The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

"Mystery" is a restricting word. Not all of the stories in this solid collection are the "whodunit" variety. I guess when it gets down to it, they all involve crime of some sort, usually murder but not always. This has been the story for millennia, as writers have always been interested in the dark side of the human psyche--what happens when people don't abide by the rules.

Edited by popular crime writer Lisa Scottoline, we get a wide assortment of stories that involve breaking the law, by some of our finest writers and some who are new to me (and one that was published posthumously). From Michael Connelly is "A Fine Mist of Blood," which features his detective Harry Bosch. From Bill Pronzini comes a Quincannon story, his detective in 1890s San Francisco, with "Gunpowder Alley," a locked-room mystery. Joyce Carol Oates is represented with a story about an awkward teenage girl being stalked, "So Near Any Time Always," which has echoes of her famous story "Where Are You Going Where Have You Been."

From more unknown writers comes "The Ring of Kerry," which could be the plot an Alfred Hitchcock Presents show, by Dennis McFadden, and "The Don's Cinnamon," by Ben Stroud, set in 1850s Havana.

A couple of stories aren't great, but I loved the opening lines, which is in itself a fine art in the telling of noir tales. From "Smothered and Covered," by Tom Barlow: "The young girl walked into the Waffle House, alone, at 3 A.M. on a Thursday morning. We all looked up from our coffee and cigarettes, waffles, sausage and hash browns. She stood on her tiptoes to take a seat on a counter stool, picked up a menu and held it close to her face, like on of the 6 A.M. retirees without his bifocals." Now, can anyone not read that paragraph and not want to read on?

Even better is this sentence from Hannah Tinti's "Bullet Number Two," set in the Four Corners region of the Southwest: "Now Hawley had a car of his own, and Old Ford Flareside, and he opened up the engine on the highway, the windows rolled down and the blazing hot air channeling through, the sand blowing against his skin and the red cliffs of Arizona stretching into the distance. Behind his seat were a twenty-gauge Remington shotgun, a 9mm Beretta, a Sig Sauer pistol, a crossbow tire iron, his father's rifle from the war, and $7,000." That is a grand sentence.

Many of the stories here come from two magazines: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, both of which I read as a kid and am glad to learn they are still in business. A few of them come from the Akashic location-centric noir series, including Patricia Smith's "When They Are Done With Us," which comes from Staten Island Noir. I've never been to Staten Island except to pass through it, so I don't know how true this line is: "The key to happiness on Staten Island, she decided, was to get as close as you could to the sky and makes the assholes as small as possible." This story contains one of the most repellent sons a mother could want, and could put a person off from giving birth.

My favorite two stories in this collection are "The Indian," a novella really, by Randall Silvis, and "The Street Ends at the Cemetery," by Clark Howard. The former is about a grudge between a man and his brother-in-law, that appears to be about a restored Indian motorcycle, but is much deeper. It is beautifully wrought, shattering piece of work. Howard's story is about a prison guard that gets involved with a visitor and that classic crime story trope, the suitcase full of money. This time it's the proceeds from a bank robbery, and the visitor's boyfriend, who is locked up, knows its whereabouts. A crooked FBI agent and a crooked prison warden want in on the action, and the double-crosses are fast and furious. It would make a good movie.