Geary Danihy was born in New Haven and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut He attended Notre Dame High School, spent two and a half years at West Point, requested release, got married, and six months later was back in the army at the Artillery OCS, in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Discharged in 1970, he attended the University of Idaho to complete his B.A. and then his M.A in English. After several jobs, he opened his own promotion agency, Culdan, which grew to include an advertising agency that handled the Jordache jeans account for two years. When the agency closed, he and his wife decided to take a chance and make a living “doing what we always wanted to do.” For her, that meant creating a company called Binky Botanika, which offers herbs, spices, and handmade bath and facial products. For me, that meant writing.
• “Jumping with Jim,” my first published story, is the result of my lifelong interest in the conflict between desire and duty. (I was raised on a steady diet of movies like High Noon, Beau Geste, Casablanca, and Captains Courageous.) My wife and I disagree over whether Conrad’s Lord Jim did the right thing by sacrificing his love for a “higher principle,” but we have no disagreement with Frank Taylor’s decision.
Jeffery Deaver, a former attorney and folksinger, is a Sew York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels. He has been nominated for four Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America (two for his short stories) and is a two-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award for Best Short Story of the Year. His book A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector, starring Denzel Washington, was a feature release from Universal Pictures. His most recent novels are The Devil’s Teardrop, The Empty Chair, and Speaking in Tongues. He lives in Virginia and California.
• Rarely do I write novels or stories based on actual occurrences, but “Triangle” is one that I did extract from real life. I lived in Manhattan for a number of years, and now that I am a resident of the sort-of South (outside-the-Beltway D.C.), I find myself returning to New York with some frequency. One summer day, en route north, I stood at the United Airlines gate at Dulles Airport and watched a tiny drama unfold — it involved a mother and stepfather seeing off a young boy, flying to the city, presumably to spend the weekend with his natural father. The boy was upset, the mother bored, and the stepfather pleased, possibly looking forward to some rime without the youngster at home. A psychologist undoubtedly could find in this sad scenario a number of insights about dysfunctional families and the anger of youth. The mind not being my forte, however, I decided to turn the situation into a story more aligned with one of my specialties: murder.
Edward Falco is the author of the hypertext novel A Dream with Demons, the print novel Winter in Florida, and the short story collections Plato at Scratch Daniel’s and Acid. Acid won the Richard Sullivan Prize and was a finalist for the Patterson Prize. His stories have been widely published in journals, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, Playboy, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly. Annual anthologies that have selected his stories include The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Erotica, and The Pushcart Prize.
• “The Instruments of Peace” is a story that emerges out of the years I spent working with racehorses, first as a farmhand in Wallkill, New York, later as groom in Orlando, Florida, and finally as a trainer at Monticello Raceway in the Catskill Mountains, where my career ended ignominiously after I bought a yearling with bone spurs and my one and only moneymaker bowed a tendon. Having failed as a horseman, I retreated to the quiet of academia, where I have since consoled myself with writing.
Tom Franklin won the 1999 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story for his novella “Poachers,” the title piece of his first book, published in 1999. The novella also appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 1999 and The Best American Mystery Stones of the Century. Franklin, from Dickinson, Alabama, now lives in Galesburg, Illinois, with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly. He is currently working on a novel, Hell at the Breech.
I worked at a plant very much like the one in “Grit” for over four years, frequently on the night shift, during my early twenties. Nowadays, when I tell people about the grit factory, they often think it’s grits, the kind you eat. I tell them no, no, it’s sandblasting grit. At the plant, I ran the front-end loader and the forklift, unloaded slag from railcars, and loaded hundred-pound bags (for which I’m still seeing a chiropractor).
“Grit” is dedicated to the great bunch of guys I knew there: my uncle. D Bradford, who got me the job; Steve Sheffield: Bryan Ward: Roy Simon: Robert Evans; and the plant manager. Jim Seidenfaden. Uncle D, Bryan, and Jim still work at the plant; Robert is out owing to a back injury; and Roy died a few years ago.
David Edgerley Gates grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His earliest influences were Kipling and Stevenson, Puck of Pook’s Hill and Treasure Island, which his father read aloud to him, but what he first read on his own was the Hardy Boys mysteries and Carl Barks’s Donald Duck adventures in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock, A Matter of Crime, and Story. An earlier mystery featuring Placido Geist, “Sidewinder,” was a Shamus nominee for 1998. Gates lives in Santa Fe.
• “Compass Rose” is the fifth story I’ve written with Placido Geist. In the first story, he wasn’t even introduced until about a third of the way in, and I didn’t realize at the time he was going to be the hero. I underestimated him at first appearance, just like everybody else.
The ghost of Sam Peckinpah inhibits these bounty-hunter stories because of the period, and because I’m trying for an elegiac quality but without making it too obtrusive. Placido Geist is himself an unsentimental sort.
Robert Girardi is the author of three novels — Madeleine’s Ghost, The Pirate’s Daughter, and Vaporetto 13 — and one collection of novellas, A Vaudeville of Devils: Seven Moral Tales, from which the selection in this volume is drawn. He is a native of Washington, D.C., but spent a good portion of his youth in Europe, an experience reflected in the international settings of much of his fiction. He lives in Washington with his wife, the poet and mystery writer Linda Girardi, and their two children, Benjamin Oliver and Charlotte Rose. He can be reached at 1girardi@aol. com.
• I’ve always been amused by the various goofy ways there are to die, and to my mind falling out of or off of a building has always had an element of comic absurdity. I’ve also long wanted to write an anti-Grisham lawyer story in which the lawyer is not only incompetent but utterly mistaken regarding the guilt or innocence of his client — and I suppose from these two slightly ridiculous impulses “The Defenestration of Aba Sid” was born.