The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

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It is possible, I suppose, that there is a smarter, harder-working, more dedicated literary figure on planet Earth than Joyce Carol Oates, but someone else will have to point out who that might be. Don’t ask me to do it.

When I asked Ms. Oates to be the guest editor for this volume, I didn’t quite know what I was getting into. (I could rewrite that sentence to avoid ending it with a preposition, but somehow it just sounds a bit off to say “I didn’t quite know into what I was getting,” so I’ll just let it go.)

It is the role of the series editor for all the volumes in Houghton Mifflin’s prestigious Best American series to select the year’s fifty best stories, and then for the guest editor to select the top twenty from that group. It was a little different this year. Ms. Oates started reading before I did, and recommended stories before I even found them. She wanted batches of stories throughout the year, rather than all fifty at once, and we engaged in frequent (I might even be tempted to say relentless) correspondence, our respective fax machines humming at every hour, and eventually telephone conversations while we debated the relative merits of certain stories. This 2005 volume is certainly the most collaborative one yet. I’m not entirely certain we followed all the guidelines set by my editor at Houghton Mifflin, but I can assure you that all of the time and energy were directed at a single goal, which was to make the book the best it could be. I hope you agree that we have achieved that.

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