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Zusatztext "For those of you who like your vittles cafeteria-style, this is a nice spread of taste treats." The Washington Post Informationen zum Autor OTTO PENZLER is a renowned mystery editor, publisher, columnist, and owner of New York's The Mysterious Bookshop, the oldest and largest bookstore solely dedicated to mystery fiction. He has edited more than fifty crime-fiction anthologies. He lives in New York. Klappentext 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. Leseprobe 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 sentences with the aim of producing something that will serve to introduce twenty fine stories, which, truth to tell, need no introduction. My words, however, will help to justify the presence of my name on the book’s cover, and will also help me earn my fee. Should I apologize for my mercenary motive? I think not. I am guided, after all, by Samuel Johnson’s immortal words: “No man but a blockhead wrote but for money.” * Would the good Dr. Johnson’s words echo so resoundingly in my soul, I have often wondered, had he picked some other word? A dimwit, say, or a palpable ass, or a clod or a clown or a numbskull? “No man but a witling, sir, wrote but for money.” It has, I submit, every bit as good a ring to it, and it leaves my own innocent surname well out of it. Ah, well. It has always seemed to me that the precise meaning of Johnson’s utterance is subject to interpretation. Perhaps he is saying that the person who writes in the happy anticipation of anything beyond financial reward is playing the fool. If you expect to make a name for yourself, or achieve literary immortality, or change the world, or pile up brownie points in heaven, then surely you’re a blockhead -- because money’s all you can truly hope to gain for your efforts. Because, certainly, Johnson himself was nowhere near as mercenary as the quoted sentence makes him appear. He wrote for money, unquestionably, and he might well have stopped writing had they stopped paying him, but he wrote also with the clear intent of adding to the world’s store of knowledge and enhancing English literature. Indeed, his dictum works every bit as well, and sounds just as likely to have been uttered by him, if we take it and turn it on its head, to wit: “No man but a blockhead wrote solely for money.” And who can argue with that? There are easier ways to make a living -- almost all of them, come to think of it -- and few less likely ways to amass a fortune. Back to our twenty superb stories, and the twenty blockheads wh...
