The Best American Mystery Stories: 2006

The anthologies in The Best American Mystery Stories series rarely showcase "conventional," plot-driven mysteries, of whatever variety; instead, as guest editor Scott Turow notes, the spotlight falls on "crime--its commission, its aftermath, its anxieties, its effect on character" (xiv).  One does not, in other words, pick up a book in this series and expect to find the Old Man in the Corner.   

As it happens, this volume's weakest stories are the ones that depend on plot twists.  (For some reason, they're also slotted right next to each other.)  Jeffery Deaver's "Born Bad," about the mother-and-daughter relationship from hell, clunks mechanically through its big reveal; the story could have used more nuance in both the psychological and stylistic departments.  Jane Haddam's "Edelweiss" and William Harrison's "Texas Heat," meanwhile, build up to "shocking" discoveries that register with all the force of popped balloons.  By contrast, the late Ed McBain's "Improvisation," while perhaps not one of the author's best efforts, nevertheless manages to turn the tables on its sexual adventurer with more flair--something it manages through the adroit use of rat-a-tat dialogue, much of it without tags.  Sue Pike elicits a chuckle or two with "A Temporary Crown," in which the celebrity-obsessed (and mentally ill) protagonist comes to Las Vegas in search of her beloved actor.  And Laura Lippman's "The Crack Cocaine Diet (Or: How to Lose a Lot of Weight and Change Your Life in Just One Weekend)" cleverly imagines two upper-middle-class adolescent girls straight out of a family values politician's worst nightmare.

There are, as usual, a number of gangsters on the loose.  While most readers will anticipate the punchline in Mike MacLean's "McHenry's Gift," the story is still a darkly amusing take on the emotional self-delusions of a low-level crook in a murderous business.  Wendy Hornsby's "Dust Up," which reads like a trailer for a comic thriller, is entertaining enough as a parodic trifle; its heroine is a comic cross between animal-loving softy and ramped-up military veteran.   Two more stories take on the heyday of gangsters as celebrity cult figures.  Elmore Leonard's "Louly and Pretty Boy" narrates a young woman's enduring obsession with her relative-by-ex-marriage, Pretty Boy Floyd.  James Lee Burke offers a more subtle take on this theme in "Why Bugsy Siegel was a Friend of Mine," in which the gangster--an odd cross between thug and yoyo-loving perpetual child--brings vigilante justice into a young boy's life; while not altogether nostalgic, the story nevertheless mourns the loss of a certain kind of American neighborhood (one already vanishing over the course of the plot).

A number of stories really amount to character studies.  The least successful is Joyce Carol Oates' "So Help Me God," in which Oates recycles much of her quasi-Gothic, class-difference-plus-sexual-brutality shtick.  It isn't bad, but it is wearisomely familiar.   (I'm not one to suggest that an author should slow down her output, but Oates has worked this vein well beyond its capacity to yield much in the way of ore.)  Andrew Klavan does rather better with modern sexual politics in "Lord and Master," in which sadomasochism becomes the backdrop to a deadly battle of the sexes.  Other tales of crooks in crisis connect crime to consciousness.  In "Theft," Karen E. Bender suggestively connects an aging confidence-trickster's games with identity to her Alzheimer's-induced loss of self; the counterfeiter in Jeff Raven's "Ringing the Changes," who bears considerably less symbolic weight, nevertheless suggests that modern America partly functions on sheer illusion.  Scott Wolven's "Vigilance," about a man on the run from...something...who finds himself in the middle of something else, lets before-and-after remain vague.  Like Bender and Raven, Wolven populates his underworld with professional shapeshifters, capable of shedding their "selves" at a moment's notice.  In a more darkly humorous vein, C. J. Box's "Pirates of Yellowstone," featuring some Eastern European immigrants out to make good (and money), offers an ironic twist on the American dream.  Emily Raboteau's bleaker and unclassifiable "Smile" drops us into the aftermath of a murder in Louisiana; the motives remain eerily unclear.  And Walter Mosley's "Karma" stars a down-and-out private detective whose desire to survive thoroughly trumps his interest in the law.

The anthology's standout entries, however, are Alan Heathcock's "Peacekeeper" and R. T. Smith's "Ina Grove."  "Peacekeeper" tracks Helen, its unlikely lawwoman, through a nonlinear narrative that travels back and forth between December 1992 and Spring 1993.  Instead of exposing the solution to the death of a young girl, Helen conceals the girl's body and stages the murderer's "suicide"; the result, she hopes, will be closure for all concerned.  "They would all believe Jocey had drowned," Helen thinks, "and it would be over" (108).  But the story itself takes "closure" apart: can this case be closed, the community healed? What happens if closure is infinitely delayed? It's not clear that spring, the traditional sign of hope and rebirth, will rejuvenate anyone concerned.  "Ina Grove," another tale of justice possibly gone awry, begins in 1904 and ends in the late 1960s.  The story is relayed through a number of different (and sometimes near-poetic) voices and registers, including newspaper reports, a sheriff's diary, the pre-execution testimony of the accused rapist/murderer (?), the rape victim (?), and the deceased's ghost.  If the narrative's structure reminds you of Rashomon, it's supposed to; according to Smith, the title itself is taken from one of the stories that inspired the Kurosawa film (354).  But unlike Rashomon, the characters "testify" over the course of six decades, adding an additional layer to the conflict among various subjective truths: the story itself slowly degrades into folk legend.  By the end, as creeping urbanization overtakes the Appalachian locale, the rape of Ina Grove is as ghostly as the culture that once gave rise to it. 

Comments

[mark]

Excellent summary, but, my word! Where do you find the time for all this reading?

[Jeff Somers]

Thanks for mentioning my story in your review--but "Ringing the Changes" was written by Jeff Somers, not Jeff Raven. Crickey!

Jeff