It’s not his craft and skill that Michael Marshall Smith displays in his short stories that I object to. It’s not the easy wit, or the comfortable way he deploys language as a weapon. It’s not even that way that he can conjure people so real in so few words. It’s that, when a Mike Smith short story is over, it’s pretty much guaranteed that there will be some moment, scene, or revelation frozen in the back of my mind that I’ll never be able to get out of my head, not even if I scrub it with wire wool so it bleeds.