Ten Year Stretch: Celebrating a Decade of Crime Fiction at Crimefest
363
Ten Year Stretch: Celebrating a Decade of Crime Fiction at Crimefest
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Overview
"Edwards and Muller have assembled top-notch talent in this entertaining anthology of 20 original short stories... High-quality entries from the likes of Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and Ian Rankin, as well as from lesser-known authors such as Bill Beverly, elevate this above similar volumes."—Publishers Weekly
The twenty brand new crime stories in this book have been specially commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of CrimeFest, described by the Guardian as "one of the 50 best festivals in the world." Contributors come from around the world and include the legendary Maj Sjöwall who, together with partner Per Wahlöö, was the originator of Nordic noir. The editors are Martin Edwards and Adrian Muller. Martin Edwards is responsible for many award-winning anthologies and Adrian Muller is one of the co-founders of CrimeFest.
Contributors to Ten Year Stretch are:
Bill Beverly, Simon Brett, Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Jeffery Deaver, Martin Edwards, Kate Ellis, Peter Guttridge, Sophie Hannah, John Harvey, Mick Herron, Donna Moore, Caro Ramsay, Ian Rankin, James Sallis, Zoë Sharp, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Maj Sjöwall, Michael Stanley and Andrew Taylor.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781464210556 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sourcebooks |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 363 |
| Sales rank: | 870,397 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime writer best known for two series of novels set in Liverpool and the Lake District. He is series consultant for British Library Crime Classics, the Vice Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, and President of the Detection Club. The Golden Age of Murder, his study of the Detection Club, was published in 2015 to international acclaim, and has been nominated for both the Edgar and Agatha awards for the year's best book about the genre. He received the CWA 2020 Diamond Dagger Award for sustained excellence in crime writing and significant contributions to the genre, joining the ranks of Sue Grafton, Ian Rankin, and Lee Child.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Hired Man
Bill Beverly
Rent was due in four days. My first check would come in five. Neither date was flexible, I'd been assured. My roommates ... let's just say the vacancy was because they'd burned the last roommate's shit and beaten him up when he complained. The house was a short walk from the bus lines on Lake and Hennepin, nice old rooms, an attic that smelled of good wood. And four guys to say hi to every day: Bjorn, Rik, Erik, and Henry.
But they were jackals. Four chairs around the table. A calendar in the kitchen with one day circled: rent due.
I'd spent my first three weeks and all my money in Minneapolis trying to find work. The fourth week I'd labored at the Northern, scratching up my next month's rent. As for my employer: well, Cook told me not even to ask Manager, Curtisall, for an advance on pay. I'd gone straight to Curtisall anyway. He shook his head. 'That's something you'd have to ask Johnny Bronco.'
'Who is Johnny Bronco?'
'Mr Bronco,' said Curtisall, 'is the friend of the man who owns the Northern.'
'Pardon me, but what the fuck do I care about this friend?'
I'd shown up on time for work every day so far, and I had already been promoted. So I was feeling my oats. But Curtisall shushed me and flashed two L shapes with his thumbs and first fingers.
I said, 'What's that?'
'Guns,' said Curtisall, 'these hands are guns, Ice Cream. They have guns where you come from?'
I guess I was stupid, because Curtisall added, 'You don't ask the Twin Cities mob if you can get your check early. Even one day.' And then he said not to curse in the restaurant. For Minneapolis runs on its manners, Curtisall reminded me.
* * *
I was moved up from Bus to Ice Cream my second day — it just wasn't that good a restaurant anymore. On the third day, just before closing, the man in the blue suit came through the dingy white chute of a kitchen to the ice cream counter. I was still learning everything. I read the notes off the wall, recipes and instructions, for every dish, even the things I'd made fifty times already, like banana splits. At the Northern, scoops had to be round and tight. One scoop went in the round dishes, two in the wide, and for two, the instructions said something like, The scoops should match each other like buttocks, same size, same roundness. The notes said how much whipped cream went on the sundaes and where the nuts on a banana split went and how much chocolate you put in a chocolate malt. I would have thought it was all chocolate.
Suddenly the old man stood beside me. He said, 'You the new Ice Cream?'
'That's me,' I said. Cook. Dishes. Waitress. The bartender was Keep. I'd been Bus and today they had a new Bus, but he was a black kid about seventy-nine pounds, who could barely heft a tub, might have been eleven or twelve. He wasn't gonna make it.
