Otto Penzler, Series Editor
Reviewed by Brendan Hughes
1.23.07

The heyday of the American mystery story was fifty years ago, when magazine racks were crowded with publications like Black Mask, New Detective, The Shadow, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. While Queen and Hitchcock continue to publish, the stories collected in The Best American Mystery Stories 2006, a new omnibus of short mystery fiction edited by Otto Penzler and Scott Turow, are culled from a more diverse roster of sources; from online crime journals to literary magazines like The Virginia Quarterly to Dangerous Women, another special collection commissioned by Penzler himself. The result is an entertaining collection that ranges from crime stories to detective pieces, from short shorts with improbable twists to longer, historical fiction-mystery hybrids, a few dead on imitations of hardboiled masters like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler thrown in for nostalgia’s sake, and a Joyce Carol Oates story that stands head and shoulders above the rest.

While reading The Best American Mystery Stories 2006, I was in the middle of a two-month binge, watching on DVD the first three seasons of The Wire, HBO’s engrossing cops and robbers drama. The program, which is inspired by David Simon’s nonfiction account of a year with Baltimore’s homicide detectives, follows a fictional Baltimore Police Department’s major case squad. It is notable for its authentic portrayal of police work and the drug trade, going so far as to include former Baltimore Police Officers and drug dealers in the cast, and has none the ‘ripped from the headlines’ kitsch of its rivals.

Experiencing The Wire and the Penzler-Turow collection in tandem, it’s clear that the television cop show and not short mystery fiction is where mystery writers are showcasing their best work. Where The Wire fires on all cylinders, with its maniacal insistence on verisimilitude, fast and messy dialogue, intricate plotting and churning themes of race, class, and sexuality, many of the stories offered by Penzler and Turow seem like one trick ponies and throwbacks to an earlier era of pulp fiction.

Penzler and Turow could well have thrown in the towel this year, and, rather than selecting two dozen or so stories, simply presented a few of The Wire’s scripts from last season. It would be a familiar roster of contributors, since mystery novelists like George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, both alumni of past Penzler collections, write many of the show’s teleplays.

This migration of mystery writers from page to screen is hardly new. Hammett and Chandler worked in Hollywood, and as an unintended effect of their efforts, a great many American mystery stories read like variations of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon or Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Even more influential than their prose was the man who gave voice to it on the screen. The American mystery story may never get over the death of Humphrey Bogart. Although he died 50 years ago and his resume extended beyond the strictures of noir and gangster movies, Bogart was the go-to guy for cinematic adaptations of Chandler and Hammett, and later became the mold in which a thousand hardboiled heroes, both on the screen and in print, continue to be cast.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 has two offerings for Bogart’s crowded altar. The best is Mike MacLean’s “McHenry’s Gift,” which originally appeared in the online pulp magazine Thuglit (motto: “writing about wrongs”). Dillon Leary, the number two man in McHenry’s drug running gang, is the Bogart stand-in here, holed up in a little apartment, waiting to get whacked. After a power grab by a Columbian drug cartel, Leary kills McHenry, who was something of a father figure to him, in a power grab of his own. Little does Leary know that McHenry has set the Columbians against him as reward for his perfidy. The story opens with Leary in his apartment. McHenry has already been killed and Leary is a man on the run. The story flashes back to Leary’s confrontation with McHenry and his lines sound as if they were composed especially for Bogart’s clenched delivery and sneering lisp. Here, Leary speaks first to McHenry, informing the older man of his new allegiance:

“Esteban sent me. He wanted us to talk.”
“Esteban, huh? You on his clock now?”
Dillon went silent.
“I have to admit,” said McHenry, “never saw that one coming.”
“Writing’s on the wall,” said Dillon. “You’ve had a good run, Mac. Longer than anyone I know. But Esteban is a Columbian. And this is a Columbian’s game.”

The story’s opening sentences could have appeared in Black Mask, the famed pulp magazine of the 1930s: “There was a knock at the door. Dillon Leary grabbed the .45 from underneath his mattress and pressed himself flat against the wall. He thumbed the safety off then racked the pistol’s slide, jacking a round into the chamber. It was a big sound in the little apartment.” The rhythm of these four sentences—short, long, long, short—is familiar in mystery stories, and the paragraph’s A-B-B-A structure (here, apartment-gun-gun-apartment) is vaguely chiastic, juxtaposing the little room against the loaded gun. The structure and rhythm recur periodically, giving the piece a terse, looping feeling, like a tightly wound coil.

Jeff Somers’ “Ringing the Changes” is grimier and boozier than “McHenry’s Gift,” stylistic hawsers that anchor it to the Hammett-Chandler-Bogart tradition just the same. As with any good mystery story, we know the lay of the land from the first sentence: “Henry used to be a jolly bastard and a lot of fun, but he’d taken the pledge and turned out to be as dull as dust when he didn’t have a drink in his hand.” Poppy, the narrator, is a not-so-gentle grafter, just a guy trying to pass off counterfeit money while the cops, with the help of one of Poppy’s rivals, try and pin a murder on him. “Ringing the Changes” doesn’t have the smash-bang action of “McHenry’s Gift,” but it does have some funny barroom dialogues between Poppy and Henry, his sober friend and underworld informant. Somers’ biography in the book’s contributors’ notes might belong to one of his characters. Somers notes that he “writes all of his stories on cocktail napkins while sitting groggily at local saloons, using felt-tip pens that produce blurry, indecipherable scrawls.” A ballpoint might tear the tissue paper.

