The Mysterious Press Anniversary Anthology

by EDITORS OF MYSTERIOUS PRESS

Genres: Anthologies

Synopsis

To commemorate this silver milestone, Mysterious Press presents 18 specially commissioned stories by the finest mystery and suspense writers working today.

Release date: June 1, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 305

Sample

 

 

 





For all Mysterious authors:

The happy ones; and sad ones;

The sober and the silent ones;

The boisterous and glad ones;

The good ones — yes, the good ones too;

And all the lovely bad ones.

And for Susan, in gratitude

Cadfael looked back to the turning-point of his life, many years past. After all manner of journeying, fighting, endurance of heat and cold and hardship, after the pleasures and pains of experience, the sudden irresistible longing to turn about and withdraw into quietness remained a mystery. Not a retreat, certainly. Rather an emergence into light and certainty.

— Ellis Peters (1913–1995), The Potter’s Field

“If I were either you or Mr. Vines,” Leonard Deep said, “I’d get out of Durango as quickly as possible.”

“Kelly and I’re leaving on the evening of the fourth.”

“Why not before?”

“We don’t want to miss the parade,” Vines said.

— Ross Thomas (1926–1995), The Fourth Durango



The Mysterious Press is twenty-five years old in 2001. And we’ve been here for sixteen of them.

Sixteen apiece, that is. We were both hired by Otto Penzler in June of 1985 — Sara Ann as editor and Bill as managing editor — back when the Press was still in the old brownstone up the stairs from the Mysterious Bookshop on West 56th Street, behind Carnegie Hall and way, way over to the left.

The concept behind the Press, its reason for coming into existence, drummed into our heads in those salad days, is to proclaim that Great Crime Literature is Great Literature.1 Creators of the best crime fiction are as deserving of respect and admiration as any “literary” author. Our goal as editors is to seek out, sign up, and nurture writers whose work — while featuring cops and private eyes and amateur sleuths — opens a window into the working of human nature. And, incidentally, provides a cracking good read.

Over the years, we’ve published dozens of crime novels we think are some of the best of the fin de siècle: The Killjoy, Rough Cider, L.A. Confidential, The Good Policeman, The Bridesmaid, The New York Detective, Humans, 32 Cadillacs, Bootlegger’s Daughter, The Mexican Tree Duck, Cranks and Shadows, Wireless, One More River, The Yellow Room Conspiracy, Bellows Falls, Wolf in the Shadows, Life Itself, Ah, Treachery!, Never Street, The Bottoms … these are a few of the books which … well, we won’t say “transcend the genre,” due to our affection and respect for the genre … but for which Mysterious Press will be remembered.

In 1990 Mysterious Press was bought outright by Warner Books, and we packed up and moved into a mighty mid-town Manhattan skyscraper. This was also the year we were joined by Susan Richman, Queen of Publicists, whose inventive and enthusiastic effort has moved the Press and its authors ever more firmly into the limelight.

The three of us have had a marvelous time as the proud keepers of the Mysterious Press flame, and we look forward to continuing to publish the brightest of dark literature over the next twenty-five years.

 

Sara Ann Freed

William Malloy


1 “If detective stories are read with more exuberance than railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic.” — G. K. Chesterton



It was sometime in the fall of 1975 when I decided that a publishing house entirely devoted to mystery fiction might be a good idea, and that I would create just such an entity.

For years I’d been reading and collecting mystery fiction first editions, and I helped write some books on the subject. My pet peeve (and one that remains to the present day) is that, even though the best mystery writers are among the most accomplished of all fiction writers working in the English language, not enough credit is given to them.

Admittedly, there are now fewer academic and literary snobs who look down their noses at the work of mystery writers, but there are still far too many who do not grasp that the best mystery fiction should be taught at the university level and deserves the front page of the New York Times Book Review. There is no less literary style, philosophic depth, and insight into human nature on the part of the top crime writers than there is among those regularly reviewed by the New York Review of Books. The intellectual seriousness of telling a story about the extremes of human passion and its consequences is at least the equal of a shocking stylistic dedication to the use of no punctuation or the moral lessons to be learned from sleeping with various members of the family.

This dedication to the excellence of crime fiction not merely as “escapist” (is there any decent fiction that isn’t?) but as a serious mirror of the human condition became a major factor in the decision to start the Mysterious Press. I knew I couldn’t single-handedly change the predilections of the reviewers and the academics, but I could at least take a small positive step in the elevation of mystery fiction by producing books that were worthy of their contents.

