To inaugurate our “Mystery Masterclass” feature, we are pleased to present this year’s winner of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, Charles Ardai. Not only is Charles one of the best writers in the business, but there’s a picture of him in the American Heritage Dictionary under the entry “Renaissance Man.” In a previous career, he created the internet service provider Juno.com; these days, he’s carrying the torch of original paperback crime fiction as the publisher of Hard Case Crime, and includes probably the bestselling American author alive, the recently crowned MWA Grandmaster Stephen King, among his authors.

THE MISSION

by Charles Ardai

There was a time when people read short stories. I’m not talking about some sepia-toned yesteryear when the pulps cost a nickel – I’m talking about when I was growing up, and I’m not very old. I turned 7 in 1976 and I remember spending a good portion of the Bicentennial reading my way through stacks of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (including their red, white, and blue commemorative issue) that I’d found at yard sales, garage sales, and flea markets. As late as the early 1980s, you couldn’t go to a garage sale anywhere in the tri-state area without finding a box of EQMMs or AHMMs for sale. Yes, you could argue that the fact that they were being sold was a sign that their owners didn’t want them any more – but the point is that they had them. Every house, every garage, cardboard boxes full of short stories. And not twenty-year-old issues they’d inherited from a parent – current issues. And not pristine, mint-condition current issues – well-thumbed current issues. Somebody in the house had subscribed to those magazines, and somebody had read them.

I was reminded of this the other day when I won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. It was, needless to say, a huge thrill and an honor. For a kid who’d grown up greedily devouring every issue of EQMM he could find, gobbling up stories by Stanley Ellin and Jack Ritchie and Clark Howard and Lawrence Block and Avram Davidson and Robert L. Fish and (of course) Edward D. Hoch, there really could be no greater pot of gold at the end of the rainbow than to stand on that dais where those heroes of my childhood had stood before me and to join their ranks.

And yet –

And yet, whenever I talk to anyone today and bring up the subject of short stories, I may as well be asking them whether they like to play whist or dance a brisk gavotte.

What happened? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal spoke of a mystery short story renaissance, and it’s true that there are a fair number of original anthologies of crime fiction being published these days, but I can’t help feeling it’s a Potemkin Village: with rare exceptions, these books sell at most a few thousand copies, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands EQMM sold every month at its peak. And how many of those copies are actually read?

Somewhere along the way, we fell out of the habit of deriving entertainment from five or ten or twenty pages of fiction. People don’t like to read as much as they used to; and those who do still like to read don’t like reading short stories as much as they used to.

I find it baffling. A well-turned short story is like a well-performed magic trick: It’s got its set-up and its payoff, its misdirection and its twists, its ability to quicken your pulse with a sudden unexpected development. And who doesn’t like a good magic trick?

Many readers, apparently – and it makes me sad.

But there is hope. A blog like this one, dedicated to the art of short crime fiction, has the opportunity to turn things around, to remind people about the pleasure they’re forgoing by restricting their reading to novels (or to blogs, for that matter).

A quixotic quest? To be sure. A doomed one? Perhaps. But a worthwhile one? Definitely.

Definitely.