JUDGING CRIMES

These and other adjectives - I keep the best ones in the back room for my best customers - are available to any publisher who cares to send me a review copy of a good book.  Putnam/Penguin/Perigree/Plume/Portfoilio was the first to take advantage of this offer - indeed, one might even say the acceptance preceded the offer - by sending me a copy of Kevin Flynn's Relentless Pursuit: A True Story of Family, Murder, and the Prosecutor Who Wouldn't Quit.

It's the kind of subtitle that makes you feel empathy for the author.  I mean, you spend years working on this book, you put yourself through the ritual humiliations of finding an agent and publisher, you get lucky, you even get  the big publicity push - even bloggers, by gum! - and .... your publisher insists on a subtitle like that.  No wonder Flynn looks like a depressed Calvin Trillin in his author's photo.

Family is important.  Murder is even more important.  But - drumroll, please - most important of all: this government employee didn't quit!  He's hanging on until retirement!!  Then he'll be out of there like a shot!!!

Janet Maslin, reviewing the book in the New York Times, trying to sound like a TV actor addressing a jury of extras, writes: "And what happens when a federal prosecutor tries to make his biggest criminal case sound like the work of a dramatist? Ladies and gentlemen, a lot can go wrong. The prosecutor may embrace all known crime clichés without using them to attain clarity."

Without using them to attain clarity?  Does Janet Maslin think you can use cliches to attain clarity?  Apparently so, because she proceeds to show Flynn how it's done: "What he does have is a case so open and shut that rendering it suspenseful is a Herculean feat."  That's three cliches in 19 words.  Top that, you JD-wielding novice!

It was not, in fact, an open and shut case.  Flynn (at least in his telling) came within an eyelash of losing it at the suppression hearing (though he would have had a good pretrial appeal).  The circumstantial evidence was fairly strong but far from conclusive, and the theory of motive was extremely weak. 

The victim's friends who emerged after the murders to "remember" hearing threats by someone they had long disliked would not, perhaps, have struck a jury as quite as credible as they apparently struck Ms. Maslin.  One theory of human behavior says that people plotting bad deeds usually don't first detail their plans to their enemies.  (But maybe it's different at the Times.  Was anyone in the newsroom surprised by Judith Miller?)

What got me about Maslin's slam, though, was her confusion about the concepts of "fiction" and "non-fiction."  Criticizing a murder for embodying "crime cliches" is -  Put it this way.  It's appropriate to the times we're living in.  One of the victims was murdered next to a box of diapers, which Flynn knows from the crime scene photos.  Maslin thinks that's a cheap symbol. 

And she concludes: "'Relentless Pursuit' claims to offer a glimpse into the way prosecutors work ... What it captures more accurately is the way writers work when trying to package real life as drama and give it more weight than it actually has."  But - you don't mind my talking about the book as if it were non-fiction, do you? - it does offer a glimpse into the way prosecutors work.   It captures the experience pretty exactly.  (Even though Flynn is a fed - in D.C. they do real crime, not just drugs and immigration.) 

And - at the risk of exposing my hick roots here - there's a part of me that thinks that murder trials are dramatic.  And that murdering two people, and putting a third in prison for life, are things that have a certain inherent weight.  Of course, I don't mean to compare those things to an "aging heavy-metal star buy[ing] a haunted suit over the Internet."

An insight into Maslin's failure of imagination is offered by her sneer at Flynn's "contrived efforts to be close to the [victims'] family."  Flynn was extremely close to the victims, and through them to their family.  He learned a lot about the victims' lives - and everything about their deaths, including a great deal more than their relatives would ever want to know.  Their deaths dominated his professional life for a year or more.

The most impressive thing about the book is the way in which it captures the prosecutor's intense relationship  with the dead, the sense of personal responsibility far beyond professional duty.  I know a prosecutor who has on her office wall a framed photograph of a baby.  Not her baby, but a baby who was killed by her own parents and uncle.  And since the family didn't care enough to take any photos of their baby during her five months of life, it's actually an autopsy photo.  But a retouched autopsy photo, with the bruises photoshopped away.  

(After this was first posted, a prosecutor told me he that when he visited two murder victims in the graveyard - also a mother and child - and saw that the family could only afford small plaques laid in the ground, he paid for proper granite headstones.  It's not exactly a personal relationship, but it's a close one.)

It's perhaps not really surprising that Maslin, in her book-lined cocoon of privilege, is unable to understand what Flynn is writing about.  But too bad that she's so nasty in her ignorance.  The Washington Post's reviewer was prepared to read the book as it is, rather than the novel it isn't, and gets a lot closer to its essence.

Did I mention that the book reads like a combination of Scott Turow and Alan Dershowitz, kept me reading far into the night, you won't be able to put it down, it's a roller-coaster - no, a Zipper! - of an emotional ride.  Four stars!  Two enthusiastic thumbs up!  Don't miss it!  You will never be the same.  But in a good way.