The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

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The American Mystery Story is flourishing as we approach the new millennium (which begins, of course, on January 1, 2001, as I do not know of a single historical entity who lived in the year o).

Mysteries have changed in both style and content, just as the rest of literature has changed, over the course of the genre’s life, which is just a bit more than a century and a half (assuming that we’re all agreed that the first true mystery short story was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841).

Mystery stories used to be mainly puzzles, then they seemed to be mainly private eye stories. Both kinds are still written, and sometimes they are very good, but more stories in this anthology (and the three that preceded it) are stories of character than one has been accustomed to seeing in collections of mystery stories. These are still mysteries, but they are more. In the words of the truly stupid reviewers who condescend when they write about a good mystery, they “transcend the genre.” As readers have become more demanding, contemporary writers have stepped up and produced more complex, more textured, more stylistically original stories.

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