In the weeks leading up to the Edgar Awards ceremony, I’ll be reading and and reviewing the six books nominated for the “Fact Crime” category. This is the second installment; you can read the first two here and here.
Full confession: This is not the newsletter I expected to write. When I heard Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders got the Edgar nom over Mandy Matney’s Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty, I made an immediate plan to read them both, with the expectation that I would write a blistering takedown of the sexism and good ol’ boy network that overlooked the work of a local female journalist who is largely responsible for breaking the earliest Murdaugh stories for an established male true crime writer. Then I actually read them both. And even though the above statement is factually true, I realized I couldn’t write that post.
The reality of it is a little more complicated. John Glatt has written just about thirty true crime books, boasting inauspicious titles like One Deadly Night and Cradle of Death. That being said, Tangled Vines is largely inoffensive.1 For anyone unfamiliar with the timeline and broad strokes of the Murdaugh family’s history of, as the subtitle puts it, power and privilege in South Carolina, the history portions of the book are solid. Glatt also gives a readable account of Murdaugh sons Paul and Buster’s alleged crimes, as well as the drug addiction and staggering financial nefariousness that presumably led Alex to first stage an attempt on his life, and then murder Paul and his wife Maggie.2 His account of the trial is thorough if not particularly gripping. No risks are taken with form or content.
Now that being said, Glatt’s outsider status shows at times. He includes phonetic spellings of names that read as crude and unnecessary attempts to capture one strain of South Carolina accent,3 and rather adorably refers to Gamecock football games as “matches.” His editorializing asides come across as a bit smarmy, which is one thing when you’re commenting on the physical appearance of someone as ethically repellant as Alex Murdaugh, and quite another when you casually deem sex work “a tawdry business.”
Glatt’s account carefully traces the way Murdaugh’s family history was steadily and unlawfully leveraged to protect the Murdaugh men until their backroom court deals could no longer be ignored. And the reason for that national prominence is largely the early and persistent attention of local journalist Mandy Matney, whom Glatt references six times.4 Matney’s book, however, is not the home run I was expecting, even hoping, it to be.5
Which is so frustrating! Because there are some truly important threads in Matney’s book that should be recognized and elevated in twenty-first century true crime. Glatt is largely absent from his account, save for the acknowledgments section where he describes his first visit to South Carolina: to attend a fundraiser (at which Mandy Matney was an invited speaker in thanks for her work bringing attention to the suspicious, possibly Buster-Murdaugh-related death of Stephen Smith) (he doesn’t mention this). In contrast, Blood on Their Hands is firmly in the “crimoir”6 category, with Matney’s voice front and center throughout the narrative.7 Because of this choice, she is able to intimately describe how institutionalized sexism and the decline of local media stymied her reporting almost as much as the Murdaugh family network.
And these are the sorts of stories we need to hear. I’m particularly interested in and terrified by how the erosion of independent local reporting will cause a lot of crucial crime stories, particularly those involving victims from marginalized communities, to be ignored or downplayed.8 Matney includes some fascinating inside baseball on precisely how internet-based news outlets prioritize clicks and direct their journalists to shape their reporting around encouraging ad-related engagement. It’s a problem, and one that I haven’t seen described in such detail in a true true crime context.
However, despite being co-written by established true-crime writer Carolyn Murnick, there are some bumps in the prose and the pacing. I found my attention drifting when the narrative described Matney’s ultimatum to her boyfriend to get engaged, for example. There are also a few places where Matney’s justified tooting of her own horn comes across as a little off-key. She deserves all the credit for pursuing this story for years through articles and her podcast, and she did not deserve the death threats, online abuse, and personal sexist attacks from Murdaugh’s lawyers. But I think letting the work speak for itself might have been a more powerful argument than restating her contributions in prose that, if not purple, flirted with shades of lilac.
So what to make of the Edgar award nomination? I’m inclined to agree with Sarah D. Bunting’s assessment in a conversation we had in the comments of her lukewarm review of Blood on Their Hands that the committee felt they had to nominate some Murdaugh book, and they went with the less risky but more consistent Glatt. They might have been better off waiting for the deluge of Murdaugh takes that will hit the shelves next year. Which one do I recommend reading? It pains me that the real answer is probably neither. So far, I think the documentaries are the superior narratives here. But if I had to endorse one or the other, I think I’d co-sign with Morgan Doughty, who was on the boat Paul crashed and close friends with the victim of the incident, Mallory Beach. As the Murdaugh mess began to get national coverage, she granted an exclusive interview to Mandy Matney, explaining
“I feel as if a local reporter would be the best being that you have been on top of this since 2019.”
Read Glatt if you like Dateline, trial coverage, use of the word “doughy” to describe a Murdaugh
Read Matney if you like local color, satisfying victories over sexist assholes, use of the word “doughy” to describe a Murdaugh
Except for the title. What does “Tangled Vines” even mean? It’s not like the South Carolina Lowcountry is particularly vine-y. Which is something you might know if you spent significant time there. Now this true crime book about a vineyard arsonist seems much more deserving of the title. I discovered it googling Glatt, and I think I might read it now.
I lack the expertise and, frankly, the will to go over all the Murdaugh family criminal twists and turns. There. are plenty of short summaries online, and I thought this Netflix docuseries was decent.
Not every South Carolinian would say “Ellick” for Alex, for example.
Oh, and Alex’s jailhouse phone calls that Glatt describes as crucial to his account? Mandy Matney filed the first FOIA request to release them.
I do like the title better.
Thanks to Sarah D. Bunting over at Best Evidence for introducing me to this portmanteau describing a crime memoir!
To be fair Matney is not a South Carolina native either, but she had been living in the state for three years before she started working on the Paul Murdaugh boat crash/murder story.
This podcast about a serial killer targeting the gay community in Toronto in the ‘90s, along with the rightly lauded Last Call, highlight how important hyperlocal papers were in documenting the deaths and protecting the community when larger media outlets (and the police) were unresponsive.