For the stepchild of publishing a quarter century ago, it was commonplace to produce mysteries on the cheapest possible paper, using pressed cardboard (instead of cloth) covers, and two-color dust jackets, while far less distinguished prose had nicely textured, acid-free paper, cloth, linen, or buckram bindings, and splendid full-color paintings to shout its existence to the world.

For collectors, I determined to make books that had previously been the province only of poets and authors of belles lettres: limited editions, numbered and signed by authors, with slipcases to preserve them. In the first years of the Mysterious Press, every book had a limited edition, and such talented artists as Steranko and Gahan Wilson provided full-color dust jacket art. A few times, I liked the art so much that I used it again as a frontispiece — that lovely throwback to nineteenth-century book production.

Having acquired the dedication to go along with the philosophy, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do next. Some very good friends made modest investments so that there was working capital, and I went to the excellent but unjustly neglected Robert L. Fish (a three-time Edgar winner and author of the book on which Bullitt was based, among much else) and asked if he’d let me publish something of his, and we settled on a collection of stories about Kek Huuygens, Smuggler.

At the same time, having been a longtime Sherlock Holmes aficionado (and a member of the Baker Street Irregulars), I found an obscure parody cycle by Charles Todd from 1915-16 and put them together for a collection as well.

I now had two books in hand and went to the yellow pages to find a printer and a typesetter, hand-delivered the precious pages to the appropriate people, and in the course of time the cartons of books arrived at my apartment building in the Bronx. While I can now say that I ordered only 1,000 copies of each title, plus 250 limited edition copies, take my word for it that you have no idea how many books that is until you unload a truck and stack them in an already crowded apartment.

Bob Fish introduced me to his friend Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho and hundreds of other books and stories, who said, sure, I could publish one of his books. That’s when I ran into trouble.

Now, to put this situation into perspective. I lived in a book-filled apartment and tried to earn a living as a free-lance writer of books and magazine articles. This is a tough way to earn a living even if you have talent as a writer, which I do not. I paid the rent by making up in long hours what I lacked in skill.

There was no one to help with the running of a publishing company. I negotiated contracts, edited manuscripts, wrote flap copy and whatever advertising and publicity were needed, hired artists and designers for the dust jackets, and handled production, including buying paper and binding materials, proofreading and on and on.

Somehow, this was all possible until I published The King of Terrors by Bloch, the third Mysterious Press book. It was, by my terms at the time, a success. When few books were being sold, I could also handle packing books, typing the invoices, keeping the bank records straight, and hauling the books to the post office (though my brother was a huge help with that).

It was impossible to get secretarial help. (“Hello, would you send a Kelly girl to my apartment in the Bronx?”) Besides, there was no room for a second person to work. I knew I needed to move into a larger space in Manhattan so that I could have an office and an assistant.

It quickly became apparent that I couldn’t afford to rent space, so, after searching for many, many months, I bought (with a partner) the nice graystone building on West Fifty-sixth Street.

Now there was so much room I thought it would be great fun to open a bookshop in the building. I knew as much about running a bookshop as I’d known about running a publishing house, but, since ignorance hadn’t stopped me once, I saw no need to let it stop me then.

Renovations began and proceeded quickly. Walls came down, walls went up, a spiral staircase was installed, and two mystery writer friends, Donald E. Westlake and Brian Garfield, together with my future wife, Carolyn, built the bookshelves. The Mysterious Bookshop opened on Friday the 13th of April 1979.

By now, slowly, the Mysterious Press had produced books by Isaac Asimov, Edward D. Hoch, Cornell Woolrich, Ellery Queen, Stanley Ellin, and the superb Lew Archer, Private Investigator by Ross Macdonald, a Mystery Guild selection, which had six printings and an introduction that was picked up and run on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Even with that success the company was losing money until Stephen King gave me the chance to publish a limited, signed edition of Cujo, which sold out almost overnight and allowed us to pay our printing bills for two other books, keeping us afloat.

Running a bookshop, even an unsuccessful one (as it was in its early days), is pretty much a full-time job. So is being a freelance writer, as earnings from writing and some lecturing provided funds to keep the store alive. Running a publishing company, even one not making very much money, was yet another full-time job. My wife and I were thinking of closing it down when I had an unexpected visit to the bookshop one afternoon.

