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Bill Pronzini

Graveyard Plots

Preface

It is common knowledge that no one reads prefaces to short story collections.

That being the case, I’m writing this one to please myself. Which is as it should be, because that’s why the stories in this book were written in the first place.

Oh, the money factor entered into it, of course; I’m a professional writer and I make my living mostly from fiction, so every dollar helps. But it is also common knowledge that no writer ever gets rich writing short stories (and that only one author in the mystery and detective field, Edward D. Hoch, can make a satisfactory living doing them exclusively). In the main these stories were exercises in “self-expression” — a euphemism meaning some pretty good ideas occurred to me and I wanted to see if I could turn them into worthy pieces of short fiction.

And I had a devil of a time selling some of them, too. What I consider a good idea all too often fails to coincide with the opinions of magazine editors. Take “His Name Was Legion,” for instance. One editor I sent it to said that the biblical references were “too mystical” for the readers of her publication, whatever that means. Another editor said there was too much sex “for a family mystery magazine.” (There’s more sex in your morning newspaper than there is in “His Name Was Legion.” And it has always struck me as a tad hypocritical for a “family magazine” to piously reject stories on the grounds of sexual content, mild or overt, while specializing in all sorts of fictional murder, mayhem, and felonious behavior.) I finally sold the story to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine for 1½ cents per word — the munificent sum of $35.00. Writers definitely do not get rich writing short stories.

On the other hand, some stories that I figured would be a difficult sell found acceptance on their first submission. “A Craving for Originality” is one. It is a writer’s story, pure and simple — a satire on hack writers and hack writing — and fits into no particular category or market. I sent it to the late Frederic Dannay at Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, without much hope because it isn’t really a crime story, and he amazed me by buying it almost by return mail. (Fred continually amazed me. He would buy stories I thought had little or no chance and reject those I was certain he would like. It got to be a kind of game, after a while — too often a frustrating one for me. All in all I managed to sell him 25 stories, of which maybe 10 I felt were “sure sales” on submission.)

Anyhow, the 23stories in these pages are my favorites among the more than 150 pieces of short crime fiction I’ve published. (A few other favorites appear in the 1983 “Nameless Detective” collection, Casefile.) They span seventeen years of my writing life, from 1968 to the present; and they run the gamut of criminous story types: straight suspense, psychological suspense, “impossible crime,” detection, fantasy, horror, satire, even what might be termed a western. One — “Strangers in the Fog” — was nominated for a Best Short Story Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America. Seven — “Cain’s Mark,” “Sweet Fever,” “Smuggler’s Island,” “Strangers in the Fog,” “Rebound,” “Cat’s-Paw,” and “Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg” — were selected for inclusion in the annual anthologies, Best Detective Stories of the Year and Year’s Best Mystery & Suspense Stories. “Proof of Guilt” was adapted for a segment of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected TV series. And “Cat’s-Paw,” one of the three stories here that feature “Nameless” (the other two are “Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg” and an original, “Sanctuary”) received a Private Eye Writers of America Shamus for Best Short Story of 1983.

Obviously I’m proud of all these stories, or they wouldn’t be here. I wish I could say that I hope you like them as much or almost as much as I do, and that they give you a couple of hours of pleasurable diversion. But I can’t say that. No one reads prefaces to short story collections, so there’s no point in it.

Is there?

— Bill Pronzini

San Francisco, California

January 1985

Cain’s Mark

The first thing Cain did when he arrived in San Francisco was steal a car.

He stepped off the through-Portland bus at the Seventh Street Terminal, carrying a blue airline overnight bag; it was a few minutes after midnight. He walked through the terminal, without haste, turning south to Mission Street and then east along there to a shadowed, unattended parking lot between Sixth and Seventh. He prowled among the scattered few cars still parked there until he found a dark blue, late-model sedan that satisfied him. From the pocket of his tan overcoat he took a thin piece of stiff, oddly shaped wire and bent to the door lock. Moments later, he slipped in beneath the wheel, placing the overnight bag on the seat beside him. He probed the ignition slot with the wire, and after a few moments more the sedan’s engine began rumbling softly. The entire operation had taken perhaps two minutes; if anyone had been watching, it would have looked like he was entering his own car with his own set of keys.