The story is dependent on author implications and reader inferences. To take Poe as an example, his creepy dungeons are painted in few words; the shiver they send up the reader’s spine depends on the reader’s imagination as much as Poe’s, and Poe knew that. He was a master at tripping off the guilty hidden thoughts and imaginings of his readers.
So what would be the essential working parts of an ideal short story?
The story must be tight and well written; a novel can take a few fumbles without much damage, but a short story really suffers from them.
The opening must be catchy and quick and set a mood — the story should be rolling with the first line. No space here for the dark and stormy night.
From C. J. Box’s “Power Wagon”: “A single headlight strobed through a copse of ten-foot willows on the other side of the overgrown horse pasture. Marissa unconsciously laced her fingers over her pregnant belly and said, ‘Brandon, there’s somebody out there.’ ”
Single headlight strobed/ten-foot willows/overgrown horse pasture/laced her fingers/pregnant belly/somebody out there.
All that bound in two sentences, thirty-six words.
What, you’re going to stop reading right there?
Scene-setting should be integral to the story, part of the fabric rather than long blocks of exposition. The scene-setting ideally should contribute to the mood and texture of the story. If you set a dark, morose story on a sunny summer’s day, you’re fighting yourself. Not to say that it can’t be done.
From Charles John Harper’s “Lovers and Thieves”: “It was the kind of rain favored by lovers and thieves. A misty November rain. The kind that hangs low, veil-like, obscuring the dark, desperate world beneath it. The kind that sends lovers into their bedrooms and thieves into the night... I was more like the thief, waiting outside the Bon Vivant on La Brea, a tired, three-story, stucco apartment building with a name more festive than its architecture. Waiting inside my gunmetal-gray 1934 DeSoto Airflow Coupe... It wasn’t where I wanted to be. It wasn’t where a PI makes any real money in this town.”
Now we get to character. The physical description of the characters is critical, and what the reader sees in this physical description should tell us much about the character’s personality. There’s a reason for that: it creates an immediate image in the reader’s mind, so that laborious explication isn’t necessary. If a guy has a twice-broken nose, a fedora, a double-breasted suit, and is smoking a Lucky Strike Green, we’ve got a pretty good idea of when and where the story is coming from, without even knowing much more.
From Dan Bevacqua’s “The Human Variable”: “Standing out front near the bug light was an incredibly tall, incredibly thin man with an orange beard. He had the word SELF tattooed above his right eyebrow. MADE was above the left. Ted asked him [where he was.]... ‘Liberty’... ‘Thanks...’ ‘Yut,’ SELF MADE said, as if he were offended by language, as if it had done something horrible to him as a child.”
Of course, a major factor in short story writing is that the story itself has to be good. One of the biggest problems of too many short stories is that they’re boring and occasionally stupid, and you feel that the editor who chose it for publication has some unstated motive for choosing it.
By “good,” I mean the reader has to want to continue it, the story should have something interesting to say about the characters (and about character in general), and it should have something surprising about it.
Not surprising in a jack-in-the-box way, where something weird pops up in the last paragraph, but something logical, something that develops directly from the story line, but something that the reader didn’t see coming. And preferably something that contributes to the resolution of the story. Something like the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
Almost all the stories in this collection work that way: I can’t quote them because I’d be giving too much away. I can say that one story that I didn’t like, and didn’t select, was doing fine until the last moment, when all the questions were answered by a jack-in-the-box.
And finally there has to be some resolution. You can’t just end a short story; you have to wind it up.
As Doug Allyn does in “Puncher’s Chance” (not a spoiler): “And because it’s the flat-ass truth.”
Some people might tell you that crime short stories, unlike the more precious kind, are a kind of fictional ghetto, full of cardboard characters and clichéd situations.
Not true. These stories are remarkably free of bullshit — although there’s always a little, just to grease the wheels. And as a guy who writes a lot of crime, I love the language, the kind of language you don’t generally find in The New Yorker.
I personally have used the phrase “douche-nozzle” to characterize a low-life character in an upcoming novel, and have to say that I’m nothing if not proud of myself; you’ll find more of that kind of fine stuff in this collection.
And so...
Here they are.
John Sandford
Doug Allyn
Puncher’s Chance
From Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
My sister finished me in the third round. It wasn’t a big punch. It stung, but didn’t do serious damage.
But it definitely got the job done.
We were sparring in the ring of our family gym, tuning each other up, getting prepped for fights only a few days away.
Jilly’s bout would open the show at Motor City Stadium, Detroit’s version of Madison Square Garden. Home of the Red Wings, Big Time Wrestling, and the Friday Night Fights. Chick boxers are mostly a diversion, eye candy tacked onto a program to pump up the crowd. No one takes them seriously. Yet.
Jilly’s trying to change that, one round at a time. Cute, blond, and blocky, she could pass for a junior-college cheerleader.
Who punches like a pile driver.
I was hoping my opponent wouldn’t be much tougher than hers. I’d be facing Kid Juba, a middleweight from Chicago. He’s been away from the game for a few years with drug problems, looking for a big comeback.
So am I. Juba will be my first bout since I ripped a rotator cuff last fall.
The docs say my shoulder’s healed now, good to go. I can curl my own weight again and spar all damn day with only an occasional ache. But boxing careers can crash and burn in a few tough years, and the six-month layoff to rehab my shoulder has been driving me bonkers.
I was desperate to get back in the ring, desperate to get my life back on track.
I come from a Detroit family of fighters, the Irish Maguires. Boxing isn’t a sport to us, it’s been the family business for three generations. We own our own gym, train ourselves. My grandfather Daryl was a welterweight contender back in the eighties. Fought Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns in their primes. My Pops, Gus Maguire, won silver in the Olympics and coached U.S. boxing teams three times.
I’m next in line, with little brothers Sean and Liam only a few years behind me.
Jilly is the first female Maguire to step through the ropes. And if the game doesn’t take women seriously, nobody told Jilly. She fights every round like a freakin’ headhunter. No mercy, no quarter asked or given.
Pops didn’t want her in the ring, said it was no fit place for a woman. When she pushed it, he matched her with Liam, who’s only fifteen but a strapping lad with fifty-plus Golden Gloves bouts under his belt. He promptly put her on the deck.
No big surprise. Every green fighter gets clocked, especially if she’s fighting a Maguire. But Jilly shook it off, and the next round she threw an elbow in a clinch and busted Liam’s lower lip open. The dirty foul ended the bout. It took sixteen stitches to close the wound. But it got my Pops’s attention.