Sunday, July 03, 2011

Best American Crime Reporting 2010

I've spent a lot of years falling for a few of these "Best American" annuals. The essays series edited by Robert Atwan was my go-to volume starting in the '80s, but at some point I finally noticed the predictably low ratio of good to bad, and the even lower ratio of stellar to good, not to mention that basically it's the same 30 or 40 names percolating through on a regular basis. The music series edited by Daphne Carr the past several years is generally worth dipping into, but dipping seems to be all I ever do. My old reliable has turned out to be this crime reporting series edited for about a decade now by Otto Penzler (proprietor of both the Mysterious Press and New York's Mysterious Bookshop, and editor of many another worthwhile project as well) and Thomas H. Cook. It's a familiar drill: Penzler and Cook bring in a name editor each year to help winnow down the final selections and write an introduction. In this case, because of the lead times involved and the nature of the material, each article also gets a "coda" to bring us up to date on the investigation and/or criminals and/or victims and/or issues we've been reading about. A good 80% of the stuff collected is very good or better, which is the kind of high ratio I like—but then, you have to be interested in the vaguely unseemly dynamics of true crime if that's going to work for you. As far as I'm concerned, they have all been pretty good so far.

This most recent volume's name editor is Stephen Dubner, who was not much of a name to me—a one-time staffer at the "New York Times Magazine." It kicks off with Calvin Trillin's winsome poetic punch from "The Nation" at Roman Polanski defenders ("Why make him into some Darth Vader / For sodomizing one eighth grader," etc.), then follows it up with a more serious Trillin piece on a case of disaffected murder in the upper Midwest. That reminded me again how good Trillin can be on crime, but you have to pick the work out of the potpourri of his catalog (Killings is the only one I know, and it's pretty good). A Jeffrey Toobin "New Yorker" piece here riffs on Polanski in a rumination (cum navel-gazer) on celebrities who get off easy, so you can imagine what the general preoccupation is that wraps around this collection like a haze. Not that it's particularly single-minded. There are interesting pieces about a sickeningly prolific serial killer who operated in post-Perestroika Moscow, a look at John Wilkes Booth, a rundown on a Seattle lowlife who racked up 112 convictions ("Not arrests, convictions," writer Rick Anderson is at pains to tell us: "94 misdemeanors and 18 felonies"). The latter is ultimately more an indictment of a justice system than a single man. There's a brief if easy excoriation here of Bernie Madoff and his antecedents, and a weird jape that the writer (Maximillian Potter) compares reasonably enough to a Coen brothers scenario, involving a buffalo skeleton marked up by scrimshaw scenes from the Bible. There's a sober recollection of Etan Patz, a six-year-old who disappeared in New York in 1979 and whose still unsolved case has forever changed the way missing kids cases are treated. Along the way, not just here but all through the series, "The New Yorker" is revealed as perhaps the single best source of true-crime literature that we have. But my favorite piece this time is from "Harper's." Written by Charles Bowden, a true-crime careerist, "The Sicario" is a very hard and unflinching look at what Mexico's drug trade is turning life into in Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso. It's horrifying, an extended interview with a hit man who claims to be trying to get out of the life, but of necessity is constantly looking over his shoulder. The piece is thick with the life-and-death paranoia by which people appear to be living and dying in that part of the world. If he's just telling stories, he's telling good ones. It has since been turned into a documentary, El sicario: Room 164, for which Bowden got a co-writing credit. I want to see it.

In case it's not at the library.

10 comments:

  1. brian.hullfish@gmail.com7:04 PM, October 18, 2011

    do you know why cook and penzler have not released best american crime reporting 2011? I must say, I miss the anthology....

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  2. That's a great question. I thought I remembered seeing it as a preorder at Amazon a few months ago but it's not there now.

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  3. Yes, where is it?

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  4. Asking myself the same question. I tracked down Otto Penzler's fan page on Facebook (not that easy to find), & it looks as if he's had a lot going on, so the 2011 "Best American Crime Reporting" may just be delayed. However, it's not listed with other similar series on the back of "Best American Mystery Stories 2011", so who can say? I left a query about "Crime Reporting" on Penzler's fan page: will post again if I get a response.

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  5. Thanks for this information, and yes, please keep us updated if you find out anything!

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  6. I got a response from Otto Penzler re my query as to the status of the "Best American Crime Reporting" series:

    "JC--Yup--Sorry to say the series was discontinued after nine years. But THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES continues in its 16th year, with Robert Crais as the Guest Editor for the 2012 edition, out in October. Thanks for your nice words. Otto"

    So there you have it. Does anyone know of a moderately comparable substitute--either books or website? I will really miss the series and am not aware of anything else like it: to me, the subject matter and writing quality & depth were really outstanding.

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  7. Thanks for this update. I am sorry to hear the news but at least now I know with certainty. I will miss this series too. It was the best collection of true-crime journalism from year to year that I knew for the past decade -- nothing else was close.

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  8. I am so disappointed to hear the Best American Crime Reporting series has been discontinued. I cannot imagine any other series being as good. I looked forward to it year after year. If anyone finds anything even close to it, please post it.

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  9. I'm very sorry to hear this series has been discontinued. I picked it up faithfully every September. I don't know a similar type of book but there are excellent crime writers at Texas Monthly magazine. The two ones I know of are Pamela Colloff and Skip Hollandsworth. You don't have to subscribe but just register and you can read back issues and even search by writer or subject matter. I saw them interviewed on 48 Hours Mystery a few times so I looked them up. They are both excellent writers but the stories are long and it has cost me a lot of paper to print them off!

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  10. Thanks for the info, sad to hear the series is discontinued. But I can offer some advice for those looking to fill that crime journalism appetite. Most of the selections from the series were taken from magazines like New York Mag, The New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, etc. Your local library should have most of these publications and an archive of past issues. Sounds like a lot of work, I know. But all you have to do is scan the covers since the feature stories are listed on the cover of each magazine. That's how I get my fix. I can tell you I've read quite a few of these that had me thinking "this definitely would have made it into the 2011 edition."

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