Born and raised in eastern North Carolina, Margaret Maron lived “off’ for several years before returning to her family’s homeplace. In addition to a collection of short stories, she’s also the author of fifteen mystery novels featuring Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD, and District Court Judge Deborah Knott of Colleton County, North Carolina. Her works have been nominated for every major award in the American mystery field and are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary southern literature. In 1993 her North Carolina-based Bootlegger’s Daughter won the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Anthony Award for Best Mystery Novel of the Year, the Agatha Award for Best Traditional Novel, and the Macavity for Best Novel — an unprecedented sweep for a single novel. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime, current president of the American Crime Writers League, and a director on the national board for Mystery Writers of America.
• The best thing about short stories is that they’re short, which is why I spent the first twelve years of my career writing them. I was too intimidated by the novel’s length even to attempt one. My first book (Sigrid Harald’s first appearance) started out as a short story that kept growing, and Deborah Knott also began as a character in a short story. Although I’ve managed to fill three hundred consecutive manuscript pages fifteen times now, I think I’ll always prefer the shorter form.
Gardenias are the smell of summer in North Carolina, and for anyone who grew up with huge bushes of those fleshy white blossoms planted beneath every open window, they evoke a tangled web of memories. “Prayer for Judgment” details a young child’s memory-in-the-making.
Jay Mclnerney is still recovering from the tumult occasioned by the publication of his first novel, Bright Lights Big City, in 1984. To date, Bright Lights has been translated into twenty languages. Mclnerney accepts full blame for the screenplay of the United Artists movie, starring Michael J. Fox and Jason Robards. His subsequent novels include Ransom (1985), Story of My Life (1988), Brightness Falls (1992), and The Last of the Savages (1996). He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker And writes a monthly wine column for House and Garden. His new novel, Model Behavior, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in the fall of 1998. With his wife, Helen Bransford, and their twins, Maisie and Barrett, Mclnerney oscillates between New York City and Franklin, Tennessee.
• “Con Doctor” has its origins in a trip to a privately run prison outside of Nashville, Tennessee. A friend of mine, who was the prison doctor, invited me to spend a day making the rounds with him. I posed as an intern. It was an eye-opening and stomach-turning experience. The maladies and injuries described in the story were those we encountered over the course of the day. Whether I have done justice to the brooding malevolence of the place I can’t say.
Walter Mosley is the author of six best-selling Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, Devil in a Blue Dress, was filmed with Denzel Washington in the titular role. His work has been translated into twenty languages. Much of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, in which “Black Dog” first appeared, was initially published in Black Renaissance Noir, Buzz, Emerge, Esquire, GQ Los Angeles Times, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Story, and Whitney Museum. The central character and some elements of that book were converted into a filmscript by Mosley and televised by HBO. Born in Los Angeles, he now lives in New York City.
Born and raised in upstate New York, the setting for “Faithless” and much of her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is a professor of humanities at Princeton University and co-edits the Ontario Review with her husband, Raymond Smith. She is the author of a number of works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, she has published six mystery-suspense novels, including, most recently, Double Delight. A number of her stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and a story of hers was reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories 1997.
“Faithless” was originally imagined as a mysterious tale in which a family is haunted by the absence of a woman who, it eventually turns out, has never really been “absent.” For years in my notes I would come across this enigmatic situation. In time, it evolved into “Faithless,” which I’ve thought of as a miniature novel. At the heart of mystery is the profoundly obdurate, utterly stubborn and implacable refusal of certain individuals to see what is staring them in the face; and, if they’re forced to see, to deny it. This is called “faith” — “blind faith.” My alliance is with the doomed but defiant heroine of my story — and with “faithlessness.”
Peter Robinson was born in Castleford, Yorkshire. His first novel, Gallows View (1987), introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who has since appeared in eight more books and three short stories. Past Reason Hated, his fifth, won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel in 1992. Wednesday’s Child, the sixth, was nominated for an Edgar in 1995, and Innocent Graves, the eighth, also won the CWC Arthur Ellis Award. His short story “Innocence” won the CWC Award for Best Short Story. A collection of his short stories, Not Safe After Dark, is to be published by Crippen & Landru in the fall of 1998. He now lives in Toronto, where he occasionally teaches writing courses.
• Because I spend most of my time writing the Inspector Banks series, I find it especially liberating once in a while to try something different, and short stories provide the perfect outlet for this impulse. Though part of “The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage” takes place in Eastvale, Banks’s patch, it takes place in the fifties, before Banks was born, and it is far from being a police procedural. I have been a great Thomas Hardy fan for some years now, and this story has its origins in a visit my wife and I paid to the house in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, where Hardy was born and lived on and off until shortly after his marriage to Emma Gifford in 1874. We stood in the room where Hardy was cast aside as dead by the doctor who delivered him, only to be revived by a quick-thinking nurse. We also looked out on the same view he saw as he wrote his early books, up to Far from the Madding Crowd, and somehow the idea for a story about someone who actually knew Hardy began to form. It didn’t have a murder at that point — the crime came later — but it did have the two elements that most of my stories have in their early stages: a sense of place and an interesting character to explore. As it turned out, “The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage” became my first historical mystery.
Dave Shaw spent his youth playing baseball on a small field near his house in Loudonville, New York. He received his M.E.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and since then his stories have appeared in The Southern Anthology, The Quarterly, Southern Exposure, and many other magazines throughout the United States and abroad. His work has been awarded the Southern Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a Wurlitzer Foundation Grant. He lives with his wife in Pittsboro, North Carolina, where he plays on a slow-pitch softball team and is completing Cures for Gravity, a collection of stories.