The Best American Mystery
Stories 2013
Edited
by Lisa Scottoline
One
way or another, I've been reading a lot of mystery stories and
thrillers recently. The Best
American
series generally provides a reliably interesting selection of short
genre fiction, and the 2013 mystery iteration is no exception to the
rule. With a mix of traditional procedurals and literary examinations
of crime and its effects on individuals and communities (as well as
stories that proudly straddle the lines that some would wish to place
between these types of tales), this anthology stands up admirably
among its predecessors and peers. Editors Lisa Scottoline and Otto
Penzler have ensured that the group is balanced, despite the
emergence of certain themes and styles. Many of the stories herein
are tinged with regret and/or told in a mournful manner, yet no two
authors take the same approach to these and other emotions,
highlighting and illustrating the rich complexity of human feelings
and experiences and the ways in which crime brings
them to the forefront. After reading a large number of these volumes,
I am always amazed to discover new takes on the common theme; this
year, Kevin Leahy's "Remora, IL" was the biggest surprise.
Excellently
and appropriately told
in the typically
tricky
first-person plural voice,
the story examines the ways in which the arrival of a private prison
affects the surrounding small town, tackling the effects of prison
culture through a different lens than is
usually offered.
Even
the more traditional procedurals and whodunnits are unusually
successful here,
providing as they do a range of vivid settings, compelling
characters, and pleasantly
confounding solutions. Clark Howard's "The Street Ends at the
Cemetery" is a delightful (and surprisingly funny) heist story
that somehow manages to maintain its suspense despite the evident
spoiler
in the title; it's
an all-around delight that, I suspect, would be just as entertaining
when read a second or third time. Similarly rewarding are
historically minded tales from Bill Pronzini and Eileen Dreyer.
Pronzini's "Gunpowder Alley" is a locked-room mystery with
thoroughly believable late-19th
century atmospherics and a conclusion that, fittingly perhaps, can be
guessed before the fictional sleuth makes the same deduction;
suffering only slightly from some botched descriptions of the setting
(so crucial to the subgenre), it is nonetheless a pleasant throwback
in both style and content. Dreyer takes a slightly different approach
in "The Sailor in the Picture", which revisits the iconic
V-Day celebrations in Times Square with an alternate perspective of a
sailor's homecoming with a surprisingly modern sensibility. The story
offers its share of suspense and action before seemingly heading for
a tidy conclusion, only for the coda to reveal an alternate, yet
deliciously satisfying, perspective on the preceding events.
Other
stories
in
contemporary settings
illustrate the ever-increasing types of stories that fall under the
mystery umbrella, and most of those in this collection do seem to fit
the theme. Andre Kocsis displays his innate sense for proper pacing
in "Crossing", a thriller about a Vietnam-era deserter who
leads a group of mysterious foreigners across the British
Columbia-Washington border. Expertly deploying elements of more
traditional genre stories, such as false leads and half-hidden
truths, as well as tense and occasionally violent interactions
between its characters, as well as a patient buildup to a final
illustration of the stakes in play, Kocsis shows that a bit of
melodrama need not necessarily diminish the power of a good story and
that strong characters can thrive within any fictional situation or
genre. The
quality of individual stories is incredibly variable in these
anthologies and may be somewhat dependent on the guest editor's
tastes, but this collection indicates that 2013 was a banner year for
short crime fiction. Crime
and criminality may provide the essential link between the stories in
The
Best American Short Stories 2013,
but each author's unique approach and style ensures that the state of
mystery fiction, at least in its short form, is as strong as it has
ever been.
Grade:
A
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