So I just started the 2007 Best American Short Stories (edited by Stephen King, series editor: Heidi Pitlor). His introduction (reproduced here) is great. Nice start. I figure he's got to be at least as non-genre-snobby as Michael Chabon, who edited the 2005 edition and put a Dennis Lehane story front and center.

So I flip back and skim the table of contents. The stories are from The Yale Review, Fiction, Boulevard, The Paris Review, West Branch, The Hudson Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review...aha!--there's Fantasy and Science Fiction... and then it goes on again with The New Yorker, Subtropics, Granta, Harpers, and Ploughshares (again).

No crime fiction magazines. But F&SF's there, so at least he's reading genre fiction. I guess there weren't any crime stories this year that quite made his cut. Fair enough.

So I flip to the back and look through the 100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2006.

Same magazines, plus Zoetrope and Glimmer Train, and a few others like that. McSweeney's. Harper's.

Not a single crime fiction magazine.

No Ellery Queen's. No Alfred Hitchcock's. Nothing.

So now I'm starting to wonder what's up.

So I look in the back at Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories, and EQMM isn't listed. Hitchcock's is, but that's it.

Did the guy the Mystery Writers of American awarded the title of Grandmaster to this year not read any crime stories when he was editing BASS?

Or did he think not a single one of the crime stories published in 2006 deserved to be in the top 100?

Or...what?