I like to write stories about life’s losers who sometimes become winners just once before the end. Like the men do in “The Cobalt Blues.”
Stuart M. Kaminsky was born, raised, and grew damned cold in the winters of Chicago. He has, for the past dozen years, lived in the warmth of Sarasota, Florida, where he writes novels, short stories, movies, teleplays, comic books, and poetry and plays softball three days a week when he isn’t on the road. Winner of the MWA Edgar for Best Novel in 1989, he has been nominated for six Edgars in three categories. His series characters include 1940s private eye Toby Peters, Russian policeman Porfiry Rostnikov, Chicago policeman Abe Lieberman, and Sarasota process server Lew Fonesca. He has also written two original Rockford Files novels. His screen credits include Once upon a Time in America: Enemy Territory, and Hidden Fears. His teleplay Immune to Murder was shown on A&E’s Nero Wolfe Mysteries.
• “Sometimes Something Goes Wrong” was a first for me, an experiment. I wanted to see how quickly I could make a story move, a story in which I had no idea of what was going to happen, a story in which I started with two men in a parking lot and wrote in furious fascination to find out what they were doing there and what would happen to them. I always know who my characters are and what will happen in my novels and short stories. In this case, I had no idea and I had a great time. I plan to do it again and soon.
Joe R. Lansdale was born in Gladewater, Texas, on October 28, 1951. He left college when he decided his main interest was writing, and he worked a variety of jobs, including farming and janitorial work, while writing in his spare time. He became a full-time writer in 1981, producing more than two hundred short stories, articles, and essays, as well as more than twenty novels and several short story collections.
He is well known for his series of crime/suspense adventures featuring Hap Collins and Leonard Fine. Mucho Mojo, a New York Times Notable Book, has been scripted for film by Oscar winner Ted Tally.
A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has won numerous awards, including an Edgar for The Bottoms, six Bram Stokers, and the Critic’s Choice Award.
• In my early twenties my wife and I owned a mule. I used the mule for plowing. We bought some land with a nice pond and plenty of grass, but we didn’t move there. We planned to, but never made it. We ended up selling the land and moving somewhere else.
But when we thought we were going to move there, we moved our mule to our land while we made plans. I went over every day to feed it, pet it, trim its hooves, make sure it was okay.
One day it was gone.
Mule rustlers.
Really.
Many years later, I got to thinking about that, the fate of my old stolen mule. About the same time I was feeling nostalgic, I came across an article about criminals who cruised neighborhoods looking for things to steal.
That’s when I came up with my boys here. And their plan to steal a mule. I decided to make them like some old boys I’d known while growing up. Not exactly nuclear scientists. Not exactly sanitation engineers, either. More like crash test dummies.
Guys who wanted quick money, and though not exactly evil, not exactly a boon to the universe either. This welded to other things I had read, experienced, heard about. This story resulted.
Keep your mules locked up.
Edgar and Emmy-winning novelist Michael Malone, critically acclaimed as one of the country’s finest novelists, has also written books of fiction and nonfiction, essays, reviews, short stories, and television screenplays. Often compared to Dickens for his comic vision and the breadth of his fictional landscape, over the past quarter-century he has introduced readers to a gallery of memorable Southern characters in such novels as Handling Sin, Dingley Falls, and Foolscap, as well as in the internationally praised mystery trilogy Uncivil Seasons, Times Witness, and First Lady, narrated by wisecracking Southern police chief Cuddy R. Mangum and his aristocratic homicide detective Justin Savile V.
Educated at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard, Malone has taught at Yale, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at Swarthmore. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy
After a long (perhaps too long) exile in television, he has returned to the novel and to his native South. He now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, chair of the English department at Duke University.
• “Maniac Loose” first appeared in the anthology Confederacy of Crime. Its sardonic heroine, Lucy, who could give even the most ruthless a lesson in how to get away with murder, is one of the twelve Southern women of my new short story collection, Red Clay, Blue Cadillac.
Fred Melton lives in Wenatchee, Washington, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two sons, Matthew and Andrew. He is a full-time dentist whose writing has been published in Talking River Review, California Quarterly, Black Canyon Quarterly, as well as other publications, and is to appear in the forthcoming anthology Scent of Cedar. His story “Counting” has also earned a 2001 Pushcart Prize nomination. Melton’s poetry and prose have been honored in the following contests: Pacific Northwest Writers Association (short stories 1996, 1997, and 1998), Seattle Writers Association Writers in Performance (1998–2001), and Washington Poets Association (2000).
Melton has lived in Spain, taken a fling at American bull riding, is fluent in Spanish, and holds a second-degree black belt in karate. He also holds a fly rod in his hand as much as possible.
• One October day, I took our younger son, Andrew, deer hunting in eastern Washington. While walking the windswept bluffs overlooking the Palouse River, we met a middle-aged wheat farmer with a stocky build and dust-caked hair. Although initially irritated by our presence, he eventually granted us permission to hunt on his property — provided we stayed clear of his grain silos. When I later learned of this farmer’s lifelong bachelorhood, he became the seed for “Counting.”
As I wrote about Uncle Keven, I began to see a man for whom justice and revenge were convictions connected at a gut level. I also discovered a man to whom fate refused to deal a fair hand; yet, he remained fiercely loyal to the thing that mattered most to him — family.
Born in New York, raised on a chicken farm in New Jersey, Annette Meyers came running back to Manhattan as soon as she could. Using her long history on both Broadway and Wall Street, she wrote The Big Killing, the first of seven mysteries featuring Wall Street headhunters Xenia Smith and former dancer Leslie Wetzon. The eighth is near completion. Her novel Free Love, set in Greenwich Village in 1920, introduced poet Olivia Brown and her bohemian friends. Murder Me Now followed in 2001.
With her husband, Martin Meyers, using the pseudonym Maan Meyers, she has written six historical mysteries in the Dutchman series, set in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century New York. In February 2001, Meyers and her husband were the subjects of a feature on their life and work for CBS-TV’s Sunday Morning.