The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

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Now that Best American Mystery Stories has reached its first decade, I thought I’d go back and reread the forewords I’d written for the first nine to see if I had anything original to say (which would be a major coup for me at any time). Well, I don’t. What I do realize is how much has changed in ten years and how much has not.

Among the changes are that I (stupidly) crowed about not having a computer for the first few volumes. I do now and couldn’t live without it. Even though I am a card-carrying Luddite and have a certificate from the Lead Pencil Society on my wall, I should have realized sooner that a computer would help me to be a better correspondent and better able to do research.

It almost seems quaint to read in that first volume that I looked at five hundred stories. My invaluable colleague, Michele Slung, now scans as many as 1,500 mystery stories and double that number of pieces of fiction to determine whether they are eligible for consideration for this genre-specific volume. Don’t ask me how she does it; I’ve never known how she could read that quickly, make such good decisions, and have such extraordinary retention.

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