A Defense of Amateur Sleuthing

After “Why True Crime Calls to Women,”
Megan Abbott, Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2018

What frightens fear off most is fascination.
The late crime author, quoted Sunday in the Times,
talks about her first taste: the slivered broken Walkman

a victim dropped by her childhood home. The obsession
(she calls it as much in her book’s tagline)
started then: a scraping of clues, a self-invitation

to be witness, sleuth, even weapon — a woman,
the article nods, may be all three at a time.
Two years after her death, an investigation

caught the killer she’d tracked, an illumination
she’d begged from her readers. She even pined
for the masked man to read her, an intimation

she echoed on reading tours, TV stations,
mass-produced covers — no fear in a byline.
The story met its end without the resolution

that we might have braced for. DNA testing,
not the words she wrote, finally cued the sirens;
natural causes had felled her. This Sunday’s edition

asks the same as each day’s news, the question
in the offing but rarely asked: never why
but how, how close we come to the passions

we know are fierce enough to end us. Her mission
was staring down, smoking out, a proposition signed
with her name, show us your face the summons

she sent and resent. Did she pile on cautions
as the presses rolled, or not? A taut stick to slide
in the glass door cavity, more attention given

to the password he might crack? Her vindication
is the photo on page 8, the sagging and lined
face over an orange suit, a past left to reckon.
Fear loses, for now. We read on with fascination.