The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

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Another year, another edition of The Best American Mystery Stories. Just as each year presents surprises and memorable moments, so does each volume in this prestigious series. It has been my privilege to be the series editor for all twenty-four annual volumes of these monuments to excellence in the realm of the mystery short story.

Writing a good mystery story is no small thing. Many of the novelists I’ve worked with over the years have claimed that it’s harder to produce a good short story, where every word must count so heavily, than to have the expansive luxury of telling the story over scores of thousands of words.

John Dickson Carr, the greatest writer of impossible crime stories who ever concocted a locked-room puzzle, claimed that the natural form of the traditional mystery is not the novel but the short story. It is not uncommon, he pointed out, for a detective story to revolve around a single incident, with a single clue, which can be discovered, divulged, and have its significance explained within a few pages. The rest is embellishment.

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