Opening Shots: Favorite Mystery and Crime Writers Share Their First Published Stories »

Opening Shots humanizes legendary writers and revisits the cutting-edge work from which raw talents broke through in bold and sometimes experimental fashion. Joan Hess's "Death of a Romance Writer" offers a nifty and humorous literary twist - an inside joke - that Hess describes as " a dollop of revenge for all the abused heroines of romantic fiction." But there's nothing funny about James Sallis's "Jim and Mary G," a disturbing story with a sad conclusion that can be interpreted in more than one way, or on several levels, simultaneously."

Between its wide variety of stories and styles and its candid personal reflections from the authors themselves,