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Since 1997, Otto Penzler has published annual collections of "The Best American Short Stories," edited and introduced by heavy hitters from Sue Grafton to Ed McBain. The 2001 volume edited by Lawrence Block is now available in the United Kingdom, in paperback, as "The Best American Mystery Stories 2." At first glance, most of these stories don't appear to be "mysteries" at all. Only two of Block's selections are traditional P.I. stories - "A Book of Kells" by Jeremiah Healy, and "The Big Bite" by Bill Pronzini. These are fun stories, and fans of the veteran mystery authors' series detectives - John Francis Cuddy and Nameless - will enjoy a visit with old friends. The sole "amateur sleuth" story, "Missing in Action" by Peter Robinson, revisits Frank Bascombe, the schoolmaster hero of "In Flanders Fields," in the World War II Britain setting that Robinson recreated so lovingly for his great novel "In a Dry Season." Of the remaining stories, three are single-case police procedurals: "Easy Street" by T. Jefferson Parker, "Under Suspicion" by Clark Howard and "Erie's Last Day" by Steve Hockensmith. Howard and Parker are genre veterans, and they both give fun /creepy twists to old formulas, but Hockensmith does something more. Through a collection of short vivid scenes, the story follows a veteran cop through his last day on the job. Larry Erie solves his case, but not in the way you might expect, and what lingers are the mundane but unexpected details of Erie's day. Despite its subject, "Erie's Last Day" feels less like a mystery than a story about an ordinary guy who happens to be a cop. Erie is less like the sleuths in the other whodunits, and more like the characters in the collection's most interesting stories - ordinary people whose lives are touched by violence or crime. The heroine of Jennifer Anderson's terrifically creepy "Things that Make Your Heart Beat Faster," is a police officer, and she solves some crimes, but the story is really about a woman surviving in an alien world. Shelly Wolansky, in Michael Downs' "Prison Food," may be a chef who cooks for death row inmates, but she is more worried about how her rebellious son will survive in the world. In "Her Hollywood" by Michael Hyde, a young teenager becomes obsessed with the fate of a murdered classmate. And in the collection's best story, Thomas Lynch's "Blood Sport", an undertaker must embalm a murder victim he knew when she was a girl. For all of these characters, the challenge of the traditional mystery protagonist is beside the point - they aren't in the position to "solve" anything, and even if they were, what difference could it make? If there's anything like a trend in this collection, it's the story of a seemingly powerless victim - usually young, almost always female - in an inescapable situation. Joyce Carol Oates, who practically invented the victim story, is back in this volume with "The Girl with the Blackened Eye." This story of an abduction is exceptionally well-written but almost pornographic in its detail, and readers will have to decide where the line between sympathy and sensationalism lies. In John Salter's "Big Ranch," a sweet but dim Native American girl lives in sexual slavery at a logging camp, and in David Means' "Carnie" a father regrets a tragic event involving his daughter. In "The Face-Lift" by Roxana Robinson and "Push Comes to Shove" by Nathan Walpow, the victims appear in unusual guises - a privileged Latin American woman, and a male professional wrestler - with surprising consequences. And in the best of the victim stories, William Gay's modern Gothic fairytale "The Paperhanger," the lines between victim, hero, and monster are eerily blurred. Purists might question many of Block's choices, wondering how they ended up in a book of "mystery" stories. But Block, who has published dozens of traditional mystery stories himself, has chosen diverse and well-written stories true to the spirit of classic crime writing. The issue here is not "literature" versus "genre" (although less than half of the stories come from traditional "mystery" publications) but the potential for a short story to be something other than a novel in miniature. The mystery story comes to life, it seems, when it is less than about mystery than it is about life.
Reviewed by Caroline Pruett, June 2003
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