'Ice Cream, you are doing a damn good job,' the old man said, and slapped me on the chest. When I looked down, there was the top inch of a fifty poking out of my shirt pocket.
The only fifty I had.
'Thanks,' I said. 'Good to hear.'
'I might look old,' he said, 'but I know how to swim with the current. You make them just right. That vanilla malted' — I dully recalled making it, twenty minutes ago — 'most of these bastards, not enough soda water, they make it too sweet.'
Catching the spirit of the moment now, I said, 'I'll be sure of it.'
'Most of them,' he said, 'they never should have become Ice Cream in the first place. You aren't like them.'
Not like them. Where had I heard that? The week before, when I'd finally got my courage up to go visit Ingrid Ericsson, my college classmate, the day before I dragged myself into the Northern (where the help wanted sign had been so long in the window that its red had faded to yellow). I had caught the Lake Street bus over to St Paul, hoping to find Ingrid home — I had left two phone messages and talked to her once, for a feverish half-minute, until she had to break off to go sit down to dinner — and come to find out that the buses weren't cooled, or this one wasn't. By the time I disembarked, I was just a sweaty kid aswim in my blazer and blue tie, and now I was introducing myself to Ingrid's mother, on the front step of the Ericsson house, where Ingrid, unfortunately, was not in. Mrs Ericsson asked me was I Swedish or Norwegian or Danish. None of them, I said, my parents met in Valdosta. She smiled tightly. It was not going well.
The front step was wide and deep, trimmed in marble of bluish-grey, veined with something between green and silver. I took a deep breath and looked up the street. Maybe there are grander streets than Summit Avenue, bigger homes and larger trees, but there was no street anywhere like that in Ocala, Florida, my town. Sure, Ocala had money: we had orange barons and strip club owners and concrete magnates and jai-alai syndicators and mid-level Mafiosi fixing games at the frontons. We had a few old landowners with spreads by the groves, ranches and missions and seven-column plantation mansions. But this boulevard, the dark stolidity, shaded brick and heavy frames and winter-thickened trees with muscular roots — this home, whose address I had memorized long ago from the Student Directory, was the home Ingrid never talked about. She would mention her family's lake house up past Duluth, and the ranch in Wyoming, its thousands of acres: these places birthed stories, tales of things she'd seen and snakes that reared and a time she broke her arm. These stories were already sepia-toned as she told them, especially when she reminisced about the hired man named LeeRoy, who was so skilled and so funny, and when he'd had a little to drink would do carnival riding tricks atop the horses, feats of strength and dexterity. LeeRoy had died one day, jumped off a horse and just hit funny, Ingrid said, and five minutes later his heart beat its last and they buried him in the field that he loved.
Poor LeeRoy, I'd say, and she'd laugh, her eyes rolling back from the yellow Hawaiian weed I splurged on at home and brought up to school for the occasional hour when she would smoke it with me.
'Thousands of acres,' I'd say, rolling another joint. We had never kissed, but we would, given time. In this I had faith. I was putting in the work.
'Thousands,' giggled Ingrid Ericsson.
That poor, funny, deceased hired man. Sometimes it felt like I'd known him too. Maybe, there on the front step, I should have said I had. But instead I told Mrs Ericsson, straight up: 'Your daughter is the reason I came to Minnesota.'
Mrs Ericsson reached out and sampled the damp lapel of my blazer between her fingers. The softly lighted foyer glimmered beyond her, what little beyond her I could see.
'She has plenty of friends, and some boys with high hopes,' she said. 'You aren't like them.'
'What does that mean?'
That, Mrs Ericsson did not explain. After barely another minute of discouragement, she excused herself, asking if I knew where the bus stop was. I walked back to Marshall Avenue and caught a bus back across the river.
St Paul was built on these great avenues running east to west, named for men — the Marshalls, the Daytons, the Jeffersons — whose ambition and energy had run east to west, straight and unbroken. In my Minneapolis neighborhood, all the name streets ran north-south, tight one-way strings in a triangle like an autoharp, tuneless, pinched, in alphabetical order, packed with little Nissans and Mazdas. As if here, men would be less grand, nowhere as grand as the scheme. And even the scheme existed to be hijacked, laid waste by lesser men, men like the one I would become in my interview blazer and tie, if I could ever get somebody to call me back.
* * *
On a Sunday, Waitress had a lot to carry, and sometimes there was a party. That day, bridesmaids. When Curtisall stuck in his head and said, 'Ice Cream, go out and bus,' I didn't complain. I took off my rubber gloves. Bus was cleaning up some disaster in the front window. I headed to the party on the upper level.
