Maxim Jakubowski, Lee Child, Peter Tremayne, Paul Johnston, Christopher Fowler, Martin Edwards, Col Bury, Barbara Nadel, Amy Myers, Ian Ayris, Nick Quantrill, Lisa Tuttle, Steve Mosby, Phil Lovesey, Claire Seeber, Simon Brett, Peter Turnbull, Carol Anne Davis, Richard Godwin, Margaret Murphy, Sally Spedding, Edward Marston, Paula Williams, Tony Black, Nina Allan, Paul D. Brazill, Jane Casey, L. C. Tyler, Cath Staincliffe, Barry Maitland, Christine Poulson, Roger Busby, Judith Cutler, John Harvey, Keith McCarthy, Bernie Crosthwaite, Ann Cleeves, Sarah Rayne, Adrian McKinty, Joel Lane, Stella Duffy, Ken Bruen, Alison Littlewood, Neil Gaiman
The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10
Copyright © Maxim Jakubowski, 2013
INTRODUCTION
FOR TEN YEARS now it’s been my privilege to edit this collection of short stories presenting the best of British crime and mystery fiction, and I’ve been afforded the opportunity of publishing over 400 stories by some of the most outstanding writers in our field. Almost all the “big” names amongst our local authors in the British Isles (and beyond, as some have moved to the Antipodes during the course of the series’ career) have been included in our pages: Ian Rankin, Derek Raymond, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Simon Kernick, Peter James, Reginald Hill, John Mortimer, Alexander McCall Smith, Andrew Taylor, Anne Perry, Roger Jon Ellory, Liza Cody, amongst others, and it has been a pleasure to feature them.
Stories published in The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime Volume 10 have won some of the most prestigious awards in the field, including the Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger, the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award and the Anthony Award, while countless others have featured on the respective shortlists.
The present volume is no exception as it features Peter Turnbull’s Edgar-winning story, Margaret Murphy and Cath Staincliffe’s CWA Dagger Short Story joint winners, and a further two shortlisted tales from diverse awards. In addition, Lee Child makes a welcome new appearance and an old friend of mine, Neil Gaiman, with whom I used to sit on the SF Foundation committee meetings in the years when he wasn’t quite as famous as he is now, also makes his debut, with a delightful Sherlockian tale, miles away from his more customary and splendid worlds of fantasy.
Other return offenders, and most welcome they are as ever, include Paul Johnston, Edward Marston, Judith Cutler, John Harvey, Amy Myers, Christopher Fowler, Simon Brett, Peter Tremayne, Ken Bruen, Barbara Nadel, Martin Edwards, Barry Maitland, Adrian McKinty, Ann Cleeves, Phil Lovesey, and countless other regulars. But again, one of my greatest reasons for pride in the series is the fact that I’m able to introduce new writers who, in all likelihood, will also become household names in the years to come: take your bow, Nina Allan, Claire Seeber, Joel Lane, Lisa Tuttle (whose excellent writing in other fields is not to be missed), Paula Williams, Roger Busby (a veteran on the comeback trail), Jane Casey, Alison Littlewood and Richard Godwin.
I hope that in this busy past decade our series has ably demonstrated the strengths and attraction of British crime writing in all its diversity, ranging from the cosy tale of detection to the noir borderlands of mayhem and destruction and the deep nooks and crannies of psychological suspense and terror. Crime writing is a many-sided art in which our writers tempt you in sly and clever ways, offering you puzzles to solve, asking ever-worrying questions about the world we live in but, most of all, providing first-class entertainment along with the thrills.
As the market for short stories and anthologies changes, its retail profile changes too, and there is, sadly, a strong possibility this may be the final volume in our series (although our primary publishers wish to debut another crime project, which may involve many of our loyal authors, as an Internet/digital replacement). But ten years is a long time, and I rest assured in the knowledge of all the enjoyment these pages have brought to so many readers over that period.
So, this is also the time to thank many of the people who have been instrumental in bringing these ten volumes to date to you, the readers, in addition of course to all the writers who have made these volumes so exciting. A vote of thanks then to David Shelley, who gave the project its first go-ahead, to Susie Dunlop, and then, at Constable & Robinson, who’ve supported me through thick and thin, Nick Robinson, Peter Duncan and Duncan Proudfoot, and in the USA Kent Carroll, Herman Graf and Christopher Navratil. Without them, we would not have lasted anywhere near so long.
Every year, our authors have kept on surprising me with the sparkle of their imagination and the fluidity of their writing. This volume is no exception. Expect to be surprised, scared, charmed, intrigued, shocked even.
And we’ll meet again, at some stage in the future, in a murky field where death, ghosts of the past, villains and detectives, cops and sleuths, fight their ongoing battle; where good and evil are never black or white but come in a hundred shades of grey. There are some pretty black stories here too: Wilkolak, Come Away With Me, The Hostess, etc.
It’s been a great ride!
Maxim Jakubowski
THE BONE-HEADED LEAGUE by Lee Child
FOR ONCE THE FBI did the right thing: it sent the Anglophile to England. To London, more specifically, for a three-year posting at the Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Pleasures there were extensive, and duties there were light. Most agents ran background checks on visa applicants and intending immigrants and kept their ears to the ground on international matters, but I liaised with London’s Metropolitan Police when American nationals were involved in local crimes, either as victims or witnesses or perpetrators.
I loved every minute of it, as I knew I would. I love that kind of work, I love London, I love the British way of life, I love the theatre, the culture, the pubs, the pastimes, the people, the buildings, the Thames, the fog, the rain. Even the soccer. I was expecting it to be all good, and it was all good.
Until.
I had spent a damp Wednesday morning in February helping out, as I often did, by rubber-stamping immigration paperwork, and then I was saved by a call from a sergeant at Scotland Yard, asking on behalf of his inspector that I attend a crime scene north of Wigmore Street and south of Regent’s Park. On the 200 block of Baker Street, more specifically, which was enough to send a little jolt through my Anglophile heart, because every Anglophile knows that Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address was 221b Baker Street. It was quite possible I would be working right underneath the great detective’s fictional window.
And I was, as well as underneath many other windows too, because the Met’s crime scenes are always fantastically elaborate. We have CSI on television, where they solve everything in forty-three minutes with DNA, and the Met has Scene-of-Crime-Officers, who spend forty-three minutes closing roads and diverting pedestrians, before spending forty-three minutes shrugging themselves into Tyvek bodysuits and Tyvek booties and Tyvek hoods, before spending forty-three minutes stringing Keep-Out tape between lamp posts and fence railings, before spending forty-three minutes erecting white tents and shrouds over anything of any interest whatsoever. The result was that I found a passable imitation of a travelling circus already in situ when I got there.
There was a cordon, of course, several layers deep, and I got through them all by showing my Department of Justice credentials and by mentioning the inspector’s name, which was Bradley Rose. I found the man himself stumping around on the damp sidewalk some yards south of the largest white tent. He was a short man, but substantial, with no tie and snappy eyeglasses and a shaved head. He was an old-fashioned London thief-taker, softly spoken but at the same time impatient with bullshit, which his own department provided in exasperating quantity.