That doesn't mean you can't have larger themes, descriptions, well-defined characters, or explore matters of great import. You can and you must. All great stories-long and, yes, short-contain those elements. You will, in fact, witness many examples in just a few turns of the page. Again, my job here is to delay that sense of satisfaction, I guess, by pointing out the obvious in wonderful, economic storytelling, so let us continue.
What Elmore Leonard means in the above quotation, of course, is that every word must count. The writers included in this collection are masters at this. In the pages after this intro, you will find no navel-gazing, no endless descriptions of winter weather or dithering on about worldview, no fashionable "look at me" acrobatic wordplay that amounts to nothing more than proving that someone bought a brand-new thesaurus and isn't afraid to abuse it.
What will you find, then? In two words: great storytelling.
The writers in this varied and brilliant collection-a heady blend of household names, veteran scribes, and promising newcomers-have taken Elmore Leonard's credo and fed it steroids and raised it to the tenth power and then driven it out to a dive bar by the airport and given it an unlimited tab. Yes, I know that makes no sense, but horrendous analogy aside, you're in for a treat.
Here, my good friend Otto Penzler and I have assembled the "best of the best" in mystery short stories. We often wax nostalgic about some past era, some now-gone golden age of-take your pick-music, literature, cinema, art. Let me give you the good news here. We-you and me, dear reader-are living in the golden age of crime fiction. I do not say this lightly. Never in history have so many authors "dunnit" with such variety and such skill.
In this collection you will find every sort of hero, every sort of villain, every sort of setting, every sort of crime, every sort of solution, every sort of surprise. To paraphrase the old saw, these stories will make you laugh, they will make you cry, they will make you cringe in fear, they will become a part of you.
All of which brings me back to Elmore Leonard's rule. Do you see something worth skipping? Cut it. Cut it off at the knees. Like, to give you an immediate example, this introduction. Cue the maniacal laughter. Fool. If you had skipped this part, you'd already be lost in one of the best mystery short stories of the year. Instead, alas, you're stuck with me.
But not for much longer. Turn the page, dear reader. These will be the last wasted words you will read in this collection. Go. Enjoy.
HARLAN COBEN
Audacious by Brock Adams
FROM Sewanee Review
SHE WAS A PICKPOCKET.
She haunted the subway station on Thirty-fourth and Holloway, where every morning Gerald waited for his train on the same cold concrete bench. He watched her through thick glasses. She was young, frail and thin, waiflike, with short shaggy black hair, and she moved like a ghost, drifting in and out of sight as the crowd milled about.
She made him look forward to the mornings. She made him feel sparks. Watching her was the only time that Gerald had felt alive since he found Dolores, his wife of fifty-three years, face-down in her Cheerios on a Sunday morning, dead from a stroke.
Gerald's pickpocket wore black leggings covered by a short blue-jean skirt. She wore two jackets, Windbreaker over denim-lots of pockets, Gerald figured. Sometimes she wore sunglasses, even though she was underground.
She was good, crafty and swift and clever, and not greedy-you get caught when you get greedy. Gerald learned her patterns as he watched her on the way to work.
Not work really. After Dolores died, and after the funeral and the family and the random visitors bringing potluck stuff over to mold in the fridge, he found himself alone in the house. He had been retired for nine years before she died, and they had never done much of anything. They never traveled or went to parties or joined any clubs. But they were in the house together, living close but separate lives, side by side. She was there, a constant, a daily affirmation, like the soreness of his right rear molar or the ingrown toenail on his middle toe-a part of life.
Once she was gone, there was nothing there but an empty house and a lot of hours between waking up and falling asleep. Gerald cleaned and straightened until there was nothing left to clean and straighten; then he tried to get his job as a building inspector back, but the contracting business had moved on, far on, from the last time he worked. The site was now run by a kid who had been an intern when Gerald retired. He had laughed and put his hand on Gerald's shoulder when he brought up returning to work. Gerald watched the light drain from the kid's eyes, watched the uncomfortable tension slide in, when he realized Gerald was serious. The kid forced the smile back onto his face. "We'd love to have you back, Gerald," he said, "but it's just not safe to have a seventy-four-year-old on a construction site."
Gerald had smiled and nodded, shook the kid's hand. His hand seemed old and callused in the young man's grip. It felt bulky in his pocket as he walked away from the site. Gerald's hair was white by now, even though he parted it the same way he had when he was thirty. His skin was weathered and wrinkled. Everything around him was new. He didn't fit.
He took an office downtown, a small dusty room with a big window that was full of sun and blue sky in the mornings. He told people he was going to be a freelance writer. He didn't write much-a humor piece for the local tabloid, a few halfhearted attempts at a memoir; mostly he looked out the window and breathed in the musty air. He just liked the rhythm it gave to his life, this waking up and getting ready and going to work and coming home, although every morning it got harder to get off that bench and onto the train. And then he found his pickpocket.
She followed patterns that no one but Gerald knew. She entered from the south entrance, the one with the stairs, rather than the escalator. She skipped down the stairs and moved close to the tracks, leaned her back against a cement pillar. She faced straight down into the black hole of the tunnel, but her eyes darted around-light, searching. She stood at the pillar a few minutes. When the first train came rumbling up the tunnel and the crowds pressed right up to the edge of the track, she drifted in, melted right into the throng, and when the doors hissed open, she made her move. Gerald had seen her unzip purses and unhook wallets from chains while the crowd jostled and shoved. She snatched a silver fountain pen from a stockbroker's breast pocket, plucked a small jewel out of an Indian woman's scarf. Then, as the crowd disappeared behind the sliding doors and was shuttled away from her, she slipped her prizes deep in her jacket, slid out the north entrance, and was gone until tomorrow.
She was interesting, a diversion for a while, until the day she pickpocketed the cop. The cop was young and nervous-looking, and he stalked around the station every other day and ran out the bums who begged for change. He stood over a bum on a Wednesday morning.
"Got to move along, buddy," he said.
The bum looked up at him. "Come on, man," he said.
"No panhandling in here."
"Cut me a break."
"Don't make this hard," the cop said. He wore a heavy utility belt loaded down with radio and gun and baton and other cop stuff. Everything was held down by leather straps with snaps on them. He unsnapped the pepper spray. '"Just move along."
The train rumbled in and the doors opened and the crowd sardined its way into the waiting cars, and as Gerald watched, his pickpocket wove her way in between the people and up behind the cop, nicked the pepper spray right out of his belt, and scuttled on out the north entrance. The cop reached for his belt, fumbled thin air, looked down with confusion.