On the upper level, we could seat four fours, three twos on the back wall, the big roundtable which went twelve seats without crowding, and the four enclosed booths along the right wall with their fringes of strange wooden beads. Smoking wasn't allowed, but on the upper level, everything was smoked. It smelled real up there, like a grandfather's pipe, like cigars.
Sunday's bridesmaids had fanned out wide — over the whole level. Gifts everywhere. I mean, the lucky couple was going to need counter space. All these women would look at home in Ingrid Ericsson's foyer on Summit Avenue. Pink gums, white teeth, hard calves below the hem: rollerblading till the snow fell, cross-country all winter.
They were only a couple years older than me, but I didn't even put on my game face.
I had a gray tub. Filled it twice and came back. I mean, there were fifteen or sixteen of them. I had to step around all of it: the bridesmaids, the chairs, the extra tables they'd shifted over because Why not? They'd all arrived in jackets, though it was August, and everything they'd shed had to be hung up on chairbacks here, in their presence — none of it could go on hangers down front, on the rack below the carved sign that read Since 1913.
The moment, looking back, had three parts. The first was the bridesmaids' final gift.
The final gift was like some wondrous invention of a century past — a sort of ornamental perpetual motion machine, with ocean-blue marbles scooped up by the tails of a ring of spinning dolphins and flipped to the center, where they rolled out again across a lacquered ocean to the outer rim where the dolphins scooped them again. It made a casino-like clinking and rattling, and the dolphins spun industriously, and who knows what powered it, a battery or a spring or some principle of movement the celebrants had kept from the rest of us, whose motions might by it be someday spared. There were delighted gasps, and I slowed down to watch.
As the bridesmaids vied, taking pictures, the bride-to-be decided that the last traces of luncheon visible along the table would not do. 'Would you,' said the bride-to-be, waving inconveniently below her camera phone, 'take this?'
I wasn't sure what she meant. But I was mannerly about it. 'Take what, ma'am?'
'This.' She waved the sort of backhand you use to scoot away a gnat.
The this was an enormous cut-crystal tray with divots in it, I could only imagine, for five or six dozen devilled eggs. They had not brought it in full of devilled eggs. Instead, the tray had borne their vast white luncheon cake. Coconut frosting, and full of booze — I could smell it from across the room. It complemented the smokiness.
'The tray?' I said. I wasn't sure what to do. I'd only been Bus for nine or ten hours — I hadn't encountered all the permutations. Now all the bridesmaids stared. 'It isn't our tray,' I said.
You didn't want to pick up a crystal tray like this one, not on a good day, much less carry it with your gray battle Bus tub through a minefield of purses and chairs and gift bags strewn. And a third of a cake on it, uneaten. A cake as big as triplets.
Maybe I wasn't getting it. Maybe my problem was the cake. 'Your Server can put the cake in a box.'
The bride turned on me, and now I saw the face her husband would see forever. To be honest, I quailed.
'You don't want to put a tray like that in the dishwasher,' I added.
'I just wanted you to move it,' she steamed, 'if you're not too stupid.' And then the second thing happened. Immediately the beaded curtains on one booth smashed all a-clatter as the one person there clambered up and came out.
It was the same old guy — vanilla malted, fifty dollars — in the blue suit. He wobbled out past the beads, the hanging light swinging behind the swinging beads, so that suddenly the room became a tiger-rush of light and shadow. He reached out for me, his eyes going big in their sockets.
But I followed the directions, I thought.
The nearest rim of bridesmaids seemed to crumble away from him. The old man's nostrils whistled once, twice, before I understood what the other hand, the one at his clavicles, meant.
He was choking.
I dropped the bus tub on top of someone's purse. I grabbed him, spun him round, slapped my arms around him and found the lowest ribs with my forearms, joined my hands. The lapels of his jacket were damp, curiously hot. He had an old man's bowl to his belly. But his frame felt so bony, so light.
No time for conversation. I remembered my first aid training, cinched him in, and clenched upwards.
On the very first thrust, a ragged, colorless chunk of something went end-over-end, cleared the bride's coiffure and disappeared into a gift bag. The old man gurgled and drew air.
The bridesmaids went silent.
I let go of the man in the blue suit and asked whether he was all right. He waved his hand, but he didn't reply, didn't even look back. With some dignity, he regained his booth, slipping through the beads and taking his place at the table.
