I defy you to find a better literary value out right now than the late Ed McBain-edited anthology TRANSGRESSIONS, which offers 10 new short novels in one, letting writers do whatever they want as long as there’s at least a loose connection to crime or suspense. With the exception of Anne Perry’s politically charged hostage tale, this collection is world-class all the way.
Donald E. Westlake provides a humorous heist of foreign currency, McBain himself dishes out an 87th Precinct investigation into murdered Muslim cabbies, Stephen King gets serious with a post-9/11 tale of being haunted by “The Things They Left Behind,” Jeffery Deaver plants a police statistican in the middle of an unusual string of elderly suicides (one hopes this character soon spins off into his own novel) and Lawrence Block’s hitman contemplates retirement while also figuring out how to kill an aging golfer.
Two novellas stick out as the cream of the crop, however. One is Sharyn McCrumb’s “The Resurrection Man,” a 19th-century story about a freed slave who works for a medical college, where his job is retrieving fresh corpses from the graveyard for study. The other, and really on a higher plane than everyone else, is Joyce Carol Oates’ disturbing and uniquely told “The Corn Maiden,” about a group of young girls who kidnap a fellow student with learning disabilities and hold her against her will in their basement, prepping her for sacrifice.
All in all, a strong contender for the year’s best anthology. With McBain’s recent passing, it’s a damn shame he won’t be around to follow this up with another volume.
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