I changed the settings from inner-city Honolulu to the outskirts of Los Angeles. My cycle of events takes place within the span of a few heartbeats, in a police interrogation room, a few miles from the urban hick town of La Caja, California (a fictional hometown I intend to revisit). To celebrate the invention of La Caja, I birthed an ambitious killer, Cut Pemberton, whose presence is a mere specter in this story. Nevertheless, he is my narratives’ inscrutable engine. He is a quicksilver force and, I may as well add, a predator and a scoundrel and a merciless miscreant too who, for the moment, exists primarily as a mordent spook in the opulent, backtracking imagination of his gargantuan road-dog, his thoroughly guilty, yet somehow blissfully blameless — and hungry and thirsty and wronged! wronged! — pale-ass pussy of a sidekick, the roundly chastened and proportioned Fat Tommy O’Rourke.
“A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” is an inquiry into the mind of this man, Tommy O’Rourke. My story, frankly, suspects Moises is complicit in a monstrous crime. While negotiating the streams of Tommy’s thoughts, I tried to make note of the reeling fluidity and momentum of subjective time as it whipped Tommy round and around in its rapids on that interminable day and night, while around him the grave machinery of fate ticked on. I looked for fun as well as art in this sad stuff. At a decisive point in Tommy’s interrogation, DEA Special Agent Roland Braddock nails him with a slur, “Pale-ass pussy.” Here’s how Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), critiqued the Moises Rockafellas of his day: “An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it; but he could not bear its image after it was done. Now he always saw himself as the doer of one deed. Madness I call this: the exception now became the essence for him. A chalk streak stops a hen; the stroke that he himself struck stopped his poor reason: madness after the deed I call this.”
My story is about exactly this: the madness after the deed. There’s nothing funny about murder. True that. But, I won’t get mad if readers think of this narrative as a comedy, even a slapstick comedy, and laugh out loud. That said, at the bottom of all this funny business, “A.k.a., Moises Rockafella” is a blues; a pale-ass, lowdown blues.
Wendy Hornsby is the author of seven novels and a collection of short stories, Nine Sons, that includes her Edgar Award-winning short story of the same tide. She lives in Southern California, where she is chair of her college history department. Currently she is finishing the sixth Maggie MacGowen mystery
One early summer evening, just before sunset, I sat on our front deck gazing out across Malibu Canyon, glass of good red wine in hand, thinking about a story for Murder in Vegas, the anthology edited by Michael Connelly. In front of me, a pair of magnificent red-tail hawks rose up out of the depths of the canyon, found thermals to ride, like kites, so they could shop the chaparral below for their dinner. Beautiful. I’m not a big fan of Vegas and whatever goes on there, but I do love the Red Rock Canyon area that rises from the desert floor just a few miles past the artifice and faux gilt of the Strip. Like the rugged canyons of the Santa Monica mountains where we live, that can be a very treacherous area for the unprepared. The elements of “Dust Up” began to emerge out of that place where stories lurk. By the time the last of the sun was gone, and with some help from my well-used copy of Sibley’s Guide to Birds, the story was formed: bad guys, an excellent body drop, endangered wildlife, and Pansy Reynard, a character I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know. “Dust Up” was fun to write. I think Pansy Reynard and I may have some further adventures to explore.
Andrew Klavan is the author of True Crime, which was filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say a Word, which was filmed starring Michael Douglas. He has just completed Damnation Street, the sequel to the Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop novels Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other places.
When I first finished “Her Lord and Master,” my agent at the time told me not to try to publish it. He said its graphically sexual and politically incorrect subject matter would hurt my career. After a couple of venues turned the story down, I brought it to my friend Otto Penzler. I trust Otto, and I figured if he told me to ditch the thing, I would. Instead, he called me and said, “I’ll get this into print if I have to build an entire anthology around it.” It took him four years but he was, as always, as good as his word. The story first came out in Otto’s anthology Dangerous Women. Then it got nominated for an Edgar Award. Now it’s been included here. The moral of the story: when in doubt, call Otto.
Elmore Leonard is one of the most honored and beloved writers in America, a regular on the best-seller lists for two decades, and the winner of the Grand Master Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America for lifetime achievement. Among the motion pictures made from his books are Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, The Tall T, Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, and Stick.
Elmore Leonard has said that if he didn’t have a good time writing novels and short stories he wouldn’t have kept doing it for fifty-five years. According to Leonard, his ultimate pleasure is developing characters, giving them attitudes, and getting them to talk in scenes that he makes up as he goes along, without much of an idea how the book or story will end.
He was already working on his novel The Hot Kid when Otto Penzler called and asked if he had time to write a story for Otto’s forthcoming anthology of suspense stories Dangerous Women. Elmore said, “You bet” and pulled Louly Brown out of the novel he was writing, but doesn’t remember why he changed her name to Louly Ring. He also introduced Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster, who later appeared in a fourteen-part serial called Comfort to the Enemy that ran in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and will be featured again in the book Elmore is currently writing.
“My characters,” Elmore said, “are always on call, never knowing where they might have to show up again.”
Laura Lippman has won virtually all the major U.S. mystery-writing awards for her Tess Monaghan novels. She also has published two critically acclaimed stand-alones, Every Secret Thing and To the Power of Three. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Murderers Row, Tart Noir, Murder and All that Jazz, Dangerous Women, and Baltimore Noir, which she also edited. A former newspaper reporter, she lives in Baltimore.