Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [0]
Edited by
MARK BOWDEN
Series Editors
OTTO PENZLER AND
THOMAS H. COOK
Contents
Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook | Preface
Mark Bowden | Introduction
John Heilemann | THE CHOIRBOY
Jimmy Breslin | THE END OF THE MOB
Mark Jacobson | THE $2,000-AN-HOUR WOMAN
Skip Hollandsworth | THE LAST RIDE OF COWBOY BOB
Jeffrey Toobin | KILLER INSTINCTS
Robert Nelson | ALTAR EGO
S.C. Gwynne | DR. EVIL
Paige Williams | HOW TO LOSE $100,000,000
Mary Battiata | BLOOD FEUD
Howard Blum and John Connolly | HIT MEN IN BLUE?
Richard Rubin | THE GHOSTS OF EMMETT TILL
Chuck Hustmyre | BLUE ON BLUE
Devin Friedman | OPERATION STEALING SADDAM’S MONEY
Denise Grollmus | SEX THIEF
Deanne Stillman | THE GREAT MOJAVE MANHUNT
Permissions
About the Editors
The Best American Crime Writing Series
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
IN THE LATE DARCY O’BRIEN’S brilliant study of the Hillside Stranglers, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi revel in the grim fantasy of a girl reared from birth exclusively for their pleasure. They watch and wait until the moment of flowering is reached, then rape and murder her. She is not a human being, but a plant grown for one dark harvest, then cut down.
Nothing in the history of crime writing more deeply illustrated the banal and commonplace source of criminal acts, that they are rooted in simple selfishness.
This year’s edition of The Best American Crime Writing amply demonstrates the irreducible and uncomplicated truth so powerfully rendered by Darcy O’Brien. From the comic to the macabre, bumbling criminals to cunning ones, it is selfishness that rules the day. The continuum runs from narcissism to solipsism, the antisocial to the sociopathic, the Me who must go first to the Me besides whom there is no other.
This is not to say that things never get complicated, for as with Medusa’s head, odd and coiling things may spring from a single source.
ONE OF THEM IS MONEY. It is Saddam Hussein’s money that provides the irresistible temptation in Devin Friedman’s story of G.I. Joe corruption, while in Skip Hollandsworth’s tale, it is the mere proximity of banks, along with an unlikely disguise, that beckons Cowboy Bob to “her” last ride. Howard Blum and John Connolly’s “Hit Men in Blue?” suggests how wickedly money can be gained. Paige Williams’s “How to Lose $100,000,000” demonstrates just how quickly it can be lost. Money is also the issue in Mary Battiata’s riveting study of how little of it, when in dispute, can generate a murder.
Sex is predictably the issue at hand in other tales. How much it sometimes costs is the cautionary lesson learned in Mark Jacobson’s “$2,000-an-Hour Woman.” But, again, it is selfishness that provides the dark core of sexual crime. Escaping the consequences of that selfishness is the central focus of Denise Grollmus’s “Sex Thief,” and Robert Nelson’s “Altar Ego.” The failure to escape it forms the narrative thrust of John Heilemann’s “The Choirboy,” a heartrending tale of justice delayed…but not forever.
Escape also provides the thematic center of Richard Rubin’s “Ghosts of Emmett Till,” an escape that is offered, in this case, by society itself, time and conscience the only arbiters of how effective it will be. In S.C. Gwynne’s “Dr. Evil,” it is an honored profession’s ineffective self-regulation that opens the escape hatch to a criminally incompetent doctor, horrendously botched surgery evidently still no reason to snatch the scalpel from his hand. In Chuck Hustmyre’s “Blue on Blue,” it is, at least briefly, the blind flash of a badge that provides a hiding place for a murderous cop, while in Deanne Stillman’s riveting “The Great Mojave Manhunt,” it is the desert waste that offers up concealment—nature, as always, indifferent to the kind of man it hides.
AND, OF COURSE, there are always those who don’t escape at all, as Jimmy Breslin illustrates to such comic effect in “The End of the Mob.”
These then are the stories in this year’s edition of The Best American Crime Writing, tales by turns harrowing