MWA Archives - Black Mask

2013 Edgars

Edgar Awards, Edgar2013, General Suggestions, Modern Masters, MWA, mysteries, mystery, mystery writers of america Comments Off

May 032013

The Mystery Writers of America presented the 2013 Edgar Awards last night at their annual banquet in New York City. Among the winners:

Best novel: Live by Night by Dennis Lehane
Best first novel: The Expats by Chris Pavone
Best paperback original: The Last Policeman: A Novel by Ben H. Winters
Best fact crime: Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China
Best critical/biographical: The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics by James O'Brien
Best short story: "The Unremarkable Heart" - Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance by Karin Slaughter
Best juvenile: The Quick Fix by Jack D. Ferraiolo
Best young adult: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
TV episode teleplay: "A Scandal in Belgravia" - Sherlock, Teleplay by Steven Moffat
Robert L. Fish memorial: "When They Are Done With Us" - Staten Island Noir by Patricia Smith
Mary Higgins Clark award: The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan
Grand Master award: Ken Follett, Margaret Maron
Raven award: Oline Cogdill, Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, San Diego & Redondo Beach, CA
Ellery Queen award: Akashic Books

Congratulations to all the award winners and nominees, and you'll find a complete list here at the MWA site. Looking forward to seeing many of them later today at Malice Domestic!

Edgars, Malice, and more–oh my!

Dana Kaye Litoff, Dead in the Water, Edgar Award, Lee Child, Meredith Cole, Molly Weston, MWA, Posed for Murder, Rosemary Harris, tracy kiely Comments Off

Apr 272012

by Meredith Cole

TV? Who has time to watch TV? Today I'm going to be a diva and totally ignore the question because I'm in New York City for the Edgar Awards this week. Squee!

Wednesday night I got to congratulate fellow criminal mind Tracy Kiely on her Mary Higgins Clark nomination. If you haven't read her book, Murder Most Persuasive, yet, do it. It's hilarious. I also got to chat for awhile with Mary Higgins Clark, who is totally charming. And visit with lots of friends like Molly Weston, Rosemary Harris, and Ellen Crosby.

Thursday night was the Edgar banquet. First of all, it's a total thrill to see the mystery community get dressed up. Second, I got to see other wonderful criminal minds who took pity on me when I said I had to blog tomorrow. Thanks y'all!

Hilary Davidson, Me, Michael Wiley

Here are two of my favorite ladies who I grabbed for a quick photo op. Molly was in town to accept the Raven (which is given to great friends of the genre). I was treated to some wonderful Southern hospitality by Molly when I went to North Carolina on the Unarmed and Dangerous tour.

Me, Molly Weston, Rosemary Harris

And last, but not least, I got my photo taken with Lee Child, because who wouldn't want their picture taken with such a charming guy?

Me, Lee Child, Dana Kaye Litoff

So that's my Edgar week. Hope you enjoyed the photos!

Bernard, Visible

anne swardson, france, Guest Posts, homelessness, Mulholland Authors, MWA, mystery writers of america, Paris, Vengeance, Writing Comments Off

Apr 172012

In “River Secret,” a man called Baptiste plays his music setup at the entrance to the Tuileries Garden in Paris. He’s fictional, but a real-life one-man band plays there as well. I see him almost every day when I jog across the footbridge over the Seine to the park entrance. The melancholy wail of his saxophone echoes off the ceiling of the concrete passageway leading to the garden. Tourists stop and listen, and drop a few coins in his upturned hat.

But do they know who he is? Where he comes from? Where he sleeps at night?

Paris is filled with people like that man. Invisible people who struggle to get by. You don’t see them sipping tiny cups of coffee in the brightly lit cafés around Saint-Germain des Près, perusing designer stores on the Rue Saint- Honoré or strolling along the Champs- Elysées. You don’t hear them complain. They don’t seek revenge for the cards fate has dealt them.

I’ve come across a lot of Parisians like that in my 15 years here.