For all of the aforementioned reasons, “McHenry’s Gift” and “Ringing the Changes” are examples of good genre fiction—as are nearly all the selections in The Best American Mystery Stories 2006. They are entertaining to read the first time through, and most of the plot twists produce a genuine, if momentary thrill. Read them a second time, though, and the seams start to show. Coincidence reigns. Cops or killers languidly hang out in bars and have chance meetings; then there are lines like, “Writing’s on the wall…You’ve had a good run, Mac…” does anyone this side of Hemingway actually talk like that? Aside from the visceral kick of the fast-moving plot, it’s this masquerade of fantasy dressed up as reality that makes the mystery story suited for television and movies. The shot of the languid detective, coolly waiting for the suspect in a saloon wordlessly confirms a thousand things the viewer already knows not just about that detective or that suspect but about all detectives and all suspects. As a picture on a TV or movie screen, the detective doesn’t concern the viewer with logic or motivation or coincidence; his pose overwhelms such considerations. On the screen, the image is iconic and therefore whole, while on the page it is vacant and therefore absurd.

What makes The Wire good television and really good mystery writing is that it is none of these things. The dialogue isn’t canned, the outcomes aren’t predictable, and the characters are driven by real psychological motivations that are both particular and universal. Most of the action happens within the confines of conversation, but gesture and silence are also used to tell the story. A good script is not the same as a good short mystery story, though, and while many of the ones in Penzler and Turow’s collection are perfectly adequate derivatives of television shows and motion pictures, only two stories, one by Joyce Carol Oates and one by R.T. Smith go successfully against the grain.

Smith’s “Ina Grove” is the story of the 1904 rape of Ina Grove, a teenager in rural Rockbridge County, Virginia and subsequent murder of her uncle by the hands of Brodie Painter, a man of “uncertain race.” As it turns out, Brodie’s race isn’t the only thing that is uncertain. Smith tells the story from different points of view, splicing together newspaper accounts, the diary of Rockbridge County’s sheriff, court testimony, and oral history transcripts, and other fictional artifacts. What begins in the newspapers as an open and shut case quickly swirls into anything but—what appeared to be a rape might not have been; what appeared to be a cold blooded murder may have been defensive. Smith also manages to capture the Edwardian ethic and speech of the era. His Sheriff Blaine Sherburne is a Teddy Roosevelt with less bluster, a man who knows he is caught between the century that has recently the passed, and the messy, bewildering one just beginning. Smith’s documentary collage style, which was popular among pulp novelists of the 1940s like Kenneth Fearing and Dennis Wheatley but hasn’t been seen much since, gives the story an aura of certainty which slowly breaks down with each additional point of view. “Ina Grove” is really a mystery story in reverse, winnowing away the ‘facts’ of the case until there are none at all.

Joyce Carol Oates’ “So Help Me God,” the collection’s best story, is a monologue delivered by Lucretia Pitman, the most unstable, unreliable narrator in a book full of them. Born to a petit bourgeois family, Lucretia fell in love, at the age of 14, with Lucas Pitman, a deputy in the St. Lawrence County sheriff’s department. Pitman, as she calls him, pulled Lucretia over as she rode her bike down a county road. What begins as a bit of teasing becomes something more sinister, as Lucas puts her in the back seat of the police car. Lucretia’s voice seems stuck in a tone approaching frantic, but with a hint of pleasure at the departure from her safe, middle class world; “Pitman takes my arm, not hard, but firm, sits me down on the seat like I was a little girl and not this skinny-leggy girl of fourteen with a glamour ponytail halfway down her back. He notes the sparkly green toenail polish but refrains from comment. Takes from his belt a pair of metal handcuffs that are these adult-sized cuffs and says, still not cracking a smile, ‘Got to cuff you, Lucretia. It’s for your own protection, too.’ By this time I’m sick with shame.”

They marry. Pitman is bad news, and as Lucretia’s life lurches uncontrollably from middle class to trailer trash, he begins to drink heavily and beat her, Lucretia’s parents disown her, and her world shrinks to the size of the couple’s shabby bungalow. A perverted prank caller who may or may not be Pitman (he only calls when Pitman is not at home) begins calling Lucretia, who, in her loneliness and an ever-present appetite for danger, plays along. Desperation and shame creep into her voice, with sentences like, “I knew that I deserved to be hurt by my husband but I was terrified of the actual hurt,” or, “I am waiting for him, hiding. I think that I am starkly sober as a creature that has been skinned alive…” For a lesser writer, the caller’s identity might become the story’s focus. Oates is after bigger game, though—showing how abuse is more than criminal, how it is the desiccation of a soul. Lucretia is transformed from a person into a “creature.” Her growing sense of entrapment is like a fissure in her psyche that slowly opens until, finally, she cracks. “So Help Me God” and “Ina Grove” don’t satisfy like “McHenry’s Gift” or “Ringing the Changes,” those neat lines of coolly violent cause and effect. Oates and Smith are more concerned with the mystery of sudden and inexplicable violence, and while their endings are bewildering, they are also less contrived.

Oates and Smith have produced the strongest of The Best American Mystery Stories 2006, stories that aren’t a few camera angles removed from a teleplay, that don’t rely on narrative parlor tricks to delight the reader. The best mystery stories of this collection do what movies and television cannot—they plunge beneath the surface of the choreographed plot and bring the reader inside their characters; they require the reader to look beyond what he can see and know, and to stare, alone, into the unknowable.