The Best American Mystery Stories 2001 [Paperback]

Best-selling author Lawrence Block is one of the mystery genre’s most prolific authors, with more than fifty books to his name, including Hit List, published in 2000. Block’s selections for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001 include stories by such luminaries as Joyce Carol Oates, T. Jefferson Parker, Russell Banks, and Peter Robinson.

Best-selling author Lawrence Block is one of the mystery genre’s most prolific authors, with more than fifty books to his name, including Hit List, published in 2000. Block’s selections for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001 include stories by such luminaries as Joyce Carol Oates, T. Jefferson Parker, Russell Banks, and Peter Robinson.

For those of you who like your vittles cafeteria-style, this is a nice spread of taste treats. The Washington Post

Introduction

The american mystery short story, it is my pleasant duty to report, is in very good shape.
Were you to skip this introduction and go directly to the stories themselves, you’d discover as much on your own. And, I must say, every impulse but that of ego leads me to urge you to do just that. The stories, to be sure, are why we’re all here.
They are the best of this year’s crop, and the crop itself was a bountiful one. And they were written, each and every one of them, for love -- love of the ideas that propel them, love of the characters that inhabit them, love of the pure task of dreaming imaginary worlds and putting well-chosen words on paper (or the screen, or what you will).
This introduction, on the other hand, was written for money. It’s part of my job as guest editor, which consists primarily of reading the year’s fifty best stories as selected by Otto Penzler with the assistance of Michele Slung and choosing twenty of that number for this volume. Having performed that happy task, I’m further required to string together a hundred senlS)