"Sinister Shorts" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Shaughnessy Perri)

Introduction

MY SISTER MARY AND I BEGAN collaborating on writing legal suspense novels twelve years ago, using the pen name of “Perri.” From the first book, we found that Perri had a distinct style: optimistic, fast-paced, no-nonsense, and seldom given to fanciful literary gestures. However, we both knew that Perri had another side: a darker, more divided self aching to appear.

In fact, just before our first novel was published, Perri had published her first short story, “The Long Walk,” a paranoid tale about a murder investigation that takes place on a hike in the Berkeley Hills, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. This first outing earned Perri an encouraging award from the Mystery Writers of America and begins this collection.

Many short stories followed over the years. Like Perri's novels, they were always about crime, but we experimented with many different writing styles and explored the grotesque, the hidden, and the frightening rather than the legal landscape of our Nina Reilly novels. We published some of them in Ellery Queen, online, and in literary journals, but others lay moldering in a box in my humid Hawaiian garage, or stashed in the back of Mary's file cabinet in California. The stories often seemed to write themselves or fall from dreams.

With our short stories, we each felt free to imprint an individual style. When Mary presented me with a new story, like “The Furnace Man,” about a housewife whose obsession with keeping her husband's love leads to bizarre consequences, I gave it a light once-over, but knew better than to touch the style. The same went for my story about a man in a wet suit going over a waterfall, “Dead Money.” I dreamed the whole story one night, plot point after plot point, and Mary checked it over and let it go.

Only one story in this book was a fifty-fifty collaboration like our novels: “Juggernaut,” maybe because Nina Reilly, the lawyer in our legal novels, makes an appearance. We'll let you guess which one of us was the main writer of “Tiny Angels,” “The Second Head,” “To Still the Beating of Her Heart,” “The Couple Behind the Curtain,” and “The Young Lady.” Then see if you can guess which one of us wrote “Sandstorm,” “Chocolate Milkshake,” “A Grandmother's Tale,” and “Lemons.”

Two of the stories are stylistic homages to far better writers. “His Master's Hand,” in which Peter the Gravedigger goes looking for Mozart's grave in Vienna, bears more than a passing resemblance to the style of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. “Gertrude Stein Solves a Mystery” is a mostly true recounting of a strange incident in the great writer's life, written in my personal version of Steinese.

Other figures important to us blew into stories like “Success Without College,” in which Paul van Wagoner, the investigator in our series, helps a victim in a shooting come out ahead, and “O'Shay's Special Case,” inspired by the stories our late brother, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, a lawyer who represented injured workers in Salinas, California, used to tell us.

In all, these stories represent a different kind of collaboration between Mary and me. We egged each other on, helped each other, and played around. We hope you enjoy the result as much as we enjoyed writing them.

Oh, and Perri, who of course will get all the credit, thanks you for reading, from the bottom of her black little heart.

Best,

Pam and Mary O'Shaughnessy for “Perri”