What modes are the most popular for representations of true crime creators?
a quick and dirty process post
This is the second in a series of posts chronicling my process preparing a conference presentation looking at representations of true crime creators in fiction. You can read the first post, about the time frame I’m looking at here.
I’m continuing to work on organizing my spreadsheet, and this week I sorted the modes of texts that feature true crime creators within the year of their publication or debut.1 I was expecting a good deal of podcasts, since the big boom in this type of storytelling came after the 2014 debut of Serial, but that’s not quite what I found.
The biggest year for true crime fiction podcasts was 2018, four years post-Serial. Makes sense. But after that, there is a sharp drop-off in their numbers. In fact, the only narrative podcast I know of that doesn’t have a novel tie-in after 2018 is last year’s Women Talkin’ ‘Bout Murder.2 The big winner in terms of format was overwhelmingly . . .
Novels! Of the fifty-plus entries I have on my spreadsheet so far, twenty-six are novels, and there is one novel-adjacent short story collection! TV is second with 12, but a good bit of those are single-episode appearances.
And here is where genre is going to be important. A couple of the podcasts are parody, so comedic, but I’m pretty sure the novels tend overwhelmingly towards drama. What does this mean? That the trope is attractive to the sort of deep dives into character and interiority offered by novels? That novel writers are also true-crime podcast listeners? (The vast majority of the novelists are women, which is its own kettle of fish.)
So for those of you following along at home, you’ve probably realized, as have I, sadly, that the time has come to stop futzing around with the data (as cool as that is), and start engaging with the damn texts. To that end, my next process post will probably center on one of my favorite of these characters, the one that inspired this whole project, Lethal Lit, co-created by writer and ‘stacker extraordinaire (and super cool guy)
.Modes describe the format of the texts, rather than the genre. (I’ll probably end up organizing by genre too, but that feels like a later part of the project, as it will necessitate me at least googling summaries and at best reading/listening to/watching each text.)
I listened to the first episode yesterday. It’s fantastic.
I'm nervous and excited about this!!