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A review by scorpstar77
The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 by Robert Crais, Otto Penzler
4.0
Prior to getting this from the Virginia Festival of the Book office to read as a reviewer of book applications for their planning committee, I had no idea that the famous "Best American" series had a mystery subgenre. I mostly enjoyed this collection, though I think the title calling them all "mystery stories" is rather misleading. In his introduction, the series editor - the well-known mystery editor and aficionado Otto Penzler - states that it's really a collection of both mystery and crime stories. OK, I can still get behind that. The two are closely related and often lumped together.
But it seemed to the me that the editors had a rather broader definition than I would have had for what constitutes a crime story. For example, in one story entitled "Trafficking," the crux of the story is the complex family relationships in a blended family (mother and son, step-father and step-son) when the parents have aged/died and the brothers have grown up and chosen different paths in life. The entire story is about one step-brother visiting the other in prison. Why the one brother is in prison is only very vaguely defined (something drug-related) and is ultimately unimportant. It's not a bad story; I just would not have classified it as a crime story.
Anyway - most of the authors here are fairly well-known, and those who aren't have still been published in respectable venues before. Most of the stories were quite good. I wouldn't necessarily have classified all of them as crime stories, but most are at least that - with a crime or multiple crimes playing a pivotal role in the storytelling - and a few are quite satisfying mysteries. Personal favorites in the collection: "The Bridge Partner" by Peter S. Beagle; "Dog on a Cow" by Gina Paoli; "Vic Primeval" by T. Jefferson Parker; "Hard Truths" by Thomas J. Rice; "Local Knowledge" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; and "Trafalgar" by Charles Todd. The last two stories listed are probably the most traditional whodunit kinds of mysteries in the book, the first a kind of hard-boiled American police procedural and the second a more old-fashioned British police investigation (though I can't quite call it a cozy since it is an investigation run by Scotland Yard, there are some cozy elements to it).
But it seemed to the me that the editors had a rather broader definition than I would have had for what constitutes a crime story. For example, in one story entitled "Trafficking," the crux of the story is the complex family relationships in a blended family (mother and son, step-father and step-son) when the parents have aged/died and the brothers have grown up and chosen different paths in life. The entire story is about one step-brother visiting the other in prison. Why the one brother is in prison is only very vaguely defined (something drug-related) and is ultimately unimportant. It's not a bad story; I just would not have classified it as a crime story.
Anyway - most of the authors here are fairly well-known, and those who aren't have still been published in respectable venues before. Most of the stories were quite good. I wouldn't necessarily have classified all of them as crime stories, but most are at least that - with a crime or multiple crimes playing a pivotal role in the storytelling - and a few are quite satisfying mysteries. Personal favorites in the collection: "The Bridge Partner" by Peter S. Beagle; "Dog on a Cow" by Gina Paoli; "Vic Primeval" by T. Jefferson Parker; "Hard Truths" by Thomas J. Rice; "Local Knowledge" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; and "Trafalgar" by Charles Todd. The last two stories listed are probably the most traditional whodunit kinds of mysteries in the book, the first a kind of hard-boiled American police procedural and the second a more old-fashioned British police investigation (though I can't quite call it a cozy since it is an investigation run by Scotland Yard, there are some cozy elements to it).