Best American Crime Writing : 2004 Edition, edited by Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook. Pantheon. 521 pages. $29.95.
Crime is a personal business, and so are writing and reading about it. An ace crime writer gets too involved in his work and takes you with him; in the process, he reminds you of both your vulnerability and your mortality.
So, anyway, are my thoughts after reading the latest anthology from Penzler and Cook. It covers a broad range of turf from both sides of the aisle, cop and criminal, and a number of them pull you right into the heart of the writer's own private obsessions.
Take James Ellroy. Riffing away in his trademark staccato style, he gives us the story of Stephanie, a straight-arrow middle-class teenager whose body is discovered one bright day in August, 1965, leaving behind no motive and no suspect. Nearly 40 years later, as the cold trail suddenly heats up again, Ellroy finds himself getting closer to her as he gets close to the case: "Stephanie was a daughter or a prom date. I don't know her. I can feel her. She's twirling. She's showing off her prom gown. I can smell her corsage."
In Sabrina Rubin Erdely's "Who is the Boy in the Box?" an aging detective is similarly haunted by a frustrating case involving the murder of a child from decades before. Cecilia Ball's "Ciudad de la Muerte" takes us to a desert in Northern Mexico that has become a dumping ground for the maimed corpses of poor young Hispanic women who fell into the hands of the mob. Ball can't help but relate; if she lived here, she might end up the same way.
In the single best piece here, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recounts the recent trial and conviction of his cousin Michael Skakel for the 1975 slaying of Martha Moxley. Kennedy sees Skakel as the innocent victim of a media circus led by Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne and his partner Mark Fuhrman, who helped revive the unsolved murder by depicting the local authorities as fraidy-cats who wouldn't dare go up against the Kennedys. Kennedy has an ax to grind, alright, but he delivers a compelling defense that is surprisingly not defensive. It's passionate and thoughtful, and it made an at least nominal believer out of me.
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