They include Piotr, the homeless guy who works the corner of the Rue de Sèze and the Boulevard des Capucines. I give him an apple on my way to work. Or Véronique, a manicurist who labors over fingers and toes 10 hours a day — so much for the 35-hour workweek. Or Farida, age 45, who’s never held a computer mouse or typed on a keyboard. She comes to a community center in Le Blanc Mesnil, a grim apartment-block suburb in the north, to learn technology skills in hopes she can get a job.

These folks have little to do with the place I call Woody Allen’s Paris: a beacon of monuments and museums bathed in golden light, devoid of crowds and traffic jams and filled with beautifully dressed French people who speak perfect English. Travel articles as well give the impression that my adopted city is populated by residents who do little but slip into small art galleries in the Marais of a rainy afternoon, or suck up duck confit with carrots at an outdoor café on the Rue Mouffetard.

You can do that when you visit Paris, and I hope you come here often. Make a point of stopping by the Tuileries entrance by the river and see the musician. He’s not invisible. He has a name. It’s Bernard. Drop a few coins in his hat. That’s his best revenge.

Check out “River Secret” in Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance, now available in bookstores everywhere.

Anne Swardson is an editor-at-large with Bloomberg News in Paris and a former European economic correspondent for the Washington Post. “River Secret” is her first published work of fiction. She is also the author of an unpublished mystery novel. Like “River Secret,” it is set in Paris, where Swardson has lived with her husband and two children for fifteen years.

The Hotline: The Story Behind the Story

Guest Posts, inspiration, Mulholland Authors, MWA, Vengeance, workplace discrimination, Writing Comments Off

Apr 132012

Every story, long or short, is a series of fictional beads threaded onto a fictional necklace to make up the finished article. As readers, we’re all interested where an author gets the ideas for their beads from and the more we like a work of fiction, the more interested we are.

In the case of “The Hotline” the beads were readily available: many years ago I worked with a Muslim colleague who was progressively eased out of her job solely on the grounds that her face just didn’t fit. I’ve seen plenty of promotions and demotions in workplaces that had rather more to do with personal motivations than professional ones. We’ve all read in the newspapers about malicious hoax calls to the police that are made for one reason or another. My dad, who came from Grenada, was a cricket fanatic and there was no point in talking to him while a cricket match was on the TV. In 1990s London, my partner was once forced to leave his home in the middle of the night while the police staged a massive raid on a group of terrorist suspects in a nearby house. The backdrop to the story is the assumptions we make about people and who they are. And as a black woman, I’ve become very familiar over the years about the assumptions people make about others based on the grounds of ethnicity, class, gender and religion.

So these made up the beads of the story and these are what I worked with. But of course then you have to ‘thread them on’ and (although some readers find this difficult to believe) you have to make things up. In the case of the story based on ‘vengeance’ this is actually a very attractive proposition. The desire for revenge is deeply rooted in human nature but every shrink and therapist will say how negative that desire is for us and that we should ‘let things go’. Then there are the practical constraints on the lust for a zinger – practical, ethical and of course legal. But what if all those limitations are removed? What would we do then?

And that’s the wonderful thing about the literature of revenge – those constraints don’t matter all…

Check out “The Hotline” in Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance, now available in bookstores everywhere.

Dreda Say Mitchell is a novelist, broadcaster, journalist, and freelance education consultant who describes herself as a “complete busybody.” She is the author of five novels. Her debut novel, Running Hot, was awarded Britain’s 2005 CWA John Creasey Dagger for best frist crime novel. She has appeared on BBC television’s Newsnight and The Review Show and has presented BBC Radio 4′s Open Book. She was the 2011 shair of the Harrogate Crime Fiction Festival. Her commitment and passion for raising the life chances of working-class children through education has been called inspirational and life-changing. Visit her website at www.dredasaymitchell.com.

Everything Old Is New Again

anthologies, Clawback, financial corruption, Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors, MWA, Short Stories, Vengeance, Writing Comments Off

Apr 122012

Decades ago, the mafia had a scam called the “bust-out.” They’d target a small business — the corner store, a machine shop, a soda distributor. After intimidating the owner into handing it over for a pittance, they’d order as much inventory as the suppliers would put on credit. They’d stop paying lenders, max out bank lines, demand customer pre-payments: in short, they’d extract as much cash as possible, as quickly as they could. Then one weekend they’d strip the premises of every last item that might be sold elsewhere — stock, fixtures, furniture, anything — and disappear.

