Every few months, a think piece about the ethical implications of true crime properties, and by extension, true crime consumption, drops. Some of these are urgent and sophisticated discussions about carceral feminism, social justice, and the parasocial voyeurism of online armchair detecting. Some are evidence of a lack of homework doing. Jack Sheehan’s review of Mark O’Connell’s new book A Thread of Violence in The Baffler a couple of weeks ago is unfortunately an example of the latter.
The article’s subtitle—“Can a work of true crime condemn its own genre?”—seems promising, but the content rehashes assumptions about true crime in the twentieth century that don’t even deserve to be called simply outdated, as they ignore the structure, tone, and purpose of foundational texts from decades prior.
Sheehan, in praising O’Connell’s narrative about interviewing a notorious Irish murderer, notes that
By bracketing the story within a metatextual frame, O’Connell tries to subvert the normal course of the true crime narrative and the sickly, prurient feelings it evokes.
It’s the word “normal” that sticks in my craw. Sheehan is arguing that O’Connell’s text is subversive and innovative because it does not succumb to what he calls “epistemological hubris.” That is, the arrogant assumption by the author that, “though the crimes they document are unspeakable, they are, in the final accounting, explicable.” In further distinguishing A Thread of Violence from what Sheehan casually describes as “normal” true crime, he explains:
But in denying us an epiphanic conclusion, and by exposing the structures (interviews, police reports, previous retellings) beneath his narrative, O’Connell tries to circumvent this problem by performing a sort of reverse citation. Gone is the confident voice of the true crime podcaster, flattening all ambiguity into an orderly narrative. By slowly peeling back the artifice of this genre—the claim to authority, the rush of discovery, the armchair psychoanalysis—he reveals the hollowness at its center.
Hoo boy. See, the problem with this praise is that in order to bestow it, Sheehan by necessity must ignore a good deal of what true crime looks like not only now, but also as early as, (checks notes), at least 1968.
To begin with, to blithely categorize all “true crime podcasters” as confidently “flattening all ambiguity” in order to produce an “orderly narrative” is ignorant at best and willfully misleading at worst. The podcast generally agreed to have begun the current true crime boom in podcasting, Serial, famously ends on a note of uncertainty and self-questioning. Some of the best long-form true crime podcasts airing in recent years—Gilbert King’s Bone Valley, Madeleine Baran’s In the Dark, Connie Walker’s Missing and Murdered, and Amara Cofer’s Black Girl Gone just to name a few—do not, to put it mildly, shy away from delivering a narrative that is disorderly. In fact, the power of their stories depend upon lingering questions, unreliable evidence, and unsatisfying conclusions. In fact, I would say a retreat from confidence in ethos and content is almost mandated for true crime podcasts to receive serious critical attention these days.1
But that’s not all! Sheehan also suggests that the genre of true crime as a whole is defined by, as he puts it, the holy trinity of authority, discovery, and psychoanalysis. The two book-length true crime texts—the Capote and Mailer bohemoths—that he name checks reveal the limitations and biases of his claim. The thing is, roughly concurrent with In Cold Blood (1965) and predating The Executioner’s Song (1979) by a decade, a book was released that marked a counterhistory of true crime in America: one that emphasizes inquiry, ambiguity, and the sociopolitical sources and personal resonances of violence.2
The Algiers Motel Incident (1968) pushes back against the claims to authority and narrative stability offered by Capote and Mailer, disturbing the assumption that true crime can or should offer one coherent truth, and highlighting a counter-tradition in American true crime that progressive twenty-first-century true crime texts, particularly by female creators, would adopt and expand.
You’ve probably heard of John Hersey because of his novella-length article on the devastation wrought on Hiroshima by the United States’ nuclear attack in 1945. However, in this account of the murder of three young black men during the 1967 Detroit uprising and the trials of the policemen accused of violating their civil rights, he deviates sharply from the omniscient and well-ordered accounts of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song, and his own background as a journalist. Hersey, deliberately and provocatively, disavows the journalistic approach to true crime writing in a lengthy first-person passage that opens chapter 2 of the book, and is worth quoting in full:
At this point in the narrative, enter myself. Reluctantly, I have always, before this, stayed out of my journalism, even as a manipulative pronoun, having believed that it sufficed for a writer to “come through” to the reader--by the nature of his selections from the whole, his filtering of all that had gone through his eyes and ears and mind; by the intensity of feeling that might be read in the lines, by his “voice.” But this account is too urgent, too complex, too dangerous to too many people to be told in a way that might leave doubts strewn along its path; I cannot afford, this time, the luxury of invisibility. For the uses of invisibility, as Ralph Ellison has made so vividly and painfully clear--an inability or unwillingness to see the particularity of one’s fellow man, and with it a crucial indifference as to whether one is seen truly as oneself--these uses of not-seeing and of not-being-seen are of the essence of racism.
Hersey acknowledges that even the presence of an authorial “I” can be “manipulative,” so he previously chose, in works like Hiroshima, to let the invisible but implied editorializing that accompanies any retrospective narrative of historical events to account for his writerly presence. This is the approach employed by Capote and Mailer. Hersey, however, feels this racially charged crime precludes the authorial “luxury” of an omniscient posture, claiming, “the events could not be described as if witnessed from above by an all-seeing eye opening on an all-knowing novelistic mind; the merest suspicion that anything had been altered, or made up, for art’s sake, or for the sake of effect, would be absolutely disastrous.” He implicitly links the conventional “absence of the author” in true crime writing to complicity in the racist social structures that both provoked and excused the murder of three innocent and unarmed black men. Because this crime was and is so politically urgent, socially resonant, and personally disturbing, suggests Hersey, he must account for his own limitations as a white man writing about the racial landscape of 1960s America.
