The Literary Thrillers Taking On Our True Crime Obsession
A lot of us have found ourselves drawn into culture’s true crime obsession: it’s a way to indulge our morbid but all too human curiosity from a comfortable distance. But the true crime boom has certainly reached saturation point: these days, