As the end of the year approached, I was looking for the best original mysteries of the year; I could not ignore the books I edited nor the authors who wrote for them. Sure enough, they produced some of the best mystery stories of the year, and several of these stories will be found on these pages, as Ellroy agreed that they were outstanding and deserved to be here.
The danger of having too many stories on a single theme is that a collection can seem to be too heavily weighted with a single type of story. Find three boxing mysteries in one book and you’re going to think there’s an awful lot of boxing around here. The same would be true if there were great anthologies about perfume or blues or zebras (there are already too damned many about cats, if you ask me).
This is not an apology, mind you, but an explanation. The fact of the matter is that the boxing stories in this book are truly wonderful, and so are the baseball stories. If anything, I may have been a bit tougher on some of the authors who wrote for those anthologies because I was overly aware of their origins. In this year’s anthology — there’s no getting around it — you will get a disparate number of sports stories. However, I believe they are among the most original and memorable stories that have ever appeared in the six years of this series.
One more thing. The only criterion for selecting a story for this book is the excellence of the writing. Last year’s book contained stories by only a handful of authors with whom I was familiar. It’s different this year, as some of fiction’s greatest names appear between these covers. When you read these triumphs of superb prose, you will instantly see that they are here because of how good they are, not because of who wrote them.
Enormous thanks and gratitude go to James Ellroy for taking the time to work so dedicatedly on this volume. His introduction conveys a great deal with the same alliterative and flamboyant flair that distinguishes his other work, most recently The Cold Six Thousand, which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list last year.
And of course, thanks to my colleague, Michele Slung, the world’s best reader, without whom this annual volume would require three years to complete. She culls the mystery fiction from all the magazines and books with original fiction all year long so that I can read the likely suspects and bring the list down to the top fifty, from which the guest editor then selects the final twenty.
Despite reading every general consumer magazine and hundreds of smaller periodicals, as well as books and the electronic publishing sites that offer original fiction, we live in fear that, unlikely as it may be, we’ll miss a worthy story. Therefore, if you are an author, editor, publisher, or someone who cares about one and would like to submit a story, you are encouraged to do so. A tearsheet or the entire publication is fine.
To be eligible, a story must have been written by an American or Canadian and first published in a U.S. or Canadian book or periodical during the calendar year 2002. If it was initially published in electronic format, you must submit a hard copy. The earlier in the year I receive a story, the more I’m inclined to welcome it with a happy heart, since reading more than a hundred stories when the rest of the world is celebrating Christmas and the entire holiday season (as occurred last year) makes me very Scrooge-like.
Please send submissions to Otto Penzler, The Mysterious Bookshop, 129 West 56th Street, New York, New York 10019. Thanks.
O.P.
Introduction
The short story is the novel writ small. It’s reduced for revelation. Its features are epiphany and lives in sharp duress. Miniaturization is difficult. It’s the watchmaker’s trade revised for words.
I prefer the form of the novel. I dig the short story dictum of “every word counts” in concert with the sweep of lives in deep duress. I’ve written twelve novels and an equal number of short stories. The novels required years of work. The short stories required more time per page, more time per sentence, more time per word. An editor friend dragged me into the craft. I’m glad he did.
The short story balances narrative line and characterization and limits the scope of plot. The short story form teaches the novelist to conceive more simply and condense the payoff. The short story form taught me to think more surely and directly. The short story form taught me to assume the reader’s perspective and curtail my reliance on plot. The short story form taught me to gauge thematically and employ brevity to make my characters pop.
My editor friend brought me to the medium kicking and screaming. I owed him favors. My commitment to the short story paid off the debt. The debt proved to be a gift disguised as hard work. The short story is the novelist’s alternative universe. It’s a respite from sustained concentration and a crash course in concentrating that much harder in the moment. It’s a reprieve from the vast borders of scope and a primer on scope contained. It’s the watchmaker’s trade taught to architects and large-scale engineers.
Plot and character must merge and meld quickly. Revelation must grab and hold hard. A world must build from overt phrase and implication. Balance must fall perfectly.
The mystery short story is a craft within a craft. The necessity for plot makes that balance tough. Mystery fiction is crime fiction. Crime fiction is mainstream fiction possessed of superior story-line and equal character-development skill. Casting plot-nets wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide is relatively easy. Constricting them to short story dimensions makes a novelist hurt. Yeah — but the hurt is so goooooooood.
Concision. Precision. Distill the essence or succumb to your reader’s derision. Sting with story, rap with revelation, plotz with your plots.
You can’t languor with language. You can’t dither in discourse. You can’t indulge idle idylls. You have to see, select, say.
The form liberates as it impinges. Crime and mystery fiction has always celebrated the extraordinary more than the prosaic. Personal honor and corruption. Societies divided. Murder as moral default. The Big Themes of crime and mystery fiction maul mainstream minimalism and minutiae. They enrapture, edify, entertain. They often orbit in orgiastic excess. They muddle as murky melodrama. They occasionally log in as literature — vibrant and vulgarized.
The crime and mystery novel is that extraordinary world captured large. The mystery short story is that world microscopically magnified.
A writer’s skill skirts that orbit of excess. Righteous writers wrangle with murky melodrama and writhe their way out alive. Crime and mystery fiction dissects and extols larger-than-life events. It’s a trap and an option to fly.
Bad crime and mystery novels meander in murk. Their depictions of large events play preposterous and make minimalism look good. Bad mystery short stories are contrivances undermined by their size. They waft wickedly worse as wastes of the watchmaker’s trade.
Yeah — but when they’re good, you get everything.
Bam — deft psychology meets a crystallized time and place. Bam — you’re someplace all new. Pop — there’s the surface of lives in stasis. Pop — they’re not what they seem.
You get a mystery. It may or may not pertain to a crime. You get that time and place laid out in layers. You get suspense and surprise. You watch characters ascend and deep-six. Fear fillets you. Heartbreak and hurt hammer home. The story is short. It may be densely packed for its size. It may hinge on a simple conceit or premise. You’re wrapped up rapidemente.