A Cold Case
Philip Gourevitch
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) $22
In A Cold Case, Philip Gourevitch once again finds himself conducting a riveting postmortem. Here he uses a familiar true crime plot (an incorruptible good-guy cop nearing retirement races against the clock to crack one last case, a 27-year-old double homicide) to get at something that transcends the exhausted genre.
True, A Cold Case is not as profound or far-reaching as Gourevitch’s searing examination of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, but this is not due to a decline in authorial engagement with the subject. Like his first book of nonfiction, A Cold Case is not simply reportage: Gourevitch’s excavation of a forgotten killing unearths a lost city–a discovery which shifts his focus from the act of murder to an examination of the protagonists and their milieu.
Gourevitch positions his inquiry on the blurred boundary between the criminal and the lawful, and does not concern himself with morals or the seeking of truths. It is, rather, a careful and engrossing attempt to conjure up an era through the voices of the scattered survivors. Gourevitch is a remarkable listener, and he’s clearly transfixed by the cop, the killer he catches midway through the book, and their graying cronies. He delights in their mannerisms, their often grisly stories, and the “adamant, shoving rhythms” of their speech. And his pugilistic prose takes on the cadences of these New Yorkers, aging relics of long-since-gentrified neighborhoods.
The murderer’s voice, Gourevitch writes in conclusion, “is so pure that it now sounds foreign in the very city it came from.” Indeed, the irremediable crime here is the death of the city that birthed and shaped the aging men associated with the forgotten murders.