The business was ruined, the owner penniless or bankrupt or worse, and the gang? They’d swept up all the cash … and were ready to do it again.
The comparison is not far-fetched. A private-equity group borrows a vast sum of money, buys a struggling company and squeezes operations as hard as they can. “Rationalizing” can involve layoffs, steep pension cuts, loan defaults, supplier hardball — anything to free up a dollar. When they’re done, the PE investors pay themselves a huge dividend, often financed by more borrowing. Then, like the mafiya, they sell off what’s left and disappear.Now that seems almost quaint. Today, it’s called a workout, not a bust-out, and the operators are private equity firms, not the Cosa Nostra. The amounts involved are hundreds of millions of dollars. And best of all, it’s completely legal.

Defenders, of course, argue that PE saves failing companies, improves efficiency and generally serves the free market’s inherent processes. Evidence is limited; studies have shown that PE-financed restructurings create fewer net jobs than if existing management struggles through on their own, and the companies ultimately fail about as often anyway. The difference is that the PE investors have extracted all the excess value for themselves, leaving behind shrunken, debt-laden businesses in no better shape to face future challenges.

Unlike past eras of plutocratic excess, the immiseration of today’s American worker has not drawn an energetic counter-reaction. A century ago strikers were put down with Federal troops and live ammunition, anarchists bombed Wall Street itself, and union organizers faced thugs armed with iron bars and guns. For whatever reason we don’t see the same kind of violence today. Perhaps the social-support nets, however tattered, are still enough to keep people from total desperation. Perhaps market ideology has triumphed. Perhaps the society we have today is what people really want.

Or maybe the anger just hasn’t bubbled over yet.

The protagonist in “Leverage” is a regular guy, a machine operator whose job is destroyed when his factory is asset-stripped by a PE “investment.” Unlike his fellow ex-workers, however, he decides that things must be made right … and that means confronting the financiers in person.

Check out “Leverage” in Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance, now available in bookstores everywhere.

Mike Cooper‘s latest novel CLAWBACK (Viking, March) centers on similar themes of bankster retribution. “Don’t bail them out, TAKE them out” — it’s a good tag line for a thriller, but Mike sincerely hopes it remains fiction.

When the Law Falls Short

anthologies, Guest Posts, law, legal system, Mulholland Authors, MWA, Short Stories, Vengeance, Writing Comments Off

Apr 102012

Francis Bacon said that “revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed out . . . . In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon.”^¹

Fast forward two and a half centuries, to Abraham Lincoln. He thought vengeance had a time and place. During the American Revolution, he noted “the deep rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge . . . were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature . . . [became] the active agents in the advancement of the noblest cause—that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty. . . . But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it.”^² Lincoln gave this speech in response, in part, to a mob killing of a black man accused of murder. In Abe’s view, it was okay to take vengeance on the British but not anyone else.

Fifty years later, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., admits the importance of vengeance within the legal system, going so far as to say, “the law does [and] ought to, make the gratification of revenge an object . . . correspond[ing] with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.”^³ Holmes saw this as a lesser evil to people perceiving the legal system as failing to satisfy and thus taking matters into their own hands. “If people would gratify the passion of revenge outside of the law, if the law did not help them, the law has no choice but to satisfy the craving itself, and thus avoid the greater evil of private retribution.” Id.^⁴

As a trial lawyer I saw many examples of law and justice diverging, with the law “not helping” the wronged party. Writing the “The Fourteenth Juror” allowed me to inflict private retribution (even if only on the page) on one aspect of the legal system that often fell short in this regard. Gratifying indeed.

Check out “The Fourteenth Juror” in Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance, now available in bookstores everywhere.

A Stanford graduate and former (vengeful) plaintiff’s trial lawyer, Twist Phelan writes the critically acclaimed legal-themed Pinnacle Peak mystery series published by Poised Pen Press. Her short stories appear in anthologies and mystery magazines and have won or been nominated for the Thriller, Ellis, and Derringer awards. Twist’s current project is a suspense novel set in Santa Fe featuring a corporate spy. Visit her at www.twistphelan.com.