And Hersey wasn’t the only one disavowing authorial confidence to tell a story about racist violence and injustice decades ago. One of America’s finest thinkers and writers, James Baldwin, wrote a true crime text in 1985 about the Atlanta child murders. As Casey Cep notes in her essay on the book, the point of Baldwin’s Evidence of Things Not Seen was not to create an orderly narrative about the crimes, but rather to point out how the “patterns” police and prosecutors manufactured to convict one man of the killings were generated from racist assumptions about poor black people. Baldwin’s book in fact dissects the very presumption of “order” as a reliable instrument of justice.
The influence of these foundational texts runs through twentieth- and twenty-first century true crime creators like Maggie Nelson3, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich4, Emma Copley Eisenberg5, Myriam Gurba6, and Angela D. Sims7. These are just off the top of my head. Hell, Truman Capote himself wrote an ambiguous true crime story in 1980!
TL;DR: True crime as a genre isn’t, and never was, as uncomplicated and tawdry as Sheehan seems to suggest. That is, there’s nothing “normal” about true crime that doesn’t do the work that O’Connell’s book seems to accomplish. As Sarah Weinman8 noted over on What to Read If this week:
Now, I think we understand that true crime doesn’t follow a tidy narrative and that expecting closure or an ending doesn’t happen in the messiness of real life.
We certainly should!
I came across another article discussing true crime this week that seemed to employ the word “normal” in a much more productive, appropriate, and historically accurate way when describing what the genre of true crime can contribute to understanding violence. In a piece about a nineteenth-century true-crime play, Bruce Dorsey places the public fascination with the murder of a young women within the framework of social drama:
The real-life demise of Sarah Maria Cornell and all that followed illuminate the very essence of a transformative moment in history, unveiling what anthropologists call a social drama. Such a drama begins when normal and peaceful means of redressing a crime fail to satisfy longings for more complete explanations. Social dramas prompt two questions: Why did this happen? and What does it tell us about who we are?
In this understanding, true crime steps in when the “normal,” and normative, practices of criminal justice institutions fail. Creators like Hersey, Baldwin, and countless others in our true crime past and present use these devastating failures not as an opportunity to impose a satisfying conclusion on a story that delivers none, but rather as a lens onto and into the harshest truths about our world, and to offer stories that are unconventionally structured, emotionally astute, and deliberately create space for political action.
The only podcast Sheehan mentions by name is My Favorite Murder, which, though not without its fundamental problems, is also a more complicated property than he seems willing to engage with. Additionally, since it candidly proclaims itself a true crime comedy podcast, it’s probably not the best representative of the genre.
Full disclosure: this argument about true crime’s counterhistory in America is one I hope to develop into a longer study, somehow, somewhere.
Who has a great new anthology out that riffs on Baldwin’s title.
Great piece, as always!
This all reminds me of something from crime fiction, specifically the introduction to The Continental Op, a collection of short stories by Dashiell Hammett, which was published in 1974. The collection was selected and introduced by Steven Marcus, who wrote in the introduction first: "...an ideal-typical description runs as follows. The Op is called in or sent out on a case. Something has been stolen, someone is missing, some dire circumstance is impending, someone has been murdered--it doesn't matter. The Op interviews the person or persons most accessible. They may be innocent or guilty--it doesn't matter; it is an indifferent circumstance. Guilty or innocent, they provide the Op with an account of what they know, of what they assert really happened. The Op begins to investigate; he compares these accounts with others that he gathers; he snoops about; he does research; he shadows people, arranges confrontations between those who want to avoid one another, and so on. What he soon discovers is that the 'reality' that anyone involved will swear to is in fact itself a construction, a fabrication, a fiction, a faked and alternate reality--and that it has been gotten together before he ever arrived on the scene. And the Op's work therefore is to deconstruct, decompose, deplot and defictionalize that 'reality' and to construct or reconstruct out of it a true fiction, i.e., an account of what 'really' happened."
And then: "What Hammett has done--unlike most writers of detective or crime stories before him or since--is to include as part of the contingent and dramatic consciousness of his narrative the circumstance that the work of the detective is itself a fiction-making activity, a discovery or creation by fabrication of something new in the world, or hidden, latent, potential, or as yet undeveloped within it. The typical 'classical' detective story--unlike Hammett's--can be described as a formal game with certain specified rules of transformation. What ordinarily happens is that the detective is faced with a situation of inadequate, false, misleading, and ambiguous information. And the story as a whole is an excercise in disambiguation--with the final scenes being a ratiocinative demonstration that the butler did it (or not); these scenes achieve a conclusive, reassuring clarity of explanation, wherein everything is set straight, and the game we have been party to is brought to an appropriate end."
It's been too long since I read Hammett's work for me to comment on whether Marcus is "right" about the stories about the Op, but there seemed to be some thoughts relevant to the different types of true crime work you write about in this post. Or not. Curious about what you think.