Best American Mystery Stories 2010 ed by Lee Child: review

The North American how- and whydunits in Best American Mystery Stories 2010, edited by Lee Child, leave the heart racing, says Mark Sanderson

By Mark Sanderson in The Telegraph, 12 December 2010

Not content with producing two excellent thrillers this year – 61 Hours and Worth Dying For – Lee Child (pic left) has somehow found the time to choose a score of stories out of a preselected 50 that proves that, even if its characters aren’t, the crime genre is alive and kicking.


All of the tales were written by Americans or Canadians and appeared in American or Canadian publications in 2010. If this suggests the collection is a ghetto as well as a grab-bag, the range and diversity of the stories more than compensates and also demonstrates that the Brits don’t have a monopoly on irony.

The title, however, is misleading. Few tales are actual mysteries. Lyndsay Faye’s Conan Doyle pastiche, 'The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness’, is an honourable exception. Nowadays howdunits and whydunits are far more common.
It is unlikely that British readers will have heard of Faye or 17 of the other contributors. The two authors who are immediately recognisable – Dennis Lehane and Kurt Vonnegut – are on top form here. The former, in 'Animal Rescue’, uses the discovery of a pit bull puppy in a rubbish bin to explore human loneliness, and the latter, in 'Ed Luby’s Key Club’, places an innocent couple celebrating their wedding anniversary in the nightmare scenario of being charged with murder in a corrupt small town. Both tales are masterly examples of a writer knowing exactly how to push the reader’s buttons.
The full review at The Telegraph.

Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Ed by Lee Child
CORVUS, £17.99, 402pp