The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

No matter the editor, the stories collected in the annual Best American Mystery Stories are usually not "mysteries" in the most conventional genre sense: while crimes energize the stories' plots, there are few, if any, stories given over to detective work (whether of the PI or the police procedural variety).  Instead, crimes feature as an element in character development, as backstory, as long-buried secrets, or as the focus of the story itself; crime-solving ranges from incidental to downright irrelevant.  The criminal is more likely to be the protagonist than the investigator.  George Pelecanos' volume is no exception to this rule.  Even the entry that at first promises to be standard-issue detective storytelling, Michael Connelly's "Mulholland Drive," winds up taking the reader's expectations apart.

One story that may have suffered, paradoxically enough, from being included in this collection is Alice Munro's first-person, rather Oatesian "Child's Play," in which the approaching death of a long-abandoned friend prompts an adult woman, Marlene, to think about her childhood response to a developmentally disabled neighbor, Verna.   "Children," says Marlene, "of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out-of-whack, unmanageable" (185), and her choice of "monstrously" inadvertently pinpoints the story's interest in what could be called the monstrosity of childhood normalcy.   Verna's difference frightens and disgusts Marlene, yet Marlene's elaborate strategies for avoiding Vera actually culminate in her own monstrosity.  Unfortunately, when read in the context of this anthology, the story unfolds predictably, simply because the reader expects that something seriously unpleasant must be about to happen (after all, why else would "Child's Play" appear in an anthology of mysteries?).  I suspect the effect might have been rather different if I had first seen this story in Harper's. 

The three stories with the most interesting narrative structures are Kyle Minor's "A Day Meant to Do Less," Scott Phillips' "The Emerson, 1950," and Nathan Oates' "The Empty House."  "A Day Meant to Do Less" begins from the POV of the deeply uncomfortable Reverend Jack Wenderoth, trying to undress and bathe his semi-paralyzed mother (who, it appears, has suffered a stroke).  Jack, fearful of both his mother's body and his own disgust, tries to analyze his own strategies for "not looking" (133) while, at the same time, he yearns to find the right words to speak to a woman who no longer has any articulate language.  But then, the narrative suddenly shifts to Franny's POV, and reveals a horrific assault and murder that has increasingly haunted Franny's life; as the story builds back up to the moment with which it began, Franny's dementia turns Jack's clumsy attempts at nurturance into something far more terrifying--all the more so because Franny can only express herself through what remains of her body.  On a much lighter--albeit more gruesome--note, "The Emerson, 1950" relates the professional and personal experiences of a crime-scene photographer.  In alternating scenes, we see what are, in effect, "snapshots" of the photographer's day job, in which he tries to capture some of death's most horrific effects, contrasted with the linear narrative of his comically frustrating relationship with some semi-demented and elderly relatives.  The photographer's art, which freezes and transforms even the most ugliest crime scene into something with aesthetic potential, cannot quite stave off his growing, but understated, fury; by the end, when he "picture[s] the room as a crime scene" (310), he has come close to perceiving murder as itself a kind of art (even though the "murder" in question is definitely in scare quotes).  And "The Empty House," which describes a dead journalist's fatal trip to Guatemala and his brother's later search for answers, quietly turns into a meditation on the limits of writing to solve mysteries: as the story proceeds, alternating third-person (the journalist) and first (the brother), it slowly becomes clear that the reader has no access at all to what "really" happened to the journalist.  In the end, the brother's longing for a resolution turns into a fantasy of a neat, happy ending, pointedly unavailable.

All of the stories, however, are at the very least enjoyable and well-crafted.  For me, the other standouts included Holly Goddard Jones' "Proof of God," a grim coming-of-age tale in which a lonely young man never quite manages to shake off his father's controlling presence; Thisbe Nissen's "Win's Girl," whose narrator finds herself being snookered when she ought to know better; Stephen Rhodes' "At the Top of His Game," which translates the language of murder into the world of high-stakes finance; Hugh Sheehy's "The Invisibles," which crosses over the genre boundaries separating mystery from dark fantasy or horror; and Elizabeth Strout's "A Different Road," featuring an elderly couple whose lives changes irrevocably because of what they say to each other during a hostage crisis.  As always, a good investment of one's $14.00. 

 

Comments

[Todd Mason]

Otto Penzler, the series editor, is famous for his catholic taste in crime fiction ("fiction involving crime"), and I'm sure the BEST AMERICAN folks at Houghton Mifflin are only too happy to encourage him to go to the edges as much as possible for the semifinalists he culls for the ever-changing final editor...hence the greater probability of stories from MANOA and WITNESS and VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW than from EQMM or THE STRAND in any given volume. I haven't looked around your site to check, but did you see the Gorman/Greenberg annual for this year yet? Happily, they're subcontracting to Sarah Weinman to troll the webzines for them, to reach out in another direction, so that the two annuals complement each other.

[Miriam]

I did read the Gorman/Greenberg anthology, but didn't write it up here.