And I just picked up the tub and got as far from that cake as I could.
* * *
I told Curtisall, 'I don't think I can go up there again. I just gave some old guy the Heimlich, and the party, they were freaking out.'
'Some old guy? Johnny Bronco?'
Somehow, in circling to the kitchen with my tub of margarita glasses and cake forks, I'd forgotten that the choking man was Johnny Bronco.
'Stop. Stop, stop,' said Curtisall, who'd been joking about something with Cook, I hadn't quite caught what, but I was the joke now. 'You gave Johnny Bronco a Heimlich manoeuvre? You, like, grabbed him and hugged him? Was he choking?'
'Why do you think I did it?'
'Did he say anything to you?'
'Not a word. He went back in his booth. What kind of name is Johnny Bronco, anyway?'
'It's a beautiful name,' Curtisall said.
'I might look old,' Cook mimicked the old man. 'But I know how to get through to the youngsters!'
Cook and Curtisall exchanged a glance.
'You should go home. Right now,' said Curtisall. 'I can do Ice Cream. Just — don't go home. Take twenty dollars and go to the lakes. Take your girl to the lakes.'
He seemed panicked, so I handed him the Bus tub. Stripped off my Ice Cream smock. The twenty he gave me was a ten.
It wasn't even two o'clock. So I went ahead to the lakes. I walked around Lake Calhoun, Lake of the Isles. High school kids throwing a football. Couples were twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty. I sat for some time, hours, trying to catch the spirit of being twenty-two in Minneapolis, young, single, free, gainfully employed, on my way up to somewhere, something, anywhere. Anything. It was a crisp, bright summer day.
All I could come up with was: I hated Minneapolis. They all knew each other. I hated the connected lakes, all ten thousand of them. I had come five hundred miles to chase a girl who only talked to me because of my dope. I could see the truth, and it wasn't much thornier than that.
There was one thing to do. Get more dope.
* * *
'You got a phone call,' said Bjorn, the youngest of my roommates. For the first day or two, I thought Bjorn and I were going to be friends. He had one of those chin beards that climbs up to tickle the lower lip, inflaming it weird and red, like something you'd uncover petting a guinea pig. He had a collection of records he kept in the living room in open crates, displayed. But when I'd studied them, he said, 'Is there something I can help you with?'
'Who called?' I said.
'I don't know.'
'What did they say?'
'Not sure,' said Bjorn. He was sitting at the table circling jobs in the want ads. He already had a job, but he was always getting a new one. All my roommates had jobs. Rik, Erik, and Henry were all entrepreneurs. One was in telecom, the other in sports foods, I forget which.
'These guys, they'll fuck you up if you don't pay on time,' Bjorn had shared with me, those first days, before the looking-at-the-records thing. 'By on time, I mean that day, not midnight. Before dinner.'
'So, by six. Six p.m.?' I'd said.
'If you leave a check in the morning, that would be best,' said Bjorn. But then I learned he'd been as cruel to the last roommate as anyone. He was the one who struck the match.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ten Year Stretch"
by .
Copyright © 2018 CrimeFest.
Excerpted by permission of Poisoned Pen Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword — Peter James, 1,
Introduction — Martin Edwards, 4,
Bill Beverly — The Hired Man, 7,
Simon Brett — The Last Locked Room, 24,
Lee Child — Shorty and the Briefcase, 49,
Ann Cleeves — Moses and the Locked Tent Mystery, 58,
Jeffrey Deaver — Blind Date, 73,
Martin Edwards — Strangers in a Pub, 93,
Kate Ellis — Crime Scene, 117,
Peter Guttridge — Normal Rules Do Not Apply, 137,
Sophie Hannah — Ask Tom St Clare, 159,
John Harvey — Blue and Sentimental, 164,
Mick Herron — How Many Cats Have You Killed?, 191,
Donna Moore — Daylight Robbery, 201,
Caro Ramsay — The Snapperoody, 222,
Ian Rankin — Inside the Box, 229,
James Sallis — Freezer Burn, 248,
Zoe Sharp — Caught on Camera, 255,
Yrsa Sigurdardottir — Road Trip, 276,
Maj Sjowall, translated by Catherine Edwards — Long Time No See, 297,
Michael Stanley — The Ring, 313,
Andrew Taylor — The Five-Letter Word, 328,
Afterword — Adrian Muller, 347,
Biographical notes, 351,