Lit Hub shares an excerpt from Jess Walter’s introductory essay for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. In the excerpt, Walter shares how she used the principles embodied by Patricia Highsmith to choose the stories featured in the collection.
While she was reading for the anthology, Walter was also reading Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995, a collection of entries from Highsmith’s eight thousand pages of diaries and journals. In excerpts from 1949, Highsmith has just finished Strangers on a Train and is working on The Price of Salt, two wildly different books. “It is both sad and thrilling to watch the young Highsmith try to reconcile these seemingly divergent literary ambitions, to battle both her deep self-doubt and the strict cultural biases of the time, all while defining for herself a creative ethos that could contain such an expansive talent,” Walter says.
In her diaries, Highsmith wrote that she wanted to examine the soul, the part of the mind that psychology cannot reach or banish. She also asserted her dedication to stories of violence, drama, and suspense. Walter also relied on those principles to select stories for the anthology. “We started with drama and suspense, some violence and psychology, and a fair amount of what Pat called ‘soul,'” she says. She also considered other elements Highsmith discussed in her journals: joy, art, heart, momentum, enthusiasm, and narrative rush.
Walter also looked for stories with dark, unflinching humor, unique settings, and ambiguity. She also looked for an undefinable element she calls snap. “I like stories that, at some point in the writing, or in the plot, or maybe even in the conception, shift or pop or crack like a whip,” she says. “This can take the form of a drastic turn of action, or a surprising revelation of character. It can be a ramping up of stakes or a burst of wonderful writing that makes you wish you’d been the one to compose it. It can be dialogue that crackles, beginnings that cause you to sit up, or endings that make you slap your head.”
All things good writers should aspire to create.
