It was a grand time to be a kid. Minor league baseball players were celebrities and the Canadian men who set up street-corner yo-yo competitions all over town seemed possessed of magic. Even the gangsters with whom “Nick” and I associated the word criminal had a Hollywood aura about them. I think the innocence of the boys in the story is a reflection of the mindset of the times. On V-J Day we knew with absolute conviction that our nation was on the right side of things and that the evil that had threatened our tiny microcosm on that dead-end street had been purged from the earth forever. Perhaps one could say that our national perspective was one of illusion, but I believe otherwise. I believe my generation will be the last one to remember what is called traditional America. We believed in ourselves. We were a united people. Each day was like waking to music and sunshine and the smell of flowers. Anyway, I’m proud of this story and the others I wrote about “Nick” and me. I hope you enjoy it.
Jeffery Deaver is a former journalist, folksinger, and attorney. The creator of the Lincoln Rhyme series of thrillers, he’s the author of twenty-two novels, has been awarded the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year, and is a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. He’s been nominated for six Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony Award, and a Gumshoe Award. His book The Bone Collectors was made into a feature release from Universal pictures starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. His most recent books are The Cold Moon, The Twelfth Card, and Twisted: Collected Stories. And, yes, the rumors are true, he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As The World Turns.
“Born Bad” is typical of my short stories. They don’t come from real-life experiences and are meant to be pure entertainment; I simply sit down and came up with a scenario that I think will make a fun story. Like my novels, the short stories are carefully plotted and move along quickly to an unexpected ending. The difference, though, is that in a novel I strive to create an emotional roller coaster for my readers. Accordingly, I have to keep in mind the connection that readers have with the book’s characters and never disillusion them. In short stories, that’s not the case, since it’s hard to form more than a marginal connection with the characters over the course of twenty pages or so; the payoff of a story is a gut-wrenching surprise. To stay with the amusement park metaphor: if novels are roller coasters, then short stories are like the parachute drop ride — when the parachute doesn’t open.
Jane Haddam is the pseudonym of Orania Papazoglou, whose first language was not Greek and whose parents were both born in Danbury, Connecticut. She is the author of twenty-two Gregor Demarkian novels and, under her own name, of a short series about romance writer Patience Campbell McKenna as well as two psychological thrillers. She was married for thirteen years to the three-time Edgar Award-winner William L. DeAndrea, who died in 1996. She lives with her two sons in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
I don’t think I would have written a story about a cat if the cat had been any other cat but Edelweiss. I’m not a cat-detective sort of person — all the cutesy half-humanness of detecting pets tends to make me climb the walls. So when Ed Gorman first asked me to do a story for a volume of cat-related mysteries, I was torn between my first reaction (“oh, for goodness sake”) and the desire to have a chance to do a short story at all. I don’t get asked to do them often, and I love the form. In the end, I opted for a story that wasn’t anything like cutesy and that couldn’t be mistaken for cozy in a million years. In the process, I gave Edelweiss — who was adopted after having been neglected and abused, and who had the most thoroughgoing case of shyness ever visited on a mammal — the sort of nonchalant self-confidence all cats are supposed to possess by birthright. She’s a good cat, Edelweiss, even if you’ll never get to meet her. If you visit, she’ll hide under the couch or behind the recycling bin until she can be sure you’re safely gone.
William Harrison is the author of eight novels — five set in Africa — as well as three volumes of short stories, essays, and travel pieces. He taught at the University of Arkansas for a number of years and still lives in Fayetteville.
I usually begin with a character when a story comes to me, but sometimes a place — or even a single image — starts the process. I was driving down toward Dripping Springs, Texas, out of Austin when I saw this forlorn little real estate company in a squat building out there among the scrub oak and mesquite trees. My wife had once worked as a real estate agent and told me how women agents always traveled in pairs when dealing with male clients — especially in isolated rural situations — and my imagination just turned over. “Texas Heat” was the result.
Alan Heathcock has published stories in a number of journals. His story “Peacekeeper,” first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, won the 2006 National Magazine Award in fiction. He is a native of Chicago and teaches at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.
Some friends of mine live in a lovely small town in Minnesota. I visited the town not long after a horrible crime — not unlike the crime in “Peacekeeper” — had been discovered. The town had palpably changed; everything felt different, somehow tarnished. I remember wondering if anything could be done to restore the town’s peace and decided nothing short of having the crime erased from the town’s collective memory would suffice. That, in turn, got me thinking on the nature of peace itself and how disrupted peace will always show itself, will be felt, will be ingested like fouled air, even if not seen by the community; peace, or the lack of peace, is a force of nature, is the very air we breathe. Around the same time I was working on a story about the Great Midwestern Flood of 1993, and it made sense that the two stories reside in the same Active space. I owe a structural debt to the Christopher Nolan film Following for the disjointed manner in which Nolan unfurled his story, juxtaposing related but out-of-sequence scenes to enable a consistent tension — building multiple lines to a proper crescendo, was, for me, a key to unlocking this particular story’s potency.
Emory Holmes II is a Los Angeles-based novelist, playwright, poet, children’s storywriter, and journalist. His news stories on American crime, schools, and the arts have appeared on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the New York Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Magazine, Essence, CODE, the R&B Report, Written By magazine, and other publications.
When my crime-writer buddy Gary Phillips called in the summer of 2004 and asked if I would contribute a story to The Cocaine Chronicles — an anthology of new writing he and novelist Jervey Tervalon were putting together addressing the effects of cocaine on American society — I jumped at the chance. I was eager to pen a twenty-first-century blues. I unearthed a motley gallery of killers I’d banked in an archive of traffickers and thugs, collected during my thirty years as a reporter and writer. Some of the characters and settings in “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” got plucked from the novel I am writing about a meth epidemic (and murder) in 1980s Honolulu. I had done a page one story on this epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle back in August 1989 and, a few weeks after that, Vanity Fair sent me back to Hawaii to do the story for them. Working on assignment for Vanity Fair is a writer’s dream come true, and the experience was all that and more for me, but my Hawaii narrative never got published in Vanity Fair. It was, however, during this time that I first uncovered the remarkable crimes and characters that have become “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella.”