In writing the story, I ended up doing far more research than reading that initial history. I even tracked down a tourist’s map from the 1850s with fold-out views of the city (this I found in the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections). The story became a novella. Then it became the first section of a novel. And then, after five years, it became a story again. I didn’t plan it that way-it was a blind search all the way through-but it took that long process of growing and cutting away and leaving the story aside and coming back to it for it to finally become what it needed to be.
Hannah Tinti’s story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award. Hannah is also cofounder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine and received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in magazine editing. Recently she joined the Public Radio program Selected Shorts as its literary commentator.
• I based “Bullet Number Two” on an experience I had while driving through the Four Corners. I got caught in a dust storm, just as Hawley does in the story, and had to pull over at a strange motel run by Navajos. There wasn’t a shootout, but my room did have a hole punched through the wall. The storm was wild, and the sand and the colors and the light of the desert in the morning stayed with me. I’m grateful to Tin House for taking a chance and running this story, and to Best American Mystery Stories for giving it a second life.
Maurine Dallas Watkins (1896 -1969) wrote the 1926 play Chicago, on which the musical is based. Winner of six Tonys and a Best Picture Oscar for the 2002 film, Watkins based her Broadway-bound play on the newspaper articles that she wrote as a young crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune while covering the sensationalist murder trials that rocked 1920s Chicago. Her tongue-in-cheek features on the “beautiful murderesses” turned media darlings were the inspiration for Chicago’s Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. Watkins wrote several other plays, including the long-lost Revelry, about the scandal-ridden White House of President Warren G. Harding, and the acidly cynical farce So Help Me God!, which received its first production in 2009, eighty years after its creation. She wrote or contributed to several films, including two Best Picture nominees, Libeled Lady and Up the River, as well as such screwball comedies as Professional Sweethearts, No Man of Her Own, and I Love You Again.
About the Editor
LISA SCOTTOLINE is the New York Times best-selling writer and Edgar Award-winning author of more than twenty novels, including stand-alone works like Don’t Go and her most recent novel in the iconic Rosato & Associates crime series, Accused. Scottoline has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America. She also writes a weekly humor column, “Chick Wit,” with her daughter Francesca Serritella for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and these columns have been collected into a series of nonfiction books.
