After Sol returned from his sabbatical, he would often go with me to Hoshi’s obedience classes. One day, Hoshi’s trainer tried to introduce him to a 130-pound rottweiler. Hoshi took a distinct dislike to the rotty and leaped at him with a great gnashing of teeth. The trainer pulled back the rotty and just looked at my 40-pound Hoshi in disbelief. Sol was looking at Hoshi, too, with a smile.
“Heh, you should make that little fella look in the mirror,” the trainer said. “Let him see what a little dog he is.”
Sol, not smiling now, snapped at him. “Heh, Slick. Don’t ever call him a dog, ya hear. The Hosh is Beyond Dog.”
Hence, the story.
Stuart M. Kaminsky lives, survives, and thrives in the sunshine and rain of Sarasota, Florida, where his story in this collection is set. Nominated five times for Edgar awards, he has written a dozen works of nonfiction and more than forty novels, including series books about Toby Peters, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Abraham Lieberman, and Jim Rockford. His film work includes writing credits for Once Upon a Time in America, Hidden Fears, Enemy Territory, and A Woman in the Wind. Kaminsky has a B.S. in journalism and an M.A. in English from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in speech (film, theater) from Northwestern University, where he taught for two decades. He is currently on leave from Florida State University.
• I’ve been writing short stories since I was fourteen and long ago found that the effort was relatively easy for me. I learned early that there was no correlation, however, between how long a story took to write and how good it might be. My short story writing was influenced by Jesse Stuart, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Chandler, and a brilliant teacher at the University of Illinois named George Scoufas. Now everything I read influences me. This morning I read about Arthur Ashe on my box of Wheaties and the legend of Dundee Marmalade on the familiar white jar on the breakfast table. Both were fascinating.
The story in this collection features Lew Fonesca, who has settled in Sarasota as a result of his car breaking down. Lew is a process server, a finder of people, and an easy mark for a sad story. This is neither the first nor the last of my stories about Lew and his friends.
Janice Law lives with her sportswriter husband in rural northeastern Connecticut. She has taught extensively at all levels, from junior high school to college, and is currently an instructor at the University of Connecticut. She has published fourteen books, ten of them mysteries, plus short stories and both popular and scholarly articles. She has been nominated for an Edgar.
• The germ of “Secrets,” as of so many of my short mystery stories, came from a newspaper brief: the unconventional weapon disposal method used in the story was a gift from the press. Characters to go with the plot emerged only when I thought of setting the story in an immigrant neighborhood like the ones on the west side of Hartford, Connecticut, familiar to me after many years of living in a neighboring town.
As the child of immigrants myself, I was especially sympathetic to the mother and daughter in “Secrets,” and it was a pleasure to put this story of violent emotions and remarkable self-control amid the mundane streets, triple-deckers, and small businesses of Connecticut’s capital city.
In stories like “Secrets,” I am chiefly interested in the surprises afforded by characters, in their unexpected capacities for good and evil, and in their ability to cope with disaster and opportunity.
John Lescroart (Less-kwa) has published ten novels. The first, Sunburn, was a paperback original that won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Best Novel by a California Author.
The following two books, Son of Holmes and Rasputin’s Revenge, are historical mysteries set in World War I featuring master sleuth Auguste Lupa, the son of Sherlock Holmes (who was perhaps the young Nero Wolfe).
The Dismas Hardy novels include Dead Irish (nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Novel), The Vig, Hard Evidence, The 13th Juror (a New York Times best-seller, nominated for the Anthony Award for Best Novel), and The Mercy Rule.
Lescroat’s other novels are urban thrillers and include A Certain Justice, which explores the themes of race and politics in America, and Guilt, the story of a successful and cultured man who is also a killer.
All of Lescroat’s thrillers have been selected by various book clubs, and all his books since Dead Irish have been translated and published extensively abroad. He lives in northern California and is working on his next Dismas Hardy novel.
• Years after first reading Watson’s delightful tease about the “missing” story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, and after I’d already enjoyed a couple of the humorous takes (Firesign Theatre, etc.) on this most famous of the apocryphal Holmesian titles, suddenly one day it came to me. I simply knew the story. It was amazing to me that it hadn’t already been written, for what else could a Holmes rat story be about except for the plague? It has to be the plague, a missing (or found) serum, and, of course, Professor Moriarty.
I was far from being in “Holmes mode,” as the last Holmesian thing I’d written was about a decade ago, but this one hit me in a bolt. The idea was so grandly obvious — surely it was floating around in the ether that day — that I was afraid somebody else would pluck it out and grab it before I did, so I started writing as fast as I could. This was one of the times that really felt almost as if someone were dictating the words to me (Watson?) (Doyle?) and I were a mere conduit. I started writing around ten in the morning, and by four o’clock that same day I’d finished it.
Sometimes they write themselves, and this was one of those times.
John Lutz’s first short story was published in 1966, and he’s been writing ever since. The author of over thirty novels and two hundred short stories and articles, Lutz is a past president of both Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America. He won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award in 1986, and the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award in 1982 and 1988. He is also a recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America Life Achievement Award. Lutz’s work has been translated into virtually every language and adapted for foreign radio and television. His novel The Ex was produced as a film of the same title, and his SWF Seeks Same was made into the hit movie Single White Female. He divides his time between St. Louis, Missouri, and Sarasota, Florida.
• I’ve long been a fan as well as a writer of Florida mystery fiction. One of the main reasons for this is that it has a special relationship with one of the most primal environments in the country. The lush foliage, teeming animal life, the sultry climate with its brilliant, revealing sunlight, pervade Floridians’ lives as well as their fiction. The heat is always on and getting hotter. In writing “Night Crawlers,” I wanted to make maximum use of that unique Florida atmosphere. Originally I was going to title the story “Primal,” because my object was to appeal to the primal part of the reader’s mind, the dark and merciless area where simple survival rules. Some researchers call it the crocodile part of the brain. I hope this story provides a path to that dim and desperate arena, but only for a brief visit.