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Otto Penzler, Lisa Scottoline, Tom Barlow, Michael Connelly, O’Neil De Noux, Eileen Dreyer, Edgerley Gates, Clark Howard, Andre Kocsis, Kevin Leahy, Nick Mamatas, Emily St. John Mandel, Dennis Mcfadden, Micah Nathan, Joyce Carol Oates, Nancy Pickard, Bill Pronzini, Randall Silvis, Patricia Smith, Ben Stroud, Hannah Tinti, Maurine Dallas Watkins

The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

An anthology of stories edited by Lisa Scottoline and Otto Penzler, 2013

Foreword

AS PREPARATION FOR writing the foreword to each new book in this wonderful series, I reread those I wrote for previous volumes. This serves the purpose of reminding me of things I may already have said and therefore assists my efforts to eschew repetition in the off-chance that readers actually pay attention to these things instead of immediately diving into the stories on these pages (as I heartily recommend).

The second goal is for this rereading process to suggest something that may be of interest to readers, to provide a slim thread that might be followed to produce a few worthwhile thoughts. Or even a single one, for that matter, which usually exhausts me.

Although I’m not certain either goal was achieved when I read the sixteen earlier forewords produced for The Best American Mystery Stories, that stroll down memory lane did provide an interesting (to me) autobiographical view of my connection to the series that illuminated numerous changes in attitude and process.

Naively and foolishly, an early foreword somehow seemed to display my comfort, perhaps even pride, in the fact that I didn’t have a computer and wouldn’t have known how to turn one on if I did. As it happens, almost immediately after I wrote that I went to the London Book Fair and returned to find my much-loved IBM Selectric typewriter missing from my desk, replaced by a computer. I asked my assistant what the hell was going on and she said simply, “It’s time. I used your credit card and ordered it. ” I told her she was fired.

“I know,” she said, “but first I’m going to teach you how to use it. ” It was a struggle for an old Luddite, but I recognize now that I couldn’t function without it.

As evidence of the change in me, and the world, since those simpler days, I now run a publishing company, MysteriousPress. com, devoted entirely to e-books. Okay, I still may be technologically challenged, but I’ve accepted the inevitable.

My life has always been deeply involved with books, beginning when I read them at a very young age, followed by collecting them, then editing and publishing them, and finally selling them through my bookshop. I lament that the number and influence of independent bookstores has dramatically diminished over recent years, and that Nooks and Kindles are now seen more frequently during my travels than hardcover books are, or even paperbacks, for that matter.

On the other hand, I have embraced some of the valuable elements of this change. It is now possible to have access to hundreds of thousands of books that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find less than a decade ago, for instance.