criminal complaints make for fascinating reading

If you go to the Boston Globe website, HERE, you can actually download (towards the upper left of the page) a PDF containing the 11-page federal criminal complaint against the surviving alleged Marathon bomber. I always find these documents fascinating, in part because they spell out in explicit prose numerous background facts that normally go without saying. For instance:

“In the area near the finish line, businesses are located on both sides of Boylston Street, including restaurants, a department store, a hotel, and various retail stores.”

What’s so fascinating about this? I suppose it’s that due to the necessity of relative completeness in describing the facts surrounding a crime, the author (an FBI agent, in this case) has to adopt the pretense of addressing people who know nothing at all about the situation, even though we all know an awful lot about it already. And in that sense, a contemporary author is forced to write like a historian more than like a contemporary.

The 9/11 Commission Report was fascinating reading for much the same reason. While there were a fair number of facts in that report that were news, it was mostly a clinical summary of things pretty much any human alive on that date who paid some attention to the news already knew. By now we may have forgotten enough about the events of 2001 that there might be a historical value in that report, but at the time it was simply a summary of the obvious, but written in the tone of a history for newcomers.