Tangled Web UK Review December 2008
The Best American Mystery Stories 2008 by
George Pelecanos
pbk out November 08
(Quercus)
at £14.99
This year’s anthology is the twelfth in this series; guest editor (after such as Robert B. Parker, James Ellroy and Scott Turow) is George Pelecanos, who had a short story (his first) in the inaugural volume back in 1997. The names of James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly and (surprisingly) Alice Munro beckoned from the cover. The combination looked well nigh unmissable to me. I was not wrong.
Highlights (alphabetical order, like the book) include a haunting tale of post-Katrina displacement from Burke, and a regrettably brief return to the criminal mainstream from the incandescent Robert Ferrigno, in which a dying hoodlum contemplates his life, death and (memorably) his chances of getting to heaven. Proof of God comes in a very different shape in Holly Goddard Jones’s story of the same name, whilst in Kyle Minor’s unbearably poignant A Day Meant to Do Less describes a world of suffering as a faithful son prepares to wash his dying and dementia-ridden mother for the first time, totally unaware of the secrets she conceals.
In Child’s Play (so good it was also chosen by Salman Rushdie for companion volume, The Best American Short Stories 2008) Alice Munro superbly (and suspensefully) examines one of those odd childhood friendships to ultimately chilling effect. Another dying parent with a secret history figures in The Blind Man’s Sighted Daughters as Joyce Carol Oates explores the complex and potentially explosive relationship between an old man and his two daughters, one his long-term ‘caretaker’, the other returning for a visit.
Stephen Rhodes, a new name (to me) but clearly one to seek out, contributes an electrifying story of Wall Street manoeuvring (a “derivatives executive”, he knows whereof he speaks). In Elizabeth Strout’s A Different Road, the vulnerability of the young gunman threatening an ageing married couple in a hospital stickup, has unexpected effects on their long relationship. Meanwhile in St. Gabriel, the final story, Scott Wolven comes on like some latter-day Marc Behm.
Some of these stories, whilst often with an integral ‘crime’, contain little in the way of ‘mystery’ (unless they be the ever-present mysteries of the heart). That’s inevitable, I guess, as the net for the 5000 stories or so that are considered annually, now stretches well beyond the crime anthologies, or the Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock magazines of yore, to on-line sources and literary magazines. Good though to see the Noir anthologies from Akashic Books, clearly now a vital influence on the US short fiction scene (and beyond), well represented here.
Akashic’s series brought forth both the Ferrigno and the Rhodes stories above, for instance, along with Michael Connelly’s clever Double Indemnity variant, and S.J.Rozan’s unusual Hothouse. Fine work too from Rupert Holmes (though you may have read this story in Dead Man’s Hand, Otto Penzler’s poker anthology from 2007), along with Chuck Hogan and Jas. R. Petrin, both graduates of the EQ and AH Mystery Magazines.
But whatever the source, this volume was a far from predictable delight; an excellent and varied collection which will keep most readers on their toes.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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