The Best American Mystery Stories – 2015

During my medical college days in Guntur, my reading would often include mystery stories, usually in small paperback anthologies, rented for about 25 paise a week from the Kumar Book Stall in Arundelpet. Many of them had the name of Alfred Hitchcock or Edgar Allen Poe associated with them. They were intriguing and I still remember a few of them for some quirky feature or other – writing, situations or characters etc. But, somehow, I have not read an anthology of mystery stories in English in many, many years. Actually I do not recall reading such since I moved to US.

When I was traveling to India earlier this year, I borrowed from the local library, The Best American Mystery Stories – 2015, guest edited by James Patterson, that human mystery writing machine (apparently one out of every 17 hardback novels published in US since 2006 was by Patterson). I used to regularly read the Best American Short Stories every year until a couple of years ago, but this is the first time that I picked up the mystery version of them. The Mystery Stories series, by the same publisher, is being published since 1997 with Otto Penzler as the series editor. This edition contained 20 stories and also listed another 30 honorable mentions.

I was in for a delightful surprise. The first story I picked up to read was Rosalee Carrasco by Tomiko M Breland (selected mainly because of its length – I was about to go to bed and at 11 pages, it was the shortest story). This story, about the intersection of several lives at a fateful, fatal shooting in a school locker room and its aftermath, was quite impressive in its narrative technic, audacity of theme and situations, and the psychological exploration of characters despite its short space only making room for stereotypical broad brush strokes. It was a story that I had to ruminate over.

I had a similar experience with many of the other stories as well. Some of them were fairly grim, some quite odd and some profoundly sad. These are not what I expected when I thought of mystery stories. Sure, each of these stories centered around some aspect of a crime, but these are not the old fashioned stories about deduction and solving a crime. Most of these included serious psychological explorations of the central characters and often included arresting situations. There is a surprising amount of pathos. There is a story of a sniper on a SWAT team, who, after a long career, suddenly started thinking about the person that he has to shoot, and the way it affected his personal and professional lives; a story of a school boy that lost a developmentally disabled buddy to suicide and another one about a kid whose mother’s infidelity led to an unexpected confrontation and a murder.

There is quite a bit of variety in these stories. A room on the Union Road is a story about the ordeal of a couple locked in the trunk of a car by a mugger – does it bring them closer or render them asunder? Another story is about the bungled kidnapping of a heiress in Haiti. Harm and hammer is about a woman, trapped in a witness protection program, that learns to make music with hammers on an anvil. Other stories include one about a Sherlock Holmes fan with deductive abilities whose approach to crime is quite a revelation; about a confession from a traitorous deed during cold war; a felon trying to rebuild his life; a pearl-hunter in Australia searching for the killers of her evil twin; a death of a demented nun in a nursing home. There is only one story that I did not like out of the 20 stories in this collection.

The other impressive thing about all these stories is the technic and the writing skills. Notes about these stories by the authors, given in the appendix, reveal that a lot of care and thought went into the structuring and writing of these stories. Attention to craft is quite evident in these stories.

My thought after reading these stories is, and this may raise a few hackles, that these writers – of mystery stories, a genre that is not quite considered classic literature – are miles ahead of most contemporary short story writers in Telugu in terms of style as well as in exploring the psychology of the individuals and situations. At some point, the Telugu writers got mired into turning news items and essays into short stories and stopped bothering about style, craft, structure and the development of the characters inhabiting those stories. Only a few seem to have gotten out of that mould.

I will be reading more of this genre, as time permits.

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The Best American Mystery Stories – 2015
Editor: James Patterson
Series Editor: Otto Penzler
432 Pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 2016