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Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and twenty short story collections, numerous essays and articles, and scripts. He has edited or coedited more than thirty anthologies. His work has been filmed, turned into comics, and performed on the stage. His story "Bubba Hotep" was turned into a cult film. He has received numerous awards for his work, among them the Edgar, seven Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize, the Herodotus Award for Historical Fiction, the Inkpot Award for lifetime achievement in the field of comics, fantasy, and science fiction. He has had two New York Times Notable Books. A martial artist for forty-nine years, he is the founder of Lansdale's Shen Chuan, Martial Science, has been inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame four times, and owns a martial arts school in Nacogdoches, Texas. He teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he is writer in residence. Currently he is helping produce the low-budget film Christmas with the Dead, based on his story of the same name.

▪ I was born in Gladewater, Texas, and my first memory is of a house on a hill overlooking a honky-tonk, a highway, and a drive-in theater. My mother and I watched the drive-in from the windows of our house, and she told me what characters were saying. From then on I was hooked on storytelling and have often written about drive-ins and honky-tonks and the people who kept them in business. I began to learn boxing and wrestling from my father at an early age; he was forty-two years old when I was born. He could neither read nor write, but like my mother, who could, he was a great storyteller. He rode the rails during the Great Depression from one carnival to the next, where he wrestled or boxed for money. My mother encouraged my love for writing, my father my love for all manner of martial arts. I still practice them both. On my way to becoming a writer I've been an aluminum chair worker, farmer, field hand, bodyguard of sorts, and a janitor. I like writing and martial arts best. Follow me on Twitter. My handle is joelansdale.

Charles McCarry, born in 1930 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worldwide bestsellers, The Miernik Dossier (1973) and The Tears of Autumn (1975). He is the author of nine other novels, translated into more than thirty languages, and the author, coauthor, or editor of nine nonfiction books, in addition to short stories, poems, and about a million words of journalism in leading American and foreign magazines. As a young man he drafted speeches for a president, a presidential candidate, and other politicians. During the early Cold War, he spent an uninterrupted decade abroad as a CIA agent under deep cover. Later on he was the editor in charge of freelance operations at National Geographic and wrote the magazine's official history for its one hundredth anniversary in 1988. He and his wife, Nancy, married since 1953, live in south Florida in winter and the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts in summer.

▪ "The End of the String" is autobiographical in the sense that it closely reflects the atmosphere and, to a degree, the reality of some of the things I experienced as a secret agent fifty-odd years ago in Africa. As is true of most works of fiction, parts of this story are invented and parts of it are drawn from vivid memory. I knew places like Ndala and made friends with men like Benjamin, the leading character in this tale, and lived through episodes that were not so very different from the ones in this story. But there is no parallel Ndala or real Benjamin. They are, by design, different enough from the originals to give away no secrets. Even for writers who never took an oath of secrecy, fiction is, after all, what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly.

Dennis McFadden lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners in upstate New York. His collection of linked stories, Hart's Grove, was published in June 2010, and his fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including the Missouri Review, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, CutBank, and South Carolina Review.

▪ For a writer, the blessing of rejection is the opportunity it affords the rejected story to grow and develop. "Diamond Alley" was afforded ample opportunity. One of my earliest stories, it began as a simple vignette about a teenaged peeping Tom and the Voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates, but it underwent some serious evolution after that humble beginning. Over the years the characters and lore of the small, fictional town of Hart's Grove began to take shape and take over, insinuating themselves into the story from the roots up. "Diamond Alley" probably grew most and developed best, however, the day I decided to shift the narration to the first-person-plural point of view; then, instead of a man remembering a murder that had occurred when he was a boy, I had a Greek chorus singing a Greek tragedy.

As for the mystery in this story, it's not much different from the mystery in every story I write-mystery in the sense that we can never really know everything that is happening in our lives, or anything that will happen after them. It's just that this one is magnified by murder. But mysteries in fiction are seldom as insoluble as those in life, as most writers can't resist the lure of omniscience; given that, and given the nature of the linked collection, it's not surprising that the answer to the primary mystery of "Diamond Alley"- who do you suppose really killed her? -lies naked there in Hart's Grove for all who care to see.

Christopher Merkner's stories have recently appeared in Black Warrior Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, and Cincinnati Review. He teaches creative writing for the University of Colorado, Denver.

▪ "Last Cottage" started as a touching and lighthearted meditation on my youth and my hometown in Illinois. I don't know what went wrong. At some point it became clear that the story had no interest in being touching or lighthearted. Writing and rewriting, I could not drop the image of the carp that sucked the surface of the lakes and rivers near my hometown. I have so many good memories of my youth in northern Illinois, but those carp-those mouths gasping and sucking, those oily eyes rolling-kept returning instead. So I decided to kill them. "Last Cottage" followed. A huge thanks to Brock Clarke and the amazing people at the Cincinnati Review for their help and support and encouragement.

Andrew Riconda lives on City Island in the Bronx. His fiction has appeared in the Amherst Review, Criminal Class Review, Oyez Review, Phantasmagoria, Rio Grande Review, Watchword, and William and Mary Review. He is currently at work on a novel, The Three People I Had to Kill Last Year, featuring the protagonist of the story in this collection.

▪ "Heart Like a Balloon" was my first attempt at the mystery genre. Most of my stories are quirky tales about sad, alienated men-just without crimes, guns, paring knives, and the flayed skin. Like many of my characters, the narrator, Brian Rehill, is trying to remain God-oblivious in a world that just won't permit that. Speaking of deities, I like to think that one of the gods of quirky crime tales, Charles Willeford, might have enjoyed this story. Hail Hoke Moseley.

S. J. Rozan was born and raised in the Bronx and is a lifelong New Yorker. She's the author of eleven books in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, the most recent of which is Ghost Hero. She also has two standalones, Absent Friends and In This Rain, and three dozen short stories published in various periodicals and anthologies, including a number of "Best of the Year" collections. She has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity Awards for best novel, as well as the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and the Edgar for best short story. She lectures and teaches widely and runs an English-language writing workshop in the summers in Assisi, Italy. Visit www.sjrozan.com.