Tod sat down with crime novelist Steph Cha to talk about Best American Mysteries & Suspense:

None of the stories in this anthology feature a cop or a detective as the main character. Do you think this reflects taste or culture? Or merely that form, in this case, dictates some of the content: it’s easier to write about doing a crime than solving a crime in the short space of a story?
You’re going to get me in trouble for being anti-blue, but yeah, this is in part a reflection of my taste. The other part of it, though, is that I do think it’s harder to pull off a satisfying short story with a traditional mystery engine than it is a novel, where you have more room for experimentation and detail. I certainly enjoy a good, thoughtful police procedural, and I made my bones writing PI fiction, but the detective narrative requires so much that when you’re only dealing with a few thousand words, it has a tendency to push out the extraneous bits, where a lot of the best stuff happens in longer works. That said, I really admire a short, contained mystery that’s both well executed and interesting, so it’s only a matter of time before the right one makes it through.