Twisted

of the Heart (Berkley) and Opening Shots, Vol. 2 (Cumberland House).
    “Triangle” previously appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
    “The Weekender” previously appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and A Century of Great Suspense Stories (Berkley) and Best American Mysteries #1 (Houghton Mifflin).
    “The Widow of Pine Creek” previously appeared in A Confederacy of Crime (Signet) and The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: Second Annual Collection: Vol. 2 (Forge).
    “Without Jonathan” previously appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

I NTRODUCTION

    M y experience with the short story form goes back to the distant past.
    I was a clumsy, chubby, socially awkward boy with no aptitude for sports whatsoever and, as befit someone like that, I was drawn to reading and writing, particularly the works of short story writers like Poe, O. Henry, A. Conan Doyle and Ray Bradbury, not to mention one of the greatest forums for short surprise-ending drama in the past fifty years: The Twilight Zone. (I defy any fans of the show to tell me they don’t get a chill recalling the famous social services manual, To Serve Man. )
    When I was given a writing assignment in junior high school, I’d invariably try my hand at a short story. I didn’t, however, write detective or science fiction stories, but, with youthful hubris, created my own subgenre of fiction: These tales usually involved clumsy, chubby, socially awkward boys rescuing cheerleaders and pompom girls from catastrophesthat were both spectacular and highly improbable, such as my heroes’ daring mountaineering exploits (embarrassingly set just outside of Chicago, where I lived, and where mountains were conspicuously absent).
    The stories were met with just the exasperation you’d expect from teachers who’d spent hours offering us the entire pantheon of literary superstars as models. (“Let’s push ourselves, Jeffery”—the 1960s’ equivalent of today’s jargon, “Think outside the box.”) Fortunately for their sanity, and my career as a scribe, I abandoned this vein of angst-ridden outpourings rather quickly and grew more diligent in my efforts to become a writer, a path that led me to poetry, songwriting, journalism and, eventually, novels.
    Although I continued to read and enjoy short fiction—in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Playboy (a publication that I’m told also featured photography), The New Yorker and anthologies—I just didn’t seem to have the time to write any myself. But a few years after I quit my day job to be a full-time novelist, a fellow author, compiling an anthology of original short stories, asked if I’d consider contributing one to the volume.
    Why not? I asked myself and plowed ahead.
    I found, to my surprise, that the experience was absolutely delightful—and for a reason I hadn’t expected. In my novels, I adhere to strict conventions; though I love to make evil appear to be good (and vice versa) and to dangle the potential for disaster before my readers, nonetheless, in the end, good is good and bad is bad, and good more or lessprevails. Authors have a contract with their readers and I think too much of mine to have them invest their time, money and emotion in a full-length novel, only to leave them disappointed by a grim, cynical ending.
    With a thirty-page short story, however, all bets are off.
    Readers don’t have the same emotional investment as in a novel. The payoff in the case of short stories isn’t a roller coaster of plot reversals involving characters they’ve spent time learning about and loving or hating, set in places with atmosphere carefully described. Short stories are like a sniper’s bullet. Fast and shocking. In a story, I can make good bad and bad badder and, most fun of all, really good really bad.
    I found too that as a craftsman, I like the discipline required by short stories. As I tell writing students, it’s far easier to write long than it is to write short, but of course this business isn’t about what’s easy for the author; it’s about what’s best for the reader, and short fiction doesn’t let us get away with slacking off.
    Finally, a word of thanks to those who’ve encouraged me to write these stories, particularly Janet Hutchings and her inestimable Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, its sister publication Alfred Hitchcock, Marty Greenberg and the crew at Teknobooks, Otto Penzler and Evan Hunter.
    The stories that follow are quite varied, with