The World's Finest Mystery... Read online

  The World's Finest Mystery

  and Crime Stories

  Second Annual Collection

  Edited by Ed Gorman

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  New York

  www.ebookyes.com

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in the stories in this anthology are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE WORLD'S FINEST MYSTERY AND CRIME STORIES: SECOND ANNUAL COLLECTION

  Copyright © 2001 by Tekno Books and Ed Gorman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 0-312-70241-8

  First Edition: October 2001

  FORGE BOOKS BY ED GORMAN

  Moonchasers and Other Stories

  Blood Games

  What the Dead Men Say

  (as editor)

  The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories

  First Annual Collection

  The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories

  Second Annual Collection

  (as E. J. Gorman)

  The First Lady

  The Marilyn Tapes

  Senatorial Privilege

  Dedicated

  to

  Janet Hutchings

  and

  Cathleen Jordan

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch, Maxim Jakubowski, Thomas Woertche, Lucy Sussex and David Honeybone, and Edo van Belkom, for their informative summaries of the mystery field, and of course, to my editor at Forge Books, Jim Frenkel, and his able staff.

  Contents

  THE YEAR IN MYSTERY AND CRIME FICTION: 2000 Jon L. Breen

  A 2000 YEARBOOK OF CRIME AND MYSTERY Edward D. Hoch

  WORLD MYSTERY REPORT: GREAT BRITAIN Maxim Jakubowski

  WORLD MYSTERY REPORT: AUSTRALIA David Honeybone and Lucy Sussex

  WORLD MYSTERY REPORT: CANADA Edo van Belkom

  WORLD MYSTERY REPORT: GERMANY Thomas Woertche

  THE 2000 SHORT STORY EDGAR AWARDS Camille Minichino

  THE YEAR 2000 IN MYSTERY FANDOM George A. Easter

  SPINNING Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  THE SUMMER PEOPLE Brendan DuBois

  AFRAID OF THE DARK Nancy Pickard

  FOR ALL THE SAINTS Gillian Linscott

  LET'S GET LOST Lawrence Block

  UNDER SUSPICION Clark Howard

  CHILDHOOD S. J. Rozan

  ART & CRAFT Donald E. Westlake

  THE ALLOTMENT Peter Crowther

  TWELVE OF THE LITTLE BUGGERS Mat Coward

  MISSING IN ACTION Peter Robinson

  THE HAGGARD SOCIETY Edward D. Hoch

  SCORPION'S KISS Stuart M. Kaminsky

  NOBLE CAUSES Bob Mendes

  THE SLEEPING DETECTIVE Gary Phillips

  A NIGHT IN THE MANCHESTER STORE Stanley Cohen

  WHAT MR. MCGREGOR SAW Dorothy Cannell

  DELTA DOUBLE-DEAL Noreen Ayres

  THREE NIL Mat Coward

  THE MAN IN THE CIVIL SUIT Jan Burke

  BLACK AND WHITE MEMORIES Robert J. Randisi

  NOTHING TO LOSE Robert Barnard

  WIDOWER'S WALK Joseph Hansen

  CHARACTER FLAW Christine Matthews

  GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE— A VIEW FROM BELOW Jürgen Ehlers

  BOO Richard Laymon

  VETERANS John Lutz

  THE ABBEY GHOSTS Jan Burke

  THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND Doug Allyn

  HAPPINESS Joyce Carol Oates

  THE CONFESSION Ian Rankin

  THE PERFECTIONIST Peter Lovesey

  A WALL TOO HIGH Edward D. Hoch

  THE SILENCE Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  THE BIG BITE Bill Pronzini

  THE GATHERING OF THE KLAN Les Roberts

  WHEN THE BLACK SHADOWS DIE Clark Howard

  REBIRTH (CAIN AND ABEL) Miguel Agustí

  HELENA AND THE BABIES Denise Mina

  OLD SOLDIERS Brendan DuBois

  THE VICTIM Ed McBain

  THE POET OF PULP Pete Hamill

  HONORABLE MENTIONS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  The Year in Mystery and Crime Fiction: 2000

  Jon L. Breen

  Call 2000 "The Year of the Puzzle." Even what century we were in was a puzzle: Was this the first year of the twenty-first, as millions of January 1 revelers including me chose to believe, or the last of the twentieth? (The answer has something to do with a binary system versus a decimal system, but I'm no mathematician.) Then there was the more significant math puzzle, with elements of the jigsaw: Who exactly was elected president of the United States? It took an extended squabble over dimpled chads, flexible deadlines, doctored absentee voter applications, and dueling supreme courts to decide.

  But what, aside from providing promising plot material, did these real-life puzzles have to do with those created by writers of crime and mystery fiction, where the deductive puzzle beloved of traditionalists has been declining for decades? Though the formal detection of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr didn't make an unexpected comeback, that most maligned, patronized, and (with book buyers) popular of Golden Age icons, Agatha Christie, had a big year. She was voted the best crime writer of the century by the membership of the Anthony Boucher Memorial Mystery Convention (Bouchercon), held in Denver, and her Hercule Poirot novels were voted the best series. One of the year's secondary sources was an encyclopedic guide to her works, while another was a deconstructionist reconsideration of the plot of her most famous book. Christie even had a new novel this year— sort of. Spider's Web (St. Martin's Minotaur) was the third in a series of novelizations of her plays by Charles Osborne.

