The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. For The Best American Mystery Stories series, it’s true: the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

When the series began in 1997, the guest editor was Robert B. Parker. I was the series editor. This year the guest editor is Jonathan Lethem. I’m still the series editor.

The mission back then was to try to read every mystery story published by an American or Canadian in 1996, and more than five hundred stories were examined in order to find the twenty best. For this edition, the mission remained precisely the same — but more than three thousand stories were examined.

A primary source for great crime fiction was the specialty magazines (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine), a handful of mystery anthologies, literary journals, and popular consumer magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Today those publications are still a treasure trove of stories suitable for being collected in The Best American Mystery Stories, but other mystery magazines have been created (notably The Strand and the rebirth of Black Mask), the modest number of anthologies has mushroomed into scores, mostly from small publishers, and electronic magazines (e-zines), of which I was unaware in 1996, have drawn some highly talented authors to their sites.

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