1 Sir Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral (1625). Yes, this is a footnote. As a former law review editor, I can’t resist.

2 Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, Volume I, p. 108-115 (January 27, 1838). Uh oh; another one.

3 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law 46 (1881). I’m out of control.

4 “Id.” is the abbreviation for the Latin word “idem,” which means same. Lawyers and academics use it to reference the previously cited source. Everyone else just says “same as before.”

On VENGEANCE and The General

anthologies, Mulholland Authors, MWA, Short Stories, Vengeance, Writing Comments Off

Apr 062012

Revenge has always been a human passion – as well as a problem for any civilized society. Early on, Jehovah reminded the Israelites that ‘vengeance is mine,’ while Aeschylus immortalized the blood feuds of the House of Atreus, which took a goddess to end, thus establishing the rule of law.

Dramas of revenge were popular enough in Renaissance England to spawn a distinct genre, the Revenge Tragedy, ironically most famous for that reluctant avenger, Hamlet, whose dithering raised the body count without ultimately sparing the king. Of course, Shakespeare knew a good thing when he saw it: revenge not only calls upon a variety of visceral and ancient emotions, it also offers excellent plot possibilities.

I’ve been rather fond of these, myself. Looking back over my short stories, I find revenge plots constructed around a variety of characters, ranging from a middle aged archeologist (male) to a restauranteur (female) with stops along they way for several wronged wives and husbands, an angry daughter, plus a disgruntled academic dean and a traumatized student. Most of these stories are told from the avenger’s point of view.

“The General” is different in just about every way. Most of my short mystery stories arise from police reports in the press. Looking back in my invaluable notebooks for the first glimmer of “The General,” I find neither a clipping nor a plot summary but the bare idea of a South American general haunted by his gardener.

I have no idea now where this notion came from, but most likely it evolved from an awareness the many dictators and dodgy strongmen, often rightist, who have fled Central and South American countries, as well as Asia, the Balkans, and Africa, to find refuge here.

In the story, I made the General Central American, probably because of the continuing troubles in Honduras and Guatemala, and because I knew a bit about the politics of the area. The first mention of the story was late in the notebook that ended in 2005, but the story was not completed until two years later, a delay not unusual for me. The initial four lines – I can hardly even call it a paragraph – indicates that I had no clear idea of what the General’s crimes involved or even if the gardener were real and not a projection of the General’s guilty mind.

Which brings us to the other unusual feature of this particular story of vengeance, it is told strictly from the General’s point of view. I don’t remember if I considered the more traditional approach, but I am convinced it would not have worked as well, considering the vast discrepancy in power, wealth, and influence of the two men and the presence of the boy, loved by both, whose inevitable suffering suggests why civilization is always, and rightly, hostile to personal vengeance.

Janice Law is a novelist who frequently commits short mystery stories. Her first, “The Big Payoff,” was nominated for an Edgar, and her stories have been reprinted in the Best American Mystery Stories, The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, Alfred Hitchcock’s Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense, Riptide, Still Waters, and the fabulist anthology ParaSpheres.

Check out “The General” in Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance, now available in bookstores everywhere.

Deserving: On VENGEANCE and the writing of Lost and Found

anthologies, Fiction, Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors, MWA, Short Stories, Vengeance Comments Off

Apr 052012

The desire for retribution is a theme familiar to all crime and thriller authors, and it has to be one of the strongest. Never is a character’s motivation more compelling than when they determine to go after somebody who deserves to die―no matter what―and it’s personal.

I’ve touched on vengeance many times in my writing. My ex-army-turned-bodyguard heroine Charlie Fox has a lot in her past to be vengeful about, and while she may be wary about crossing the line, that doesn’t mean she won’t do it if she has to.

But not this time.

When Lee Child first contacted me about contributing to a then-unnamed MWA anthology, I agreed (bit his arm off at the elbow is probably a better description) and asked him if there was a theme. “Good people doing bad things for the right reasons,” came his typically succinct response. “Dark justice.”

