She is a past president of Sisters in Crime and current secretary of the International Association of Crime Writers, North America.
• Although I keep a file of short story ideas, I often plunder from my life experience. The character of Olivia Brown first appeared in a short story, “The House on Bedford Street,” and came from my youthful determination to be a writer and my admiration for Edna St. Vincent Millay.
I wrote “You Don’t Know Me” in response to an invitation to submit an erode noir story for the anthology Flesh and Blood. Fuhgeddaboudit. Erotic noir is not my style. But wait, wasn’t I a writer, and shouldn’t the writer continue to surprise the writer?
“You Don’t Know Me” came from my file of ideas. It had been on the edge of my consciousness for years and came surging out as if it were waiting to be told. This was the first time I’d written from a male point of view. It had to be that way, because it was his story.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of suspense and psychological horror, including most recently the novella Beasts and, under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, the novels The Barrens, Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon, and Double Delight. Her suspense and crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. She lives in New Jersey and is professor of humanities at Princeton.
• “The High School Sweetheart” was inspired by my uneasy sense that those of us who write, and perhaps even those of us who read, crime fiction are in some ambiguous way moral accomplices to evil. To celebrate the master crime writer is to celebrate the artful appropriation of violence that, in “reality,” would appall and terrify us. Yet, such actions are redeemed through “art.” (Or are they?)
Robert B. Parker lives in Cambridge with his wife, Joan. They have two sons, David, a choreographer, and Daniel, an actor. Parker is the author of more than forty novels and two short stories, the second of which is “Harlem Nocturne.” A novel based on “Harlem Nocturne” should appear in perhaps 2004.
• When I was a small boy living in western Massachusetts, Sunday baseball was not broadcast from Boston, so my father listened to the Dodger games on WHN, which came to us straight up the Connecticut Valley. That is why I was a near terminal Dodger fan when Jackie Robinson came to the Dodgers in April 1947. I never saw it, but I remember it as if I did. The dark skin and the white uniform. The bright green grass, and Red Barber’s marvelous Southern voice remarking carefully that Jackie was “very definitely brunette.” I thought then that Jackie Robinson was one of the great men of the twentieth century. I have not changed my mind.
“Harlem Nocturne” is based on no actual event that I know of. It came about because Otto Penzler asked me for a short story for his baseball anthology, and I couldn’t think of one, so I asked Joan and she said, “You know so much about old-time baseball. Why don’t you write about that?” So I did.
Southern Californian F. X. Toole wrote for forty years before being published at age sixty-nine in ZYZZYVA, the San Francisco literary magazine. Having that first short story accepted, Toole considered himself a success, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel.
Since then, his book of short stories, Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner was published — first in England, then in the United States. Translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese, Rope Burns received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction in 2000 and was also chosen by the New York Times as one of its Twenty Memorable Books of that year. “Midnight Emissions” is Toole’s first venture into the world of whodunits.
• Though I wrote “Midnight Emissions” in the first person, I considered it a dry run for a third-person novel I wanted to set in the boxing world of Los Angeles and San Antonio, Pound for Pound. I say “dry run” because I felt that if I could get my Texans right in “Midnight Emissions,” then I might also have a good shot at getting them right in the novel. Pound for Pound is at 120 K at this point, only now I’m stuck with Texans and prune-pickers who won’t shut the fuck up.
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Daniel Waterman is a writer and editor who now resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This is his first published story.
• Skeet’s tale, his condition, recuperation, and evolution into the brute he becomes erupted from me over the span of a few weeks I spent alone in a four-bedroom ranch house, barren of furniture, in Alabama, knowing not a soul, waiting for a new chapter in my life to begin. Skeet’s history and path seemed clear to me but meant nothing in themselves until I painted him with some redemptive features and paired him with a family, or at least a few individuals capable of loving him. And then it became their story ever so much as Skeet’s.
I’ve found it interesting that although many friends, family, and colleagues have read the story, only one has ever asked, “What, exactly, happens to Skeet?” It’s a fair question — I’m the first to admit that what actually happens to Skeet in the end is ambiguous — but one with an annoying and unsatisfactory answer. All I can really say is that I leave Skeet’s fate to the reader’s imagination. Though I have a fairly clear idea myself, I’m not sure the answer is all that important. Skeet is a golem of sorts — not without heart or thought — yet stands for a part of us that becomes leaden. And though a multitude of mysteries surround Skeet — how he becomes the man he does, what accounts for his obsessive need to collect such an improbable fauna, what it signifies that he must destroy life to hold onto it — the principal mystery seems to me to be the fate of the narrator: In molting from one life to another, what has he lost or gained, how will he resolve any feelings of guilt or betrayal, and how will he contend with an unanchored sense of self that might abide for a lifetime unresolved?
Scott Wolven is a graduate student at Columbia University, where he’s finishing an MFA in creative writing. He is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories and lives in New York City with his wife. His stories have appeared in HandHeldCrime, Plots with Guns, Crossconnect, the Mississippi Review on-line, Permafrost, and Thrilling Detective.
• “The Copper Kings” is one of several stories I’ve written about these characters, and I’m sure I’ll keep them together for a few more. I lived in Idaho for a while, and it’s a beautiful and hard-boiled setting for all types of things. I like big dogs and sometimes put them in my stories. The phrase “copper kings” originated as a reference to the 1880s businessmen who owned the huge copper mines in Anaconda and Butte, Montana. More recently, Butte had a minor league baseball team named the Copper Kings. I really liked it as a title.
It also allowed me to run a loose, obscure thread through the story. One of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories is “The Copper Beeches,” where Holmes and Watson take a short trip through the English countryside by train. When Watson says he likes the country, Holmes replies that it terrifies him, much as Greg admits that farms scare him on the drive toward Ryan’s. Holmes describes potential crimes in the country as “deeds of hellish cruelty,” and I thought about that as I wrote the story.