Michael Connelly is the author of eleven published novels and one short story. His novels included the Harry Bosch series as well as The Poet, Blood Work, and Void Moon. A former journalist who specialized in crime, he was the recipient of numerous journalism awards before he realized they meant nothing and he devoted himself full-time to writing fiction. He spends most of his time in California and Florida.
• I’m not a practitioner of the short story. For years I fended off inquiries, requests, and demands for a short story. I simply liked the long form better and arrogantly felt small stories were made from small ideas. I figured I was a big-idea man. Of course, I was wrong. But I did not realize this until Otto Penzler cornered me and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. A short story about baseball. I nodded. Yeah, I could try that. Nothing is as big and as small at the same time as baseball. I had never played the game on any organized level, but once I moved to Los Angeles I fell in love with watching the Dodgers. I worked out many a plot point between innings at Dodger Stadium. For me it is a place of Zen in a sea of chaos. The seminal moment in modern Dodger history was Kirk Gibson’s home run in the ’88 series. A moment of wonderful joy before the dark times that followed. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t afford it. I actually saw it while standing on a sidewalk on Melrose Avenue and watching with a crowd through a doorway into a sushi bar. After the ball sailed over the wall and the game belonged to the Dodgers, the sidewalk crowd exploded, people running every which way and into the street to tell perfect strangers the news. I was one of them. It seemed like nothing could be wrong in the city that night.
Thomas H. Cook is the author of sixteen novels and two works of nonfiction. He has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award three times in three different categories; his novel The Chatham School Affair won for Best Novel in 1996. He has also been nominated for the Hammett Prize, as well as the Macavity Award. His short story “Fatherhood” won the Herodotus Prize and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 1999, edited by Ed McBain.
• I wrote my first short story while working as a contributing editor and book critic for Atlantic Monthly. I’d never attempted such a thing before but was pleasantly surprised to discover that writing a short story gave me the same feeling of satisfaction as reading one. As a writer, I particularly liked that the payoff, that final moment toward which you have been moving all along, came much sooner in a short story than in a novel, and, with it, the sense of creative completion.
As a reader, I find that a short story is like a brief encounter, intense and highly charged, yet capable of lingering in the heart for a long, long time. In “The Fix” I strove for that intensity and resonance by using boxing, and particularly the battered nobility of a long-maligned fighter, to suggest the daily “fixes” that beckon us, the erosion of character that inevitably accompanies our acceptance of them, and finally the dreadful, dawning truth that corruption may know every pleasure save that of self-respect.
Sean Doolittle’s debut novel, Dirt, a crime thriller set in and around a crooked Los Angeles funeral home, was selected as one of the 100 Best Books of 2001 by the editors of Amazon.com. Doolittle lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife, Jessica, and daughter, Kate. He is working on his next novel and any short stories that tug on his sleeve.
• I imagine that most people, at one time or another, have probably experienced some version of the same gut-level fear: the fear of losing ability. I’ve heard writers say that they’ll never live long enough to write all the ideas they have floating around in their heads. Personally, I’ve never suffered from this affliction. I tend to be the type who wonders, after putting each idea to paper, if I’ll ever have another one. It wasn’t until after I finished “Summa Mathematica” that I began to suspect that this particular anxiety doesn’t really have all that much to do with writing.
As for this story: I was remodeling our basement (another story), trying to figure board feet or something, when I realized it had been so long since I’d done any math beyond using a high-powered PC to balance the checkbook that I had actually forgotten most of the multiplication tables I’d memorized in grade school. This bugged me a little in principle, but not that much overall. I never knew ’em all that well anyway, and I always hated math. But I remember thinking something like, “If you held a gun to my head, I couldn’t times these fractions.” Stephen Fielder wasn’t far behind that thought.
A former reporter and restaurant critic, Michael Downs learned to write fiction at the University of Arkansas’s graduate programs in creative writing, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He has published short stories in half a dozen literary reviews, including the Georgia Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Willow Springs. This is the second of his stories to appear in The Best American Mystery Stories series; “Prison Food” appeared in the 2001 edition. Downs lives and writes in Montana, where he is at work on two books, both set in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. One is a collection of short stories; the other is a book of nonfiction, supported by a grant from The Freedom Forum.
• One snowy Easter morning when I was a boy of eleven or twelve, my family awoke to find police cars clogging our dead-end street. It was not long before we learned that our neighbor had killed his wife and their two dogs. I had liked the neighbors, and I had especially liked their dogs. This was when we lived in a small town in Vermont. Later in the afternoon that Easter Sunday, a reporter from the Rutland Herald rang our doorbell, but my father declined to say anything about our neighbors out of what I took to be a sense of propriety. Years later I became a reporter, and whenever I got frustrated that people wouldn’t talk to me, I tried to remember my father’s perspective. That dual vision — and, in general, the complicated needs of any reporter and any witness (in specific, my reporter and Dudek) — infuses “Man Kills Wife, Two Dogs.” I first tried to set the story in Vermont, mimicking my childhood experience, but as is often the case, fact could not accommodate fiction. Once I moved the story to Hartford and made Dudek my character (instead of a man like my father), imagination and story rocked loose. In truth, I know no more of what happened on that morning of my boyhood than Dudek knows about the murders in his landlord’s apartment.
Brendan DuBois is a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, where he received his B.A. in English from the University of New Hampshire. A former newspaper reporter, he has been writing fiction for nearly twenty years and still lives in his native state with his wife, Mona. He is the author of the Lewis Cole mystery series — Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, and Killer Waves — and his fourth novel, Resurrection Day, a look at what might have happened had the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted into World War III, received the Sidewise Award in 2000 for Best Alternative History Novel. He is currently working on two new novels and has had more than sixty short stories published in Playboy, Mary Higgins Clark Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
His short stories have been extensively anthologized in the United States and abroad. He has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for Best Mystery Short Story of the year, and he has been nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his short fiction three times. Visit his Web site at www.BrendanDuBois.com.