Dark justice.

That sounded damn cool to me. But although Charlie is a troubled girl, she’s never really embraced her dark side. And I wanted this tale to be dark. I don’t really write noir in the true ‘everybody dies without redemption’ sense of the word, but I love the hardboiled edge.

Here was an opportunity to take that edge and push it just a little further.

The basic idea for Lost And Found came very quickly. Almost as soon as I’d got the email from Lee. Working out the best way to get the story across, though, that took me rather longer. Meanwhile, the deadline crept ever nearer.

Now, every writer knows that nothing concentrates the mind quite like a deadline, and as the story grew and took shape in my head I knew I was going out on a limb with it in both style and structure. As soon as I started to write, the thing that came over most strongly to me was the staccato rhythm of the piece, partly from the natural urgency within the story, and partly from using present tense.

I wanted to tell the story using two intertwined narratives, so first-person was out, but rather than two third-person viewpoints, I went for one in third and one in second-person.

From there it came in a rush. A tale of two men whose lives touched and parted, leaving indelible scars on them both. And the ultimate act of vengeance one is driven to commit upon the other.

When I sent the piece to Lee, I did so with the proviso that there were still a few weeks to go before the deadline: “So I still have time to write something else …”

Within a few hours he’d come back to me—I won’t tell you exactly what he said, but I will say I’m thinking of having the email framed and hung above my desk. Suffice to say that the story made the cut of VENGEANCE, as it was written.

I am enormously proud to have it there.

Zoë Sharp wrote her first novel at fifteen and created no-nonsense ex-Special Forces-turned-bodyguard heroine, Charlie Fox, after receiving death-threat letters as a photojournalist. Her work has been nominated for the US Edgar, Anthony, Barry, Benjamin Franklin, and Macavity Awards, as well as the CWA Short Story Dagger. Find out why Lee Child said, “If I were a woman I’d be Zoë. If Jack Reacher were a woman, he’d be Zoë’s main character, Charlie Fox.” Follow Zoë on www.facebook.com/ZoeSharpAuthor, @authorzoesharp

THE VENGEANCE ANTHOLOGY

anthology, book passage, Dennis Lehane, Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, MWA, Vengeance Anthology, Zoë Sharp Comments Off

Apr 052012

by Michelle Gagnon

I hope you'll excuse a little BSP today. I have a short story out in the new Mystery Writers of America Anthology, VENGEANCE, edited by the wonderful Lee Child. Plus I think there's a lesson to be learned from the long, occasionally tortu

ous journey this story has had over the past twelve years...

Some background first. This was the first real piece of crime fiction I ever wrote. I composed it while working with the San Francisco Writers' Workshop back in 2000. I've never been much of a short story writer, but at the time I was just diving back into fiction, and figured that playing around with briefer pieces might help me find my voice. So this was one of the first (and only) stories I ever wrote. Shortly afterward, I started working on my first book (the one that never sold), and then, eventually, moved on to writing THE TUNNELS.

I always had a soft spot for this story, but had no idea what to do with it. Filled with hope, I submitted it to a few literary magazines. After it was roundly rejected by them, I shrugged and put it away in a drawer.

Fast forward to 2004. Lee Child was headlining the Book Passage Mystery Writers' Conference, and at the last minute I scraped together enough money to attend. On the last night of the conference, all the participants were invited to read a short piece of fiction, kind of an informal critique exercise. I wasn't happy with the opening of my novel yet, and was considering skipping the event entirely until I remembered this story. So I pulled it out of the drawer, dusted it off, and read it that night. All in all, it was well received; Lee attended the reading, and spoke with me afterward about how much he'd liked it. Which was terribly flattering, but again, I had no idea what to do with it. So back in the drawer it went.

Fast forward another seven years, to 2011. Lee emailed me out of the blue and asked if I'd ever done anything with that story from the Book Passage reading. He explained that he was putting together an anthology for the MWA centered around the theme of vigilante justice, and thought my piece might fit in perfectly. He asked if it would be all right to include it. Once I finished turning cartwheels across the room, I said yes.