  Meanwhile, at the same mile-high convention, the Private Eye Writers of America gave their lifetime achievement award to master puzzlemaker Edward D. Hoch, a writer more associated with impossible crimes and fair-play clues than blows to the head and rye bottles in the desk drawer.

  Giving hope to the more literal-minded traditionalists, no less than two authors, Nero Blanc and Parnell Hall, were practicing the crossword-puzzle mystery, invented by Dorothy L. Sayers in the 1920s but produced since by the late Herbert Resnicow and few others.

  With the growing blockbuster obsession of the major corporate book publishers, many readers and writers of bread-and-butter mystery fiction confronted another kind of puzzle: the maze they had to master to find each other.

  Finally, one of the longstanding puzzles of crime and mystery fiction, but I don't know if it's a math puzzle, a word puzzle, a political puzzle, or (for those involved) another maze: Why have American and British markets shown such resistance to crime fiction from other languages and cultures? And why does the whole world seem to view the crime novel as an Anglo-American art form?

  Early in 2000, during a visit to a national park in Chile, my wife and I learned that our tour guide was a mystery enthusiast who enjoyed a number of English-language writers in the original or in Spanish translation. After recommending some other writers she might enjoy, I asked her what contemporary Latin American crime writers she could recommend. She was unable to name a single one, indeed seemed to doubt there were any. The only one I could think of was Mexico's Paco Ignacio Taibo II, several of whose brilliant and offbeat novels have been published in the U.S.A., but surely there must be others.

  It's true that the French, with Emile Gaboriau, Maurice Leblanc, and Gaston Leroux, have been accorded some historical importance, and at least some forei
gn-language writers have enjoyed a brief or extended vogue in Britain and America: Maigret's Belgian creator Georges Simenon, of course; the German author of Night of the Generals and other World War II fiction, Hans Hellmut Kirst; the Italian author of the bestseller The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco; the Swedish police proceduralist team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahloo; and a pair of Dutch authors, Robert van Gulik and Janwillem van der Wetering, both of whom wrote in English. Numerous others have at least occasionally cracked the English language market in translation: the Italian team of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini; several Japanese writers (Seicho Matsumoto, Masako Togawa, Edogawa Rampo); the French Frederic Dard (Sanantonio) and Hubert Monteilhet; the Russian Yulian Semyonov; the Spanish Manuel Vázquez Montalban; and the Scandinavians Poul Orum, Jan Ekstrom, and K. Arne Blom. Among the prominent foreign-language writers currently being published in English are Holland's Baantjer, many of whose DeKok novels have appeared in trade paperback translations from Intercontinental, and Sweden's Henning Mankell, whose novels about Kurt Wallander are published by The New Press. But the fact remains that the balance of trade in crime fiction has always favored English-language works.

  In December 2000, Club Med sponsored a mystery-novel conference in the Bahamas that drew such distinguished American writers as Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, James Crumley, and Nevada Barr. Several foreign-language writers were also invited: Taibo of Mexico, Leonardo Padura of Cuba, Santiago Gamboas of Colombia, Laura Grimaldi of Italy; Thierry Jonquet, Chantal Pelletier, and Dominique Manotti of France; and José Angel Manas of Spain. A check of Amazon.com shows that of this group, only Taibo has any books available in English translation. The formation of the International Crime Writers Association a few years ago, and its English-language anthologies, have helped to bring some international writers to the attention of English-language readers, but English-speaking countries continue to have a resistance to foreign writers that does not exist in other countries where English-language books in translation are popular. While you could say the same about English-language motion pictures, at least the best of foreign film can be expected to turn up with subtitles at the big-city art houses. No such equivalent exists for foreign crime fiction.

  THE WEB

  The discussion of internationalism leads conveniently to the increasing importance of the Internet as a source of up-to-date information. Quite often I get news of the mystery field in the U.S. and Great Britain first from a Web site that is maintained in Japan: Jiro Kimura's The Gumshoe Site (www.nsknet.or.jp%jkimura). Another useful site, The Mysterious Homepage: A Guide to Mysteries and Crime Fiction on the Internet (www.webfic.com/mysthome/mysthome.htm) is maintained in Denmark by Jan B. Steffensen.

  Some other sites I've found particularly valuable are Tangled Web U.K. (www.twbooks.co.uk), a great source of British reviews by H. R. F. Keating, Martin Edwards, Val McDermid, and other well-known author-critics; and the Thrilling Detective Web Site (www.thrillingdetective.com), a good stop for lovers of the hardboiled. My most exciting recent find, though, is Michael E. Grost's A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection (members.aol.com/mg4273/classics.htm), which includes some contemporary subjects but is most valuable for its historical coverage. You'd be hard-pressed to find a print source that covers in such detail writers of the past like Lee Thayer, Octavus Roy Cohen, Burton E. Stevenson, Helen McCloy, and Lawrence G. Blochman.

  BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR 2000

  The superlative "best" refers to those novels I have read and reviewed, which do not necessarily include all the worthy crime fiction of the year. However, I can recommend the fifteen books below without reservation, and I doubt anyone could find fifteen better. There's no common theme this time apart from the literary: The novels of Collins, Doughty, Engel, Stansberry, Taibo, and Westlake deal in a major or minor way with the doings of novelists, not such a surprising topic for novelists to be writing about.

  Sarah Caudwell, The Sibyl in her Grave (Delacorte). The late author's final novel about Professor Hilary Tamar, whose gender must remain a mystery, is a literate, seriocomic puzzle for fans of Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin. Has any writer gained as formidable a reputation as Caudwell on the basis of four widely spaced novels?

  Max Allan Collins's The Hindenburg Murders (Berkley). The creator of the Saint, Leslie Charteris, is the sleuth in this recreation of a 1937 disaster from our best fictionalizer of twentieth-century mysteries.

  K. C. Constantine, Grievance (Mysterious). With Rugs Carlucci succeeding Mario Balzic as central character, the series about the Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, police continues to feature complex relationships, extraordinary dialogue, and unconventional mystery plotting.

  Thomas H. Cook, Places in the Dark (Bantam). To say this cleverly crafted, lyrically written, time-shifting saga of two brothers from small-town coastal Maine bears comparison with the author's earlier Breakheart Hill and The Chatham School Affair should be recommendation enough.

  Val Davis, Wake of the Hornet (Bantam). Archaeologist Nicolette (Nick) Scott, a specialist in the examination of historic aircraft, investigates a Pacific island mystery involving the Cargo Cults. This series started strong and has gotten better with each book.

  Louise Doughty, An English Murder (Carroll & Graf). As the publisher's enthusiastic press releases emphasize, this is not your parents' English-village mystery. Subversive or not, it is a sensitive, complex, and remarkable novel.

  Howard Engel, Murder in Montparnasse (Overlook). The sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of 1920s Paris come to life in this tale of the literary expatriate colony, first published in Canada in 1992.

  Nicolas Freeling, Some Day Tomorrow (St. Martin's/Minotaur). An amazing novel from the viewpoint of a troubled, quirky, and brilliant retired Dutch botanist suspected of killing a teenage girl. Freeling always has been a specialized taste, but I'd recommend this one even to readers who could never warm up to series cops van der Valk and Castang.

  Stuart M. Kaminsky, The Big Silence (Forge). Chicago policeman Abe Lieberman, one of the great characters of contemporary crime fiction, confronts a variety of personal and professional problems.

  H. R. F. Keating, The Hard Detective (St. Martin's Minotaur). Tough woman detective Harriet Martens seeks a Biblically obsessed serial killer in a splendid police procedural from an unusual series— previous titles include The Rich Detective, The Good Detective, The Bad Detective, and The Soft Detective— joined by theme rather than a continuing character.

  Elmore Leonard, Pagan Babies (Delacorte). Locales from Africa to Detroit and a pair of likably bent central characters combine for a model comic caper with a serious undertone.

  Domenic Stansberry, Manifesto for the Dead (Permanent Press). A remarkable pastiche set in early-seventies Hollywood approximates Jim Thompson's style, while featuring the troubled novelist as the main character. (Another publication of interest to Thompson fans from the same small press is Mitch Cullin's chilling book-length poem, Branches.)

  Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Just Passing Through, translated from the Spanish by Martin Michael Roberts (Cinco Puntos Press). A playful, unconventional, and astonishing documentary novel details the author's search for the truth about a Mexican anarchist and labor leader of the 1920s.

  Donald E. Westlake, The Hook (Mysterious). In the grim vein of the author's great 1997 novel, The Ax, this tale of ghostwriting and murder brings the cutthroat publishing scene to life— and death.

  Laura Wilson, A Little Death (Bantam). Three cases of mysterious death spanning half a century in the life of a British family form the puzzle in one of the most original whodunits of recent years. Presented in the U.S. as a paperback original after a 1999 publication in Britain, this first novel is my choice for book of the year.

  SUBGENRES

  Private-eye buffs had plenty to enjoy in 2000, including Amos Walker in Loren D. Estleman's A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (Mysterious), as distinguished as ever in style; newcomer Joe Barley, the academic gumshoe of Eric Wright's The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn
(Perseverance); Sharon McCone in Marcia Muller's Listen to the Silence (Mysterious); Ivan Monk in Gary Phillips's Only the Wicked (Write Way); Spenser in Robert B. Parker's tongue-in-cheek racing mystery Hugger Mugger (Putnam); the Nameless Detective in Bill Pronzini's Crazybone (Carroll & Graf); and Sam McCain in Ed Gorman's Wake Up, Little Susie (Carroll & Graf).