11 - True crime

Summary

Over forty-two years ago, Truman Capote wrote a bestselling book, In Cold Blood, and loudly proclaimed that he had invented a newart form. As Capote told George Plimpton in a long interview: “journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the 'nonfiction novel,'” and that “a crime, the study of one such, might provide the broad scope I needed to write the kind of book I wanted to write. Moreover, the human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.”

Whether or not Capote invented something called the “nonfiction novel,” he ushered in the serious, extensive, non-fiction treatment of murder. In the years since In Cold Blood appeared, the genre of true crime regularly appears on the bestseller list. It is related to crime fiction, certainly - but it might equally well be grouped with documentary or read alongside romance fiction. And while its readers have a deep engagement with the genre that is very different from the engagement of readers of crime fiction, its writers are often forced to occupy a position - in relation to victims, criminals and police - that is complex and contradictory. In this essay I will be tracing the history and development of this hybrid genre, as well as examining some of the tensions - between reader, writer, criminal and cops - that are at its heart.

In Cold Blood made reading about gory crime - in this case, the random murder of a farm family in Holcomb, Kansas - respectable. Moreover, despite its French epigraph it insisted on the Americanness of the victims - and the killers. It ushered in a theme which has since been richly mined by true crime authors: that violent crime is an act that can fundamentally reshape a community and create or lay bare the unspoken fears between members of that community.