So this week my little story, the first piece of crime fiction I ever wrote, was published alongside the work of some of my idols, including Lee, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, Karin Slaughter, and Zoe Sharp. To say that I was honored to be part of this anthology would be a tremendous understatement. It really is a dream come true.

And from it, I've learned a few things:

a) It's impossible to judge the true value of a writing conference. Sometimes they might seem like a waste of time and money, but you never know what may come of the contacts you make there.

b) Never empty that drawer. The story that can't find a home today might bear fruit years down the road (or even decades!)

c) Never give up. I have to confess, when those literary magazines first snubbed my work, I was disheartened and almost tossed in the towel. I really thought the story was pretty great, and discovering that not everyone agreed was crushing. It was hard to go on when it felt like what I was writing might never be appreciated, or even read, by anyone outside my critique group. Eight published or soon-to-be-published novels (and one short story) later, I'm really happy that I decided to forge ahead.

What follows is an excerpt from my story, IT AIN'T RIGHT. The VENGEANCE Anthology is currently on sale at bookstores and online.

IT AIN'T RIGHT

“It ain’t right, is all I’m saying.”

Joe just kept walking the way he always did, shovel over his shoulder, cigarette clinging to his bottom lip.

“You hear me?”

He stopped and turned, lifting his head inch by inch until his eyes found my hips then my breasts then my eyes. A dustdevil whirred away behind him, making the bottom branches of the tree dance like girls on Mayday, up and down. He stared at me long and hard, and I felt the last heat of the day seeping into my skin and down through my bones, reaching inside to meet the cold that burrowed in my stomach early that morning.

“She’s dead, ain’t she?” With his free hand he scratched his belly where the bottom of his ‘Joe’s Diner’ shirt had pulled away.

“Yeah, but just cause she’s dead don’t mean she should be put down like this.”

He looked past me, towards where the road met the hill and dove behind it, wheat tips glowing pink in the twilight. “What else we gonna do with her?”

Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance: An Introduction

anthologies, Books, Guest Posts, Lee Child, Mulholland Authors, MWA, mysteries, Short Stories, Writing Comments Off

Apr 032012

Editing this anthology was a lot of fun—not least because Mystery Writers of America’s invaluable and irreplaceable publications guy, Barry Zeman, did all the hard work. All I had to do was pick ten invitees. And write a story. And then later on read the ten winning stories chosen by MWA’s blind-submission process. Piece of cake. Apart from writing my own story, that is, which I always find hard, but that’s why picking the invitees was so much fun—I love watching something difficult being done really well, by experts.

It was like playing fantasy baseball—who did I want on the field? And just as Major League Baseball has rich seams of talent to choose from, so does Mystery Writers of America. I could have filled ten anthologies. Or twenty. But I had to start somewhere—and it turned out that I already had, years ago, actually, when I taught a class at a mystery writers’ conference in California. One of the after-hours activities was a group reading around a fireplace in the motel. A bit too kumbaya for me, frankly, but I went anyway, and the first story was by a young woman called Michelle Gagnon. It was superb, and it stayed with me through the intervening years. So I e-mailed her about using it for this anthology—more in hope than in expectation, because it was such a great story, I was sure it had been snapped up long ago. But no—it was still available. Never published, amazingly. It is now.

One down.

Then I had to have Brendan DuBois. He’s a fine novelist but easily the best short-story writer of his generation. He just cranks them out, one after the other, like he’s casting gold ingots. Very annoying. He said yes.

Two down.

And I had Twist Phelan on my radar. She’s a real woman of mystery—sometimes lives on a yacht, sometimes lives in Switzerland, knows about oil and banks and money—and she had just won the International Thriller Writers’ award for best short story. I thought, I’ll have a bit of that. She said okay.

Three down.

Voodoo doll

Then there was the overtalented but undersung Jim Fusilli. He wrote two great New York novels that I really loved, and then four more just as good, and he’s the rock music critic for the Wall Street Journal. We make lists together, like the top three bands most dependent on their drummers for their sound. (Led Zeppelin, the Who, and the Beatles, obviously.)

I asked; he said yes.

Four down.

