• If I recall, my first inspiration for “Rhonda and Clyde” came on a bitterly cold day. (We don’t have many of those here in the South, thank God.) It probably put me in a Fargo frame of mind, because when I created Wyoming sheriff Marcie Ingalls that morning, the image of the movie character Marge Gunderson sort of jumped into my head, and it stayed there throughout the planning of the story. That choice of a protagonist wasn’t surprising; I’ve always liked stories about strong and smart women in law enforcement, and the way their colleagues (and the criminals) often make the mistake of underestimating them.
I also remember wanting to (1) give her a deputy she didn’t particularly like and (2) make the villains a husband-wife team, maybe because I especially enjoy writing dialogue and I knew both those partnerships would give me a lot of opportunity for that. This line of thinking was a bit different for me, because I usually start with the plot and only then come up with the characters. In this case I created my players first and then dreamed up something for them to do, with some twists and reversals along the way. Anyhow, once I had all that in mind, I sat down and wrote the story in a couple of days’ time — and it turned out to be one of my favorites.
Maybe an occasional cold snap isn’t a bad thing...
Tom Franklin is the author of a collection of stories, Poachers, the title story of which won an Edgar Award. His novels include Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, the UK’s Gold Dagger for Best Novel, and the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction. His most recent novel is The Tilted World, cowritten with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and teaches in the MFA Program at Ole Miss.
• I wrote this story because the great Lawrence Block asked me to, for his terrific anthology From Sea to Stormy Sea. Block had writers choose an American painter (from a list) and then select one of his or her paintings (from another list) and go from there. My painter was John Hull, and the painting is called This Much I Know. I’d not heard of this artist, but the picture he did was rather quiet, muted in color, depicting a small house and a couple of cars, bystanders, cops. It seemed like an “after” shot — something terrible had happened in that house, and I began wondering what the “before” was. The story came quickly after that.
Richard Helms is a retired forensic psychologist and college professor. He has been nominated six times for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award, winning it twice; five times for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award; twice for the International Thriller Writers Thriller Award, with one win; and once for the Mystery Readers International Macavity Award. He is also a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, along with other periodicals and anthologies, and has recently written three screenplays for independent filmmakers in North Carolina. A former member of the board of directors of Mystery Writers of America and the former president of the Southeast Regional Chapter of MWA (SEMWA), he was presented with the SEMWA Magnolia Award for service to the chapter in 2017. “See Humble and Die” is his first appearance in The Best American Mystery Stories.
• I’ve lived in the South all my life. Though a greater portion of those sixty-five years has been spent in cities like Charlotte, Charleston, and Atlanta, I have always been fascinated by small towns. In fact, for twenty-three years — until we downsized and moved back to Charlotte in 2016 — we lived in a town so small it had neither a police force nor a post office of its own. Law enforcement was handled by the county Sheriff’s Department, and our mail arrived courtesy of a post office in a town ten miles away. We were one step removed from being a 1950s-style rural route.
Living in a small town is a strange mix. On one hand, neighbors tend to be closer and to support one another better than in a city. The downside is the potential for simple arguments to turn into bitter, decades-long blood feuds or, in the worst case, to erupt overnight in violent retribution. Resentments simmer and run long and deep in places where you cannot escape or hide from disputes.
My captivation with small-town life led me to devour Bill Crider’s series of Texas-based Sheriff Dan Rhodes novels. I finally met Bill at the Shamus Awards in St. Louis several years back. We developed a casual friendship that I dearly wish had been closer and of longer duration. Bill was gracious enough to provide a cover blurb for one of my small-town Judd Wheeler crime novels (Older Than Goodbye), and I am indebted to him for his support. I last talked with Bill at Bouchercon in Toronto, only months before he passed away. When I heard that Michael Bracken was editing a book of Texas private eye stories, I endeavored to produce a story that would make Bill proud. With the inclusion of “See Humble and Die” in this collection, I hope that mission was accomplished.
Ryan David Jahn is the author of seven novels, including Good Neighbors, which won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Dagger, and The Dispatcher, which was named by the Financial Timesas a top-ten crime novel of the year. He lives with his wife, Jessica, and two daughters, Francine and Matilda, in Louisville, Kentucky.
• My father killed himself in March 2004 while living in an RV park in Bullhead City, Arizona. I hadn’t talked to him in eight years, and don’t remember crying when I found out — don’t remember feeling much of anything at all. It was just information, like reading the obituary of someone you’ve never met in the morning paper. A stranger died and I was supposed to be torn up about it or something, but I wasn’t. I got a box of his things, including pictures he’d taken in Vietnam, his medals, and letters he’d written to his own father. I read about his platoon taking mortar fire; I read about a single leg lying in the dirt and how disconcerting it was to see it detached from a body.
An RV lifestyle catalogue dated February 2004 was in the box of his belongings I’d gotten. My father had circled a cabinet set, something he planned to buy for the RV he was living in if and when he got the money together. That made me cry. In February he’d had plans for the future — he was going to buy some new cabinets for his RV — but in March he was dead. I wondered if he’d saved some of the money.
My youngest daughter, Francine, likes to go hiking with me. We drive out to the woods and spend hours surrounded by trees, walking in relative silence. Sometimes we see a family of deer. Francine and I both freeze in those moments, and the deer freeze, and we all look at each other with dumb blank eyes, and in that instant — in that second before a distant twig snaps, breaking the spell — the world is absolutely perfect and beautiful. Take a picture and keep it forever. I’m not the most self-reflective person on earth, so I can’t tell you why, but “All This Distant Beauty” is about the mental and emotional juxtaposition of those two things: my father’s suicide sixteen years ago and an afternoon hike with my six-year-old daughter. Make of it what you will.
Sheila Kohler is the author of eleven novels, three volumes of short fiction, a memoir, and many essays. Her most recent novel is Dreaming for Freud, based on the Dora case, and Open Secrets will be published in July 2020. Her memoir, Once We Were Sisters, was published in 2017 in the United States, England, and Spain. She has won numerous prizes, including an O. Henry Award. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories and published in thirteen countries. She has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Princeton. Her novel Cracks was made into a film directed by Jordan Scott, with Eva Green playing Miss G. You can find her blog at Psychology Today under “Dreaming for Freud.”