About book The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 (2003)
Doing a bit of genre-related research, I recently revisited BAMS 2002 and 2003. As might be expected, both anthologies are mixed bags. The best of these crime/mystery stories offer a refreshing contrast to the stories of, say, Annie Proulx or Donald Ray Pollack — they portray toughness and despair without fetishistic fascination. The worst of these stories flatten into predictable exercises in genre, their characters flattened for the sake of plot, form, structure.The star of both these anthologies may be Scott Wolven, who seized my attention with two fine, minimal stories of rural impermanence. His 2005 collection, Controlled Burn, is now on my to-read list.
My biggest complaint was that not too many of the stories seemed to be actual mysteries. In the intro, Connelly lays out that he has a broad definition of what constitutes a mystery story - yet I was still surprised at how loose the criteria really were. While all of the stories center on a crime, only a few have a mystery feel to them. Overall it felt more like a collection of crime drama stories. It is worth a read for the few gems...or if you like crime stories and are not set on reading mysteries.
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