The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [1]
Only material first published in the 2009 calendar year is eligible. All submissions must be received no later than December 31, 2009. Anything received after that date will not be read. This is neither arrogant nor capricious. The timely nature of the book forces very tight deadlines that cannot be met if we receive articles later than that. The earlier material is received, the more favorable will be the light in which it is perused.
Please send submissions to: Otto Penzler, The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, New York, 10007. Regretfully, no material can be returned. If you don’t trust the postal service to actually deliver your submission, please enclose a self-addressed stamped postcard.
Thank you,
Otto Penzler and
Thomas H. Cook
New York, March 2009
Introduction
IF ALL THESE CRIMES are so terrible, why do I feel so good?
It’s not all murder in these pages—there is a little fraud, robbery, and even (honest!) shoplifting—but most of the stories feature untimely demise, delivered by force. Some of the bodies are floating (an advertising executive in a river in Poland and a hedge fund manager in a pool near Palm Beach); some of them are mutilated (the victims of Mexican drug gangs and the corpses at a Philadelphia funeral home, sold to the transplant industry for parts); most are obscure (the victims of a Somali gang war in, of all places, Minnesota, and a loudmouthed punk on Long Island). One is very, very famous (JFK).
Still, these stories are the unlikely vectors of good cheer because, simply, they are so fascinating and so well told. These are good days for crime (most days are), but they are also rough days for journalism, especially for publications that tell stories at some length. Newspapers and magazines are going bust or shrinking, and so, it is said, are attention spans. But these stories show that narrative journalism—a fancy term for story telling, nonfiction division—is alive and well.
Notice that verb: show. As in the most venerable, and still the most useful, advice given to writers: show, don’t tell. There is a wonderful moment in Hanna Rosin’s “American Murder Mystery” that brings home the meaning of that well-worn phrase. To be honest, the subject matter of Rosin’s story could sound a little dry. She is exploring whether the decision to close down high-rise housing projects for the poor and move their residents to suburban neighborhoods—a practice that was broadly supported across the political spectrum—was in fact good public policy. Rosin tells the story through a pair of husband-and-wife researchers in Memphis; by coincidence, he studies crime and she studies housing. One day, he decided to plot his violent crime statistics (in blue) over her poor people (in red). “All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire,” Rosin writes. “The rest of the city has almost no dots.” Aha, says the reader, sharing the moment of recognition.
It’s great reporting, which is the constant throughout these varied stories. In “The Zankou Chicken Murders,” Mark Arax recounts how Mardiros Iskenderian built a small empire of fast-food chicken restaurants in and around Los Angeles. There is family strife, and ultimately murder, but the key to the story for me was how delicious the food sounded. “How did they make the chicken so tender and juicy?” Arax asks. “The answer was a simple rub of salt and not trusting the rotisserie to do all the work but raising and lowering the heat and shifting each bird as it cooked. What made the garlic paste so fluffy and white and piercing? That was a secret the family intended to keep.” You could tell this story without dwelling on the food; a narrow-minded writer (or editor) could see it as extraneous to the crime story. But it’s not too much of a jump to see how the family’s passion in the kitchen turned into rage of another kind—at each other. Here,