A very smart publishing entrepreneur sent his assistant to ask if I was interested in expanding the scope of my publishing house. If so, would I meet with her boss? Being no fool, I reckoned this couldn’t be all bad and we met a few days later at 3:00 P.M. I know the time because I think it’s rude to be late, and I didn’t want to appear too eager and show up early, so I kept my eye on my watch and rang the bell at 3:00. Sharp. I was on the down elevator at 3:13, having shaken hands on an arrangement whereby money would be provided for additional staff, acquisition, production, and promotion of books. The deal was that he would get back his investment with first moneys received and then we’d share the profits fifty-fifty. Sounded pretty good to me.

We then needed to find a publisher who would distribute the books, which means a sales staff to sell them, a warehouse for storage, and a credit department that would collect the money owed.

After meeting with several of the largest houses, I decided I wanted to be with the smallish but very prestigious Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This decision goes back to the philosophical raison d’être of the house, giving mysteries the chance to be treated with the respect they deserved.

The first author who signed with me was Donald E. West-lake, one of the most talented, versatile, and (deservedly) praised writers of our time, a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and Edgar winner in three different categories (novel, short story, and screenplay). Gregory Mcdonald soon followed suit, and so did Patricia Highsmith.

Things were looking pretty rosy until shortly before the first book was released, when the investor said he wanted to end the relationship, and when could he have his half of the losses? There it was, in our agreement: share profits and losses. It seems some tax shelter holes had closed and the deal was over. The losses at that moment looked to me like the combined national debt of four major European countries, but he made a very reasonable offer of a payout that could easily have taken the rest of my life but seemed fair to both of us.

Reasonable or not, my major emotional and intellectual response to this new situation was, of course, panic. First, I was in more debt than I could ever have imagined. Second, the Mysterious Press had already become a very good publishing house with a wonderful list of authors that had suddenly been flushed. Third, and a real reason for insomnia, many men and women who earned their living writing books had entrusted that living to me. Suddenly, some of the most talented mystery writers in America were going to be orphaned.

It was near Christmas 1983 when I called my friend and agent, Nat Sobel, partly as last resort but partly because I needed someone to whom I could tell this tale of woe, who would understand and, maybe, offer sympathy. Sympathy is not what happened. “You’ve got a great company here,” he said, “with great authors. And it’s a great idea — a publishing house devoted only to the best mystery fiction. I’ll just get you another partner.”

He made it sound so easy that I went home and told Carolyn our troubles were over and she nearly collapsed in my arms with relief and joy. Two months later Nat and I had lunch with the editor in chief of Warner Books, Bernard Schirr-Cliff, and his boss, Laurence J. Kirshbaum, president, and we shook hands on a deal after about fifteen minutes. On April 1 (April Fool’s Day, as I like to remind people) we signed the contracts.

The first thing that Larry Kirshbaum asked after all the documents were signed convinced me that this was going to be a wonderful partnership. He didn’t ask about projected income, or how many units we could move in the second year, or what additional profit centers did I envision beyond the sale of books. No. Larry asked me, “Who’s your favorite writer? Who should we go after for the Mysterious Press list?” Ross Thomas. No hesitation. The brilliant and versatile Thomas had never had the success he deserved and we felt we could help him achieve it. We did.

James Ellroy, the modern master of noir fiction, who had not found much of an audience with his first few books, then produced The Black Dahlia, which had numerous hard-cover editions before making the New York Times best-seller list as a paperback.

In the next few years, such extraordinary authors as Ruth Rendell, P. D. James, Len Deighton, James Crumley, Ellis Peters, Aaron Elkins, Joe Gores, Marcia Muller, Eric Ambler, and Kingsley Amis produced books for the Mysterious Press as well. So did many other writers, also immensely talented, who have not had quite as much recognition. Yet.

It is not arrogance or hyperbole to say that the Mysterious Press has become the most distinguished publisher in history to be focused on mystery/crime/suspense fiction.

Success stories are team efforts, of course. The talented people at Warner Books struck me then, and still do (with some — but not too many — changes in the cast of characters), as the most intelligent, creative, and hardworking people in the world of publishing. It starts at the top, with Larry Kirshbaum (everybody’s pick as the nicest man in publishing), and continues into the art department, the marketing and sales teams, production, and so on.

But it all really starts with the authors, and this book should be dedicated to them — for their talent as well as their courage and friendship in casting their lot with a publishing house that didn’t have the grand tradition of a Scribner or Knopf or Viking or Random House.

This book is a monument to all those writers who lifted the Mysterious Press to its glorious success. I haven’t been part of that history for more than a decade (Warner bought it in 1989), but it was time to let my baby go and leave its care to others.