And then, purely by chance, in the course of a conversation Karin Slaughter told me she’d just finished the nastiest story she’d ever written. Which had to be something, right? With Karin? I didn’t ask. I just told her.

Five down.

Alafair Burke was next. I’ve followed her novels from the very beginning and loved them all. Then she went and wrote a terrific story for Michael Connelly’s MWA anthology a few years ago. I thought, Hey, she did it for him, she can do it for me. I asked. She said yes.

Six down.

Then, because I’m a transatlantic person, I thought about a couple of great writers from the old country. First up: Dreda Say Mitchell. She’s five novels into a terrific career, and I find her narrative voice completely fresh and utterly addictive. I asked; she said yes.

Seven down.

Then, Zoë Sharp. If I were a woman, I’d be Zoë. If Jack Reacher were a woman, he’d be Zoë’s main character, Charlie Fox. A natural fit. I asked; she said yes.

Eight down.

Two spots left.

I thought: Let’s complete the lineup with a couple of heavy hitters. I waited until both of my targets were drunk and happy at the Edgars, and I asked. Michael Connelly first. A busy guy, but a nice guy. He blinked. He said yes.

Nine down.

Then I turned to Dennis Lehane. Equally busy guy—he’d just had a kid. But equally nice too. He blinked. Twice. But he said yes.

Bingo.

So then it was about sharpening my editorial blue pencil and waiting for their stories to show up. They did, but I didn’t need the pencil. I think there was a spelling mistake in there somewhere, but authors like these don’t need help. So then it was about waiting for the MWA winning stories to arrive.

The way it works is that any paid-up MWA member can submit a story; the author’s name is replaced with a code number, so the judges read each story blind. The selection panel evaluates them all and chooses the ten best. The panel for this anthology was Heather Graham, Tom Cook, David Walker, Joe Trigoboff, and Brendan DuBois (pulling double duty, which was good of him—he could have written another nine or ten stories, probably, in the time it took). I thank them all for their hard work, and for their excellent judgment—the ten they came up with are first-class, and when the numbers were matched to the names, it turned out we had an interesting bunch of people.

Ladies first: Anne Swardson submitted from Paris, where she’s been living for fifteen years as a heavy-duty financial journalist. Tough gig, but hey, someone’s got to do it. C. E. Lawrence is a multitalented New Yorker—writer, performer, poet, composer, and prize-winning playwright. Quite irritating. Janice Law is already an Edgar-nominated short-story writer (but the panel didn’t know that—remember the code numbers). She’s had stories published all over the place, so it’s no surprise she made the top ten.

And the men: Rick McMahan is a special agent with the Department of Justice, so he walks the walk, and naturally he’s also published here and there. Adam Meyer is an accomplished movie and TV writer and novelist and short-story writer who comes from New York but lives in DC. Michael Niemann is a German guy who lives in Oregon and is mostly a nonfiction writer specializing in African and global issues. Orest Stelmach is a thriller writer from the Northeast. He’s fluent in four languages, which is four more than me on an average day. Darrell James lives in California and Arizona and is a multipublished and award-winning short-story writer, and also a debut novelist. Steve Liskow lives in Connecticut and is also a published novelist and short-story writer. And finally, Mike Cooper is a former financial guy from the Boston area whose stories have won a Shamus Award and been selected for The Best American Mystery Stories annual anthology.

So, ten high-quality invitees and ten high-quality competition winners, plus me. We all got the same brief: Write about vengeance, revenge, getting even, maybe doing a bad thing for a good reason. Or a bad reason. It was a loose specification; a tighter one would have been ignored anyway. Writers are like that. Their imaginations run along unique and uncontrollable paths, as you will see. Or maybe as you’ve already seen. I know some people read anthologies back to front. If you’re one of them, thanks for reading. If you’re not, I hope you enjoy what follows.

Lee Child is the author of sixteen Jack Reacher thrillers, all of which have been optioned for major motion pictures. Child, a native of England and a former television director, lives in New York City, where he is at work on his next thriller.

MYSTERY WRITERS OF AMERICA PRESENTS VENGEANCE is now available in bookstores everywhere.