Best American Crime Writing 2003

The second volume of the late lamented annual series of true-crime writing is heavily shadowed by 9/11—inevitably two of the pieces here include the word "terrorist" in their titles and at least as many more concern themselves with various crimes of foreign policy. That's interesting too, certainly in the pieces found here, as are other topical pieces, such as Marie Brenner's longish "The Enron Wars," originally from "Vanity Fair." John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, provides the introduction (no editing input, evidently), using the platform to criticize some of the excesses of the so-called USA Patriot and Homeland Security legislation, a welcome view then and something of a brave one too. So hear-hear, huzzah, and bravo to him. Nevertheless, the pieces I tend to like best as usual are more concerned with the mundane eccentricities and perversions of everyday life. For example, "The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared" by Skip Hollandsworth (a very good writer who appears in this series frequently), which is about a woman in her 30s who has spent much of her adult life impersonating high schoolers. "The Bully of Toulon" by Robert Kurson charts the tragic ending of decades of simmering tensions in a small Midwestern town. "My Undertaker, My Pimp" by Jay Kirk from "Harper's" details unexpected corruption in an unusual place; Kirk never particularly seems to feel he is writing about crime, a surprisingly fresh point of view in the context. My favorite in this volume is a straightforward piece of documentary journalism, profiling an ongoing development in forensic science. "The Body Farm" by Maximillian Potter (from "GQ"!) is about "a two-acre patch of Tennessee woods that is surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence topped with razor wire." Here, bodies that have been donated to the scientific cause are strewn about with deceptive casualness—partly buried, buried in shallow graves, lying on the ground, sitting up against tree trunks, tied to trees. They have been left to decompose and researchers are there to chart it with care. Determining time of death is often critical for homicide investigators and these ongoing experiments contribute to that knowledge, and so here we are, with these sudden fever visions of a carnival hellhouse scenario, rotting corpses scattering the woods willy-nilly and the woods taking back its own. This has also been covered on true-crime TV now, but the most vivid descriptions of it, which haunt me still, are in the Potter piece here. And, as usual, everything else here is pretty good too.

In case it's not at the library.