Best American Crime Writing 2004

It seems apparent now that this series is over—no 2011 edition, no word on it anywhere that I can find, no response from a query I sent to the publisher. Thus, R.I.P. to one of my favorite runs of these ubiquitous "Best American" annual issues, and on to the first three volumes in my backward-facing consideration, where we find, perhaps not surprisingly, some of the very best stuff. The editorial team is, after all, putting its collective best foot forward, in a time bracketed by the coming of DNA-based forensics and the O.J. Simpson case on one end and the various disasters of the Bush/Cheney administration such as Iraq and Katrina on the other, when appetites for true-crime tales, forensic science, and reality television, in retrospect, achieved some kind of peak, such that giant forensics-based fictional TV show franchises, even entire cable channels, could be devoted to the themes of murder and mayhem and justice. It's still going today with the Investigation Discovery channel, but the energy seemed to go on the wane when Court TV transmuted into the trash-standard TruTV. I worry the ID channel is going a similar way in slow motion. On the other hand, there is always a taste for true crime, as disreputable and slumming as it can feel, or be, so not to worry. Meanwhile, behold the 2004 edition: Joseph Wambaugh, a literary lion of the genre, supplies the Introduction (albeit unfortunately using it to saw away on an evident hobbyhorse of tort reform). The book runs to over 500 pages (after this it would fall from then on to the standard 300 most of these annuals come in at). And it includes work by James Ellroy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jon Krakauer, and Scott Turow. As always, the cases range far and wide, transcending the usual contours of true crime as in Mark Bowden's fascinating takedown of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" from "The Atlantic Monthly," "The Dark Art of Interrogation." But it also drives reliably right into the heart of what people love about the genre, plain bad actors in the dark rainy woods of everyday lives and people. A nice example here is Sabrina Rubin Erdely's "Who Is the Boy in the Box?" from "Philadelphia" magazine, which details the case of a young boy, between four and six years old, whose nude body was found wrapped in a blanket in the woods of a Philadelphia suburb in 1957. The case made a sensation at the time, but the boy has never been identified and the case never solved. Cold cases, of course, are now a reliable staple of true crime, largely because of the giant advances still being made in forensics technologies and the many cases subsequently solved. But they don't all get solved and many still remain a mystery. If the end of this series is currently a mystery too the quality of its volumes is not. This is one of the best.

In case it's not at the library.