Introduction Jonathan Kellerman

Should you get a career criminal to engage in a rare moment of honesty, he may very well admit that crime is his job, and that he takes it as seriously as would any professional.

Likewise the business of catching criminals, an often plodding, picayune, migraine-inducing endeavor best left to those who get paid to do it. For, despite their shortcomings and limitations, and occasional displays of breath-taking incompetence, the boys and girls in blue and their plainclothes colleagues are almost always the sole solvers of mystery and mayhem. Private eyes are best left to squinting at adulterers behind keyholes, little old ladies in bulky cardigans wouldn't last a minute on the streets, and, when a serial killer is apprehended it's rarely -- if ever -- the result of a clever "psychological profile" expelled from the bowels of Quantico, but rather, plain, old-fashioned footwork by the unheralded local yokel gendarmes.

I am of two minds about crime stories that feature non-cops as detectives.

I despise those snotty productions where some effete, narcissistic rank amateur shows up the pros by manipulating the pieces of a silly, contrived puzzle.

Crime stories should feature cops.

All this from the guy who enlarged the theme of Shrink Detective. But though the Delaware novels obligate the reader to assume a certain measure of suspension of disbelief -- no psychologist could get in that much trouble -- my intention from the moment I constructed the first Delaware, When the Bough Breaks, was to adhere to a level of realism that wasn't at war with what I knew about the so-called criminal justice system from my experiences as an expert witness. This meant that though Dr. D.'s intelligence and training would lend him a certain degree of insight, he could never wing it as a solo act, would always have to work with a cop and within the context of the "rules." Hence Milo Sturgis, and Alex's customary role as a consultant.

On the other hand, there is something extremely compelling and appealing about crime stories that feature naifs and other innocent amateurs -- men and women caught up in Kafkaesque situations of life-threatening proportion, having to fight and/or reason their way to safety. Hitchcock exploited this theme frequently to brilliant effect, in films such as Rear Window -- based upon a short story by that maestro of paranoia, Cornell Woolrich a.k.a. William Irish -- as well as in North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, etc. Some of our finest writers, from James T. Farrell to Elmore Leonard, have taken us into the mind of the outsider grappling with the ugly side of life.

By abandoning the story restrictions and character limitations of police proceduralism, the skillfull crime writer can be freed to create themes, situations, and parodoxes that pulsate with vitality and originality.

The stories in this collection possess that freshness and inventiveness. As a group, they tend toward tough-mindedness and a dark, brooding -- but not despairing -- spirit, well in-line with The Way Things Really Are In Contemporary America. Few, if any, can be termed dizzy or cute. Nearly anything in these stories could happen. That makes them frightening.

And shouldn't crime stories be frightening?

Because even the stiffening corpulence of Colonel Blowhard's livid corpse lying face up in the musty manor house drawing room during martini hour is a terrible event. The manipulated demise of any human being bears our serious attention, if not always in compassion, at least in horrified pause.

We crime writers have chosen to explore bad stuff. Sometimes we offer the illusion of solution (I avoid that nauseating pop psych cliché closure because terrible things never close.) Sometimes we leave threads unraveled because life is rarely neat and clean. Always we wrestle with the eternal and ultimately unanswerable question: why do people do evil?

This book is a compendium of significant talent plumbing the depths of bad stuff as it intrudes upon the lives of those not paid to deal with it -- non-cop he's and she's cast, often against their will, in the role of fixer. Non-cop victims faced with conundrums they don't always solve. The protagonists in these stories occupy varied positions on The Mountain of Moral High Ground. Some you'll cheer on, others may cause you to look behind your shoulder a little more often the next time you venture out into the dark.

One way or the other, they're all doing their job.

What more can you ask?

Copyright © 1999 by The Mystery Writers of America, Inc.