UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Best American Mystery Stories 2005, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (2005)

             The first mystery in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 is really a crime story, and an indication why Joyce Carol Oates was chosen to edit this collection, since she’s not a mystery writer. The books she writes under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, sometimes billed as mysteries, are crime stories where family secrets come slowly out in the narration, hardly mysteries in the usual genre sense. Such quibbling takes nothing away from her literary judgment though, and this collection contains topnotch stories that have appeared not only in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine but also in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic, and various small magazines.

            Many will consider the jewel of the collection to be the longish story called “Jack Duggan’s Law,” written by George V. Higgins. Higgins, who wrote the mystery classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, died in 1999, and this story’s delayed publication in 2005 may make it the last of his works to see print.

            But there are other treats as well. Stuart Kaminsky has a story called “The Shooting of John Roy Worth,” where we learn in the first few paragraphs that the town’s sign painter, probably mentally retarded and certainly mentally disturbed, intends to kill the only celebrity from the little town of Pardo, Texas. From there the story moves toward its conclusion quickly and inevitably. But Kaminsky’s rapidly drawn, convincing characters provide a surprise ending.

            Scott Wolven’s story, “Barracuda,” describes in the best hard-boiled tradition an upstate New York subculture in which the usual human virtues of honesty, loyalty, and pity have no place.

            Here’s the opening from a story by Dennis Lehane that he calls “Until Gwen”:

  Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar, two Sundays a month, at the local VFW. But she feels her calling—her true calling in life—is to write.

            That opening, which I would characterize as Elmore Leonard meets Garrison Keillor, might fool you into thinking that “Until Gwen” will be a comic story. But it keeps on getting darker and darker until, as Lehane himself admits in the biographical notes at the end of the book, “it ended up being arguably the darkest thing I’ve ever written.” And that, coming from the man who wrote Mystic River, is dark indeed.

            On the other hand, Daniel Orozco’s story, “Officers Weep,” really is funny throughout. Orozco manages to present a mystery, a love story, and some urban social comedy while never deviating from the form of police reports, a sequence of them from two lines to two dozen lines long  It’s an ingenious narrative device, and Orozco captures the authentic sound of police lingo.

            Among these and the fifteen other stories in this collection, I think you’ll find something you like.