The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

These days when I have very little time to dedicate to reading high-quality fiction they server the purpose of keeping my interest in literature aflame. However, that collection has been very uneven in terms of quality of writing. Some years I would read one amazing story after another, while with a different guest editor I would struggle to go through the entire collection. My biggest complaints would always revolve around the same issue: even though I appreciate good writing in its own right, I still insist that the stories I read be in fact stories. They need to tell something consequential. That usually, but not always, means that I want “something to happen.” Too many of the stories that have been coming out of literary workshops in recent years have been incredibly well crafted, but ultimately sterile.

This is the first year that I had branched out and decided to check out “The Best American Mystery Stories.” I don’t know why I didn’t do this before. The very title of this collection suggests a very dynamic and eventful assortment of stories. Indeed, in that regard the collection has lived up to its premise. However, there is more to a mystery story than some very exciting set of events, involving often (but not always) some kind of surprise. The editors of this collection seem to have understood “mystery” to mean a crime of some kind. Therefor it would be a big stretch to call most of the stories in this collection a “mystery.” Don’t get me wrong: these are all very well written and interesting stories. Most of them are very dark and even depressing though, so this is not necessarily a “fun” book to read. If they made movies or TV series based on these stories they would most accurately be described as dramas. I feel that the editors, when deciding between the literary value of the stories and their merit as true mysteries may have given the first of these two criteria much more weight. Nonetheless, this is a very good collection of short fiction. Now I will look into reading the collections from the previous few years, and hopefully at least some of them will be dominated by “true” mystery stories.