— Otto Penzler

     New York, July 2000





 


Awarded the Mystery Writers of America’s title of Grand Master in 1992, Donald E. Westlake began his writing career with The Mercenaries in 1960, which was nominated for the Edgar for Best First Novel. He has written dozens of novels over the past forty years, including, as Richard Stark, the Parker series of hard-boiled crime fiction. His Hollywood screenplays include The Stepfather and The Grifters, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Boy Cartwright, the odious hero of the following story, made his debut in the novel Trust Me on This (1987).


FIRST MYSTERIOUS PRESS PUBLICATION:


LEVINE, 1984

The fact that the state of Florida would give the odious Boy Cartwright a driver’s license only shows that the state of Florida isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. The vile Boy, execrable expatriate Englishman, handed this document across the rental-car counter at Gulfport-Biloxi Regional Airport and the gullible clerk there responded by giving him the keys to something called a Taurus, a kind of space capsule sans relief tube, which turned out on examination in the ghastly sunlight to be the same whorehouse red as the rental clerk’s lipstick. Boy tossed his disreputable canvas ditty bag onto this machine’s backseat, the Valium and champagne bottles within chattering comfortably together, and drove north.

This was not the sort of assignment the despicable Boy was used to. As by far the most shameless and tasteless, and therefore by far the best, reporter on the staff of the Weekly Galaxy, a supermarket tabloid that gives new meaning to the term degenerate, the debased Boy Cartwright was used to commanding teams of reporters on assignments at the very peak of the tabloid Alp: celebrity adultery, UFO sightings, sports heroes awash in recreational drugs. The Return of Laurena Layla — or, more accurately, her nonreturn, as it would ultimately prove — was a distinct comedown for Boy. Not an event, but the mere anniversary of an event. And not in Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Miami or any of the other centers of debauchery of the American celebrity world, but in Marmelay, Mississippi, in the muggiest, mildewiest, kudzuest nasal bowel of the Deep South, barely north of Biloxi and the Gulf, a town surrounded mostly by De Soto National Forest, named for a reprobate the Weekly Galaxy would have loved if he’d only been born four hundred and fifty years later.

There were two reasons why Boy had drawn this bottom-feeder assignment, all alone in America, the first being that he was in somewhat bad odor at the Galaxy at the moment, having not only failed to steal the private psychiatric records of sultry sci-fi-pic star Tanya Shonya from the Montana sanitarium where the auburn-tressed beauty was recovering from her latest doomed love affair, but having also, in the process, inadvertently blown the cover of another Galaxy staffer, Don Grove, a member of Boy’s usual team, who had already been ensconced in that same sanitarium as a grief counselor. Don even now remained immured in a Montana quod among a lot of Caucasian cowboys, while the Galaxy’s lawyers negotiated reasonably with the state authorities, and Boy got stuck with Laurena Layla.

But that wasn’t the only reason for this assignment. Twenty-two years earlier, when Boy Cartwright was freshly at the Galaxy, a whelp reporter (the Galaxy did not have cubs) with just enough experience on scabrous British tabloids to make him prime Galaxy material, just as despicable in those days but not yet as decayed, he had covered the trial of Laurena Layla, then a twenty-seven-year-old beauty, mistress of the Golden Church of Sha-Kay, a con that had taken millions from the credulous, which is, after all, what the credulous are for.

The core of the Golden Church of Sha-Kay had been the Gatherings, a sort of cross between a mass séance and a Rolling Stones world tour, which had taken place in stadiums and arenas wherever in rural America the boobs lay thick on the ground. With much use of swirling smoke and whirling robes, these Gatherings had featured music, blessings, visions, apocalyptic announcements, and a well-trained devoted staff, devoted to squeezing every buck possible from the attending faithful.

Also, for those gentlemen of discernment whose wealth far exceeded their brains, there had been private sessions attainable with Laurena Layla herself, from which strong men were known to have emerged goggle-eyed, begging for oysters.

What had drawn the younger but no less awful Boy Cartwright to Laurena Layla the first time was an ambitious Indiana D.A. with big eyes for the governorship (never got it) who, finding Laurena Layla in full frontal operation within his jurisdiction, had caused her to be arrested and put on trial as the con artist (and artiste) she was. The combination of sex, fame, and courtroom was as powerful an aphrodisiac for the Galaxy and its readers then as ever, so Boy, at that time a mere stripling in some other editor’s crew, was among those dispatched to Muncie by Massa (Bruno DeMassi), then owner and publisher of the rag.

Boy’s English accent, raffish charm, and suave indifference to putdowns had made him a natural to be assigned to make contact with the defendant herself, which he had been pleased to do, winning the lady over with bogus ID from the Manchester Guardian. His success had been so instantaneous and so total that he had bedded L.L. twice, the second time because neither of them could quite believe the first.

In the event, L.L. was found innocent, justice being blind, while Boy was unmasked as the scurrilous Galaxyite he in fact was, and he was sent packing with a flea in his ear and a high-heel print on his bum. However, she didn’t come off at all badly in the Galaxy’s coverage of her trial and general notoriety, and in fact a bit later she sent him the briefest of thank-you notes with no return address.

That was not the last time Boy saw Laurena Layla, however. Two years after Muncie it was, and the memory of the all-night freight train whistles there was at last beginning to fade, when Laurena Layla hit the news again for an entirely different reason: She died. A distraught fan, a depressingly overweight woman with a home permanent, stabbed L.L. three times with a five-and-dime steak knife, all the thrusts fatal but fortunately none of them disfiguring; L.L. made a lovely corpse.

Which was lucky indeed, because it was Boy’s assignment on that occasion to get the body in the box. Whenever a celebrity went down, it was Galaxy tradition to get, by hook or by crook (usually by crook), a photo of the recently departed lying in his or her casket during the final viewing. This photo would then appear, as large as physically possible, on the front page of the following week’s Galaxy, in full if waxen color.

Attention, shoppers: Next to the cash register is an intimation of mortality, yours, cheap. See? Even people smarter, richer, prettier, and better smelling than you die, sooner or later; isn’t that news worth a buck or two?

Getting the body in the box that time had been only moderately difficult. Though the Golden Church of Sha-Kay headquarters in Marmelay — a sort of great gilded banana split of a building with a cross and a spire and a carillon and loudspeakers and floodlights and television broadcasting equipment on top — was well guarded by cult staff members, it had been child’s play to Mickey Finn a staffer of the right size and heft, via a doctored Dr Pepper, borrow the fellow’s golden robe, and slip into the Temple of Revelation during a staff shift change.

Briefly alone in the dusky room with the late L.L., Boy had paused above the well-remembered face and form, now inert as it had never been in life, supine there in the open gilded casket on its waist-high bier, amid golden candles, far too much incense, and a piped-in celestial choir oozing out what sounded suspiciously like “Camptown Races” at half speed. Camera in right hand, he had reached out his left to adjust the shoulder of that golden gown to reveal just a bit more cleavage, just especially for all those necrophiles out there in Galaxyland, then it was pop goes the picture and Boy was, so far as he knew, done with the lovely late lady forever.

But no. It seemed that, among the effects Laurena Layla had left behind, amid the marked decks, shaved dice, plastic fingernails, and John B. Anderson buttons, was a last will and testament, in which the lady had promised her followers a second act: “I shall Die untimely,” she wrote (which everybody believes, of course), “but it shall not be a real Death. I shall Travel in that Other World, seeking Wisdom and the Way, and twenty years after my Departure, to the Day, I shall return to this Plane of Existence to share with You the Knowledge I have gained.”

Twenty years. Tomorrow, the second Thursday in May, would be the twentieth anniversary of Laurena Layla’s dusting, and an astonishing number of mouth-breathers really did expect her to appear among them, robes, smiles, cleavage, Wisdom, and all. Most if not all of those faithful were also faithful Galaxy readers, naturally, so here was Boy, pasty-faced, skeptical, sphacelated, Valium-enhanced, champagne-maintained, and withal utterly pleased with himself, even though this assignment was a bit of a comedown.


Here was the normally moribund crossroads of Marmelay, a town that had never quite recovered from the economic shock when the slave auction left, but today doing its best to make up all at once for a hundred and fifty years of hind teat. The three nearby motels had all quadrupled their rates, the two local diners had printed new menus, and the five taverns in the area were charging as though they’d just heard Prohibition was coming back. Many of the Sha-Kay faithful did their traveling in RVs, but they still had to eat, and the local grocers knew very well what that meant: move the decimal point one position to the right on every item in the store. The locals were staying home for a couple days.

Boy traveled this time as himself, a rare occurrence, though he had come prepared with the usual array of false identification just in case. He was also traveling solo, without even a photographer, since it wasn’t expected he’d require a particularly large crew to record a nonevent: “Not appearing today in her Temple of Revelation in the charmingly sleepy village of Marmelay, Mississippi …”

So it was the truth Boy told the clerk at the Lest Ye Forget Motel, unnatural th. . .