If we are, as so many people with an opinion would have us believe, in the midst of a resurgence of interest in true crime, it’s largely a question of packaging.
The podcast Serial, now in its second season, was the offspring of the long-running radio program This American Life, a veritable audio staple of upper-middle-class white American households. The Jinx, Andrew Jarecki’s multi-episode documentary on the alleged crimes of real estate millionaire Robert Durst, aired on HBO. Making A Murderer, the newest true-crime cultural sensation, unspooled its 10-part narrative on Netflix. And Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside, one of the most acclaimed books of 2015, brings the reader into policing life in a poor Los Angeles neighborhood as part of larger commentary on race, justice, and society.
Public radio, high-end cable and streaming, and narrative nonfiction? This all seems worlds removed from mass market paperback covers with dripping fonts, Nancy Grace’s nightly news finger-wagging, salacious headlines, and barely fictionalized films on basic cable channels like Lifetime or Investigation: Discovery.
Nonetheless, all these types of crime coverage derive from the same recurring impulse. As Harold Schechter wrote in the introduction to the Library of America’s True Crime anthology: “The appetite for tales of real-life murder, the more horrific the better, has been a perennial feature of human society.”
Why that’s so is an easy question to answer: the shock of murder creates a schism between order and chaos.
We wish for justice but even when we get it, the result rings somewhat hollow. We gorge on facts and innuendo but are then left with the hangover of trauma, the aftermath of a system that too often fails people. We crave a narrative that restores righteousness, but are left with scraps of barely connected meaning.
More interesting is how, as Schechter wrote, that appetite for crime is perennial.
In the US, it stretched as far back as Cotton Mather’s execution sermons, which featured a type of sanctimony perfect for Puritan times and, stripped of 17th century linguistic colloquialisms, still relevant for today’s moral hypocrites.
Benjamin Franklin’s pithy The Murder of a Daughter, published in 1734 in the Pennsylvania Gazette when he was a young reporter, seems to betray the future inventor of electricity’s horror at the crime: “For that they had not only acted contrary to the particular Laws of all Nations, but had even broken the Universal Laws of Nature.”
Murder as titillation truly flowered in the 19th century, as the proliferation of newspapers demanded more outrageous stories and headlines. How could they not, when executions were essentially cheap (if not free) live theater, with newspaper copy and penny dreadfuls stoking the imaginations of readers and voyeurs – and too often both at the same time?
Jack the Ripper was perfect for his time, not only because that type of serial sexual sadistic killer had hardly been foreshadowed before, but also because the case vivisected the stifling decorum made mandatory by the Victorian era. Could one truly respect elaborate rules of mourning when a killer threatened to strike again, taunting the media in the process?
Titillation certainly carried the day as the century changed – I think of the still-unsolved 1922 murders of Edward Hall and his lover Eleanor Mills, the crime scene ransacked by scoop-seeking journalists and memorabilia-hungering spectators – but the writing quality of true crime stories moved several steps forward from yellow journalism.
Novelists like Edna Ferber and Theodore Dreiser covered trials. Dorothy Kilgallen peppered her columns as much with crime stories as she did with celebrity (before dying in mysterious circumstances of her own). The New Yorker started its recurring Annals of Crime feature. And Edward Pearson’s 1924 collection of true crime journalism, Studies in Murder, attracted positive critical and commercial attention, as did the work of the Scottish solicitor and crime historian William Roughead.
The high-low double track is most blatant with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Capote, after all, began reporting the Clutter murders in Holcomb, Kansas, because, like all true crime chroniclers, he knew the story would sell. That it would be to New Yorker readers instead of, say, Confidential readers had more to do with Capote’s perception of himself and his own ambitions than whether the story demanded something more.
Capote’s book isn’t necessarily better than those by mid-century practitioners like Lenore Glen Offord, Joseph Henry Jackson and Edward Radin, some of whom contributed well-written chronicles to Fawcett Gold Medal’s true crime line a decade earlier. But those books had Gold Medal’s signature provocative artwork, which worked as bait-and-switch: look at the sexy girls first, read a good book next.
The cover of In Cold Blood, on the other hand, save the black letters of the title and the red letters of Capote’s name, was as spare in presentation as the New Yorker issues that ran the original serialized version months prior.
Highbrow trappings may have elevated praise for In Cold Blood but they hardly shook off criticism, such as Renata Adler (early in her decades-long tenure as a New Yorker staff writer) excoriating the book’s “lurid and sensationalistic” tone, which struck her as “meaningless and false”. (Adler would also tell the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, the story was “everything the New Yorker despises”.)
The success of In Cold Blood formalized true crime’s split into parallel tracks. One fit Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision, Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, James Fox’s White Shadow, and Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line.
The other satisfied the desires of those who wanted a similar book/film/TV feel to the in-your-face newspaper and cable news stories. (Rule, in fact, had the best knack for this, having cut her teeth writing pseudonymously for pulp magazines like True Detective earlier in her career.)
The writer who understood true crime’s dichotomy best, and most successfully moved between both spheres, was Dominick Dunne. Perhaps it was his concentration on writing about the rich and the powerful. Perhaps it was his innate sense of moral outrage, cauterized by the murder of his daughter Dominique and the light sentence – and by extension, inadequate justice – her killer received. Maybe it was his own knack for knowing and sharing gossip.
And yet, even if Dunne (who died in 2009) were still alive, I’m not certain he would best understand true crime’s current moment.
This moment is less about high or low culture, snobbishness or populism, but about interaction.
A book or a documentary or a podcast is now seen as the continuation, even the beginning, of a crime story, not the end. Investigation is taken up by internet sleuths, or new information comes to light that spurs court proceedings. The dichotomy of true crime is now between observer and participant. It’s no longer enough to be horrified or morally outraged. Now, it seems, the perennial fascination that is murder has the power to make us act, even if our actions are futile.
