Frederick Waterman is a former journalist and sportswriter who worked for newspapers in Connecticut and New Hampshire and for United Press International. His assignments included coverage of murder trials, presidential campaigns, the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and Wimbledon. He also worked as a drama critic in New York and Boston. “Best Man Wins” is the sixteenth story in the “Row 22, Seats A & B” short-story series, which appears in United Air Lines’ in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, and at Row22.com.
• When I read a short story, I want it to be compelling from the start, so that I must know what happens. I want the writing to be clean and clear, I want the writer to have a voice that is so distinct I can almost hear the words being spoken out loud, and those words should have a rhythm and cadence that seem to carry the reader along. I want the story to have themes that I will find myself thinking about later and characters I’d recognize if they walked into the room — not because of their appearance, but because I’d understand who they are and why. Those are the things I admire in a good short story, and that is what I sought in “Best Man Wins.”
Timothy Williams is a native Kentuckian and a graduate of the M.F.A. program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His fiction has appeared in the Greensboro, Colorado, Cimarron, and Texas Reviews and in several other literary quarterlies. A short story collection and a crime novel are now with his agent and should be landing on editorial desks soon. He currently lives in Murray, Kentucky, with his wife, Sherraine, and two children, Carson and Madelyn, and teaches creative writing and humanities at Murray State University.
• “Something About Teddy” was inspired by a long, monotonous drive on an interstate with my wife. During the trip, she decided to pass the time by analyzing my personality. Her diagnosis? Being married to me is like being married to two men — one who craves order and meaning, another who thrives on chaos. That was enough to spark my imagination, and I began to wonder what would happen if you locked the two into a car and put murder on their agenda. Somewhere along the line, I realized that theirs was a love story with an inevitable ending. I’d also like to thank Neil Smith at Plots with Guns both for publishing my story and for providing a place on the Web where hardboiled and noir fans like myself can indulge our passion.
Scott Wolven is the author of Controlled Burn, a collection of short stories published by Scribner. Wolven’s appearance in the 2004 edition marks the third consecutive year his stories have been selected for The Best American Mystery Stories series. He has taught creative writing at Binghamton University (SUNY) and attended graduate school at Columbia University.
• “El Rey” is about hard work, boxing, and murder — a real action story. I grew up in Catskill, New York, so boxing and boxers were all around, including the Champ, Mike Tyson. I read once that “action can be inscrutable... and desperately concealing. As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease,” but grows. Eudora Welty wrote that (along with her own fine stories), and she was a Ross Macdonald fan. So she knew about the increase of mystery through action, especially around dangerous characters like Tom Kennedy, and I thought about it as I wrote the story. In fairness to the setting, if you’re ever in the real St. Johnsbury, Vermont, visit the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, on Main Street. A true American treasure.
This story is dedicated to Tom Sahagian, the straight shooter. To all the men and women in our armed forces. Special thanks to Randy Duax at lostinfront.com, Denise Baton at Mystcrical-E, Susan Strehle, Ruth Stanek, Stefanie Czebiniak, Jaimee Wriston Colbert, Colin Harrison, Sloan Harris, Ray Morrison, Alex Cussen, M & DW, and the super team at WSBW.
Angela Zeman was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, where her widowed mother brought her up mostly within the public library. She attended various colleges, the most distinguished being the Heron School of Art in Indiana. Having loved books all her life, she decided to learn to write at the age of thirty-five. Since then, as per the exasperated observation of her beloved friend and writing mentor, the late Gary Provost — “Like me, you want to write everything” — she began writing her first short story to distract her mind during a two-day car trip home from a Florida vacation. The car was full of children, some not her own. The car’s driver was an unstable and violent man who had just discovered her secret: that she intended to divorce him. Potboiler indeed.
• Years later, Cathleen Jordan phoned from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to buy that story. “The Witch and the Fishmonger’s Wife.” My first sale! That story, however, was not my first attempt at writing. My earliest effort had been a novel about a female assassin-for-hire who only murdered husbands. (Are you detecting something here?) Although my protagonist did a superior job of eliminating nine, for some reason no one would buy that book. Thankfully, I’ve since sold many short stories and a different novel. That unsold book, however, began my fascination with a theme I seem compelled to explore in all my fiction, including this anthology’s “Green Heat.” Not that husbands are evil; I adore my current one. But that any relationship — among family or with the most vile stranger — can lead to terror, unexpected tenderness, or even a laugh. We humans, the planet’s most imaginative connivers, endlessly validate my theory that we had no business living in the Garden of Eden in the first place.