a lot more like making music than laypeople suspect, and a lot of riffing between successful collaborators happens organically. The whole experience, in retrospect, was a lot more fun than it had any right to be. Maybe the story reflects that. I hope it does, anyway.

Theresa E. Lehr
is a scuba diver and educator and has published in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
and in
Texas Magazine
of the
Houston Chronicle.

• Years ago, while six months pregnant and traveling Down Under with my children and husband by camper van, we stopped at a roadside park next to a rushing stream. Within moments a motorcyclist, dressed completely in black leather, pulled up next to us. Once the rider removed her helmet, I realized she was a young woman. Her independent spirit fascinated me, and she was the inspiration for my main character.

I have been a scuba diver for thirty years. Near-drownings, bad air, faulty equipment, and poor decision-making have given me a mighty respect for the power of the sea. However, nothing can keep me from exploring the wonders of the ocean whenever possible. After watching a show about the pearling industry in Western Australia, I knew I had to write this story.

Family dynamics can be such a complicated universe. Having three brothers, I found it only natural to make sibling rivalry and competition a main component of “Staircase to the Moon.” I chose estranged twin sisters for a dark twist. The twins are of Japanese descent to connect them to the immigrant Japanese who brought pearl diving to Australia. Writing about the tensions between the family members gave me the opportunity to explore jealousy, resentment, forgiveness, and reparation without having to interact with any of my own family. Great fun.

And last, pearls and Japan? I was born in Japan and have always coveted my mother’s strand of cultured pearls she bought in 1955.

Lee Martin
is the author of the novels
The Bright Forever
, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction,
River of Heaven
,
Quakertown
, and
Break the Skin.
He has also published three memoirs,
From Our House
,
Turning Bones
, and
Such a Life.
His first book was the short story collection
The Least You Need to Know.
He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at Ohio State University, where he is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and a past winner of the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

• “A Man Looking for Trouble” began, as my stories sometimes do, with a narrator’s voice that I heard one day while I was out for my morning run. I remember hearing the line “My uncle was a man named Bill Jordan.” Immediately I wondered who was speaking and why his uncle’s presence made it urgent that he tell this story. I often write from a point of curiosity. I try to complicate that curiosity while moving the story forward but never quite answering all the questions that are there to be answered. In that way, I’m like the reader with anticipations and expectations and a reason to keep moving forward. When I got home from my run, I wrote the sentence “My uncle was a man named Bill Jordan, and in 1972, when I was sixteen, he came home from Vietnam, rented a small box house on the corner of South and Christy, and went to work on a section gang with the B & O Railroad.” Later, after the story’s interests had announced themselves to me in the first draft, I added the second sentence, about the narrator’s mother’s romance with Harold Timms, and just like that I had two threads to follow. By this point I also knew why this story mattered so much to my narrator. I wanted to place the innocence of his love for Connie alongside the ugliness of the adults’ lives. At the end of the story, my narrator knows that he and Connie are now helpless in a world run by the adults. “A Man Looking for Trouble” is a story about what ruins us. Above all, it’s a story about those moments when love might save us if only we’d let it.

James Mathews
grew up in El Paso, Texas, and now lives in Maryland. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Masters in Arts Program. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including
Painted Bride Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Florida Review, Northwest Review, The Wisconsin Review, The South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly
, and many more. His short story collection,
Last Known Position
, received the 2008 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. He is also a retired air force chief master sergeant who has served overseas numerous times, including two tours in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (in 2003 and 2006). He is currently at work on a novel.

• As an Iraq war veteran who has depended on the “band of brothers” mentality during hazardous deployments, I have always been intrigued by that rare breed of serviceman who willingly rejects the bonding process and instead isolates himself from comrades. It struck me as a defense mechanism, albeit one that was starkly counterintuitive. “Many Dogs Have Died Here” is my attempt—with a dash of mystery and absurdism—to better understand the self-exiled warrior in a postwar setting who must ultimately account for his isolation and face the grief and loss from which there is no hiding.

Thomas McGuane
lives in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of numerous novels and short story and essay collections, including
Ninety-Two in the Shade, Driving on the Rim, Gallatin Canyon
, and
Crow Fair: Stories.
His stories and essays have been collected in
The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays
, and
The Best American Sports Writing.
He is a regular contributor to
The New Yorker
and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• “Motherlode” is a story that suggested itself out of my preoccupation with life in the American West and its collision with the energy industry, often an enemy of the earth with the capacity to generate, besides money, its own publicity and access to government. These are of course generalizations, but I know intimately people like this vulnerable protagonist, and I have seen much of the deterioration of civic life at the behest of oil and its broadly corruptible allies.

Kyle Minor
is the author of
Praying Drunk
, winner of the 2015 Story Prize Spotlight Award.

• Alice Munro said it better than I can say it:

“Two mysteries, really: Why do they do it? And how do they live with it?”

Joyce Carol Oates
is the author of many novels of mystery and suspense, including most recently
Ace of Spades, Daddy Love, The Accursed
, and
Mudwoman
, as well as collections of stories, including
Give Me Your Heart, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares
, and
Black Dahlia & White Rose.
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was the 2011 recipient of the President’s Medal in the Humanities. “So Near Anytime Always” will be included in
Evil Eye: Four Tales of Love Gone Wrong.

• “The Home at Craigmillnar” was written during a very anxious time in my life, about which I can say only that I survived it!

During this enforced time in Edinburgh at the hospital bedside of my husband, stricken with pneumonia, I had the occasion to read of a breaking scandal involving a Catholic-run orphanage that was truly horrendous—dating back decades and involving generations of abused children. The nuns were as atrocious in life—or more so—as in my story. I found the material extremely upsetting, especially as there seemed to be little remorse among the surviving abusers.

The story of the American-set “Home at Craigmillnar” was my way of converting a personal crisis into something larger and I hope more valuable. It is still very hard for me to reread the story and recall those circumstances spent in a Scottish hospital, though—fortunately!—my husband, Charlie, recovered and we returned home a week after we had planned.

Eric Rutter
’s first short story appeared in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
in 2007. Since then he has contributed half a dozen more stories to that magazine, including one that was nominated for a Barry Award. He is a lifelong resident of southeast Pennsylvania.