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Book of the Year

Recently, I sat with an acquaintance and discussed books of the year. My acquaintance is rather proper and politically-minded, so he went on and on about Tayari Jones and Roxane Gay, and I imagine it felt good and virtuous to describe these well-respected writers and their widely-lauded works.

My choice, though, for book of the year was something far more lurid. It was "I'll Be Gone in the Dark," by Michelle McNamara.

I continued to think about it over the weekend. Indeed, how could anyone stop thinking about it? Certain details are etched permanently in my mind. The way the killer would stick a teacup on top of a victim's heaving chest; he would say, "If you make a sound, if that cup moves an inch, everything will fall and crack. If I hear a crack, you are dead." So then, basically, the person couldn't breathe.

The way the killer actually went to a town hall meeting and heard someone complain about him--then sought out and targeted this understandably enraged and desperate citizen in his own home.

The way--for years--cops had almost nothing to go on, except a scrap of paper that had one noun printed in creepily uneven handwriting. The noun was something like: "Retribution"--! Or "Punishment"--!

How the killer would have long, long periods between entry and attack; people would report hearing him sitting in a corner, sobbing, making reference to his mother in a high-pitched voice.

How you couldn't use a site like Ancestry.com to find the killer; there were privacy issues. When McNamara died, she was still banging her head against a wall over this very issue. Then, when the actual killer was discovered, it was in fact through a site like Ancestry.com.

There are some problems with true crime--as a genre. One is that--beyond their occasional crazy and destructive actions--killers tend to be sort of boring. You see this in fiction, don't you? Who really wanted to spend time with Jamie Dornan's character in "The Fall," after approximately the first thirty minutes in the series? I'm sorry to say I feel this way whenever I pick up a Val McDermid novel; you have the crazed killer who pops up every three chapters, and you have to spend time in his head, and, guess what, that head is claustrophobic and pitiable. A certain level of predictability sets in. I'm much more interested in the McDermid chapters that deal with office politics--the striving-and-jockeying that occurs among the various inspectors. Office politics: A well that never runs dry.

That said, "I'll Be Gone in the Dark" gets around the boring-killer-mind problem. I guess it does that by never revealing who the killer is. (McNamara died before finding out.) Without that essential piece of the puzzle, the killer is a bit like Mona Lisa; he has that bizarre enigmatic half-smile. You look, and look, and you can't reach the bottom of the mystery. (I wonder if this particular sensation has changed/diminished--during reading sessions--now that we all (minus McNamara) know who the Golden State Killer is.)

If you're left to wonder, and wonder, then you can become obsessed. You might, like McNamara, begin to think a great deal about young track stars from California in the seventies--simply because a victim once mentioned the Golden State Killer's notable calves. You might wonder, and wonder, and wonder, and wonder about a certain cuff link, whose initials match an important set of cuff links, which may or may not have been real, which may or may not have been spotted on the Killer one evening.

McNamara is like Javert going after Jean Valjean (except, of course, she is a *good* version of Javert, a commendable version of Javert). While telling her story, McNamara of course gives us a self-portrait, and it turns out that portrait is just as compelling as the Mona Lisa thing. That's because you'd have to be sort of nutty/extraordinary to give up most of your professional life to the (amateur) pursuit of a deranged killer. McNamara shows us herself, warts and all; she catalogues the people who bluntly doubted her writing talent; she lists the special occasions she missed because of her obsession. She's unsparing. You fall in love with her.

If I've sold you on this book, let me recommend a few other true crime masterworks, as well. It seems to me that Toobin's "The Run of His Life" falls into this category. (Toobin's intelligence and his self-assured voice are simply national treasures. And though it's a cliche to say a work of non-fiction is stranger than fiction, it's of course true of "Run of His Life," which gives us Faye and her Brentwood Hellos, OJ and his SEAL-team murder tactics, Marcia Clark and her national-lightning-rod haircut.) I'd also recommend "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"; even if you doubt Janet Malcolm's skepticism, even if it seems pretty damn clear that the woman at the center of the mystery hired a dude to off her ex-husband. Beyond the details of the case, there is, once again, the joy of a supremely intelligent narrating mind. Malcolm could make the phone book seem interesting. Ditto for Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murderer."

A friend of mine doesn't enjoy spending time with true crime: Why probe the depths of human depravity? Why not read about, say, the history of comedy, or the triumphs of the Wright Brothers? But my heart belongs to the weirdos. There's something deliciously contrarian about anyone who would say, "I'm going to spend my beach vacation in a seven-hundred-page nightmare epic about the Manson murders." My heart is always with the contrarian. My heart is with the lunatic and his notepad, researching cuff links, hoping to unmask killers, savoring wretched, horrid stories about wavering tea cups.

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