But of course, even today, Manhattan is a hotbed of imagined crimes and mystery as well as the real thing. For some of our stories, family is at the heart of a crime. In “Three Little Words,” Nancy Pickard reveals the often-spiteful core of the Big Apple and what happens when one woman tries to change it. The mystery-solving mother of series detective Lydia Chin tackles a missing-persons case brought to her by her son in S. J. Rozan’s “Chin Yong-Yun Makes a Shiddach,” while in “Red-Headed Stepchild” fellow MWA grand master Margaret Maron shows a step-sibling rivalry that matches anything adults can dream up. Thomas H. Cook portrays how some family ties can bind to the bitter end in “Damage Control,” set in a gentrified Hell’s Kitchen, and Persia Walker’s “Dizzy and Gillespie” tells of a dispute between neighbors in a Harlem apartment building, with a loving daughter caught in the middle.
All these wonderful stories, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. Lee Child’s drifting modern warrior Jack Reacher makes a stop in the Big Apple in “The Picture of the Lonely Diner,” in which just exiting a subway station ensnares him in enough intrigue and danger to fill a novel. A sunny day in Central Park turns dangerous for at least one perpetrator in Julie Hyzy’s “White Rabbit.” And Ben H. Winters takes us behind the cutthroat world of Off-Broadway theater in “Trapped!”
Our esteemed publisher, Quirk Books, has illustrated each of the stories with maps and photographs from these classic neighborhoods, making Manhattan Mayhem a unique tribute and keepsake anthology in honor of a very special organization and an equally special city.
We hope you’ll be as pleased reading these stories as we were writing them.
ON THE OCCASION of MWA’s seventieth anniversary, we would like to take a moment on behalf of the organization to extend our deepest appreciation to Mary Higgins Clark. Since joining its ranks as a young writer, she has consistently been a tireless champion of MWA, our members, and mystery writers worldwide.
Mary is always ready to lend a helping hand in our endeavors. In addition to many tasks performed on behalf of MWA during her more than ten years as a member of the National Board of Directors, as MWA’s national president she served as an indefatigable and peerless leader and spokeswoman for our genre. Mary also took on a small job that lasted for two years, organizing and chairing the 1988 International Crime Congress, a stellar weeklong affair hosting mystery and crime writers from all over the world.
If that were not enough for one individual to give of her time and talent, Mary has also edited three annual MWA anthologies and contributed to many more.
She is a talented and beloved writer, and her outstanding contribution to the genre was duly recognized when she was named MWA Grand Master for her outstanding body of consistently high-quality work produced over her storied career.
Much has changed since Mary first joined our ranks, but she, thankfully, has remained the same gracious, warm, and caring person she has always been, and we are all richer for knowing her. Certainly recognized worldwide as “The Queen of Suspense,” around here she is known as “The Queen of Our Hearts.”
We offer our deepest and most sincere thanks for Mary’s many years of selfless service to Mystery Writers of America and writers everywhere. We hope there are many more to come.
BARRY T. ZEMAN
Chair, Publications Committee
TED HERTZEL, JR.
Executive Vice President
THE FIVE-DOLLAR DRESS
Mary Higgins Clark
It was a late August afternoon, and the sun was sending slanting shadows across Union Square in Manhattan. It’s a peculiar kind of day, Jenny thought as she came up from the subway and turned east. This was the last day she needed to go to the apartment of her grandmother, who had died three weeks ago.
She had already cleaned out most of the apartment. The furniture and all of Gran’s household goods, as well as her clothing, would be picked up at five o’clock by the diocese charity.
Her mother and father were both pediatricians in San Francisco and had intensely busy schedules. Having just passed the bar exam after graduating from Stanford Law School, Jenny was free to do the job. Next week, she would be starting as a deputy district attorney in San Francisco.
At First Avenue, she looked up while waiting for the light to change. She could see the windows of her grandmother’s apartment on the fourth floor of 415 East Fourteenth Street. Gran had been one of the first tenants to move there in 1949. She and my grandfather moved to New Jersey when Mom was five, Jennie thought, but she moved back after my grandfather died. That was twenty years ago.
Filled with memories of the grandmother she had adored, Jenny didn’t notice when the light turned green. It’s almost as though I’m seeing her in the window, watching for me the way she did when I’d visit her, she reminisced. An impatient pedestrian brushed against her shoulder as he walked around her, and she realized the light was turning green again. She crossed the street and walked the short distance to the entrance of Gran’s building. There, with increasingly reluctant steps, she entered the security code, opened the door, walked to the elevator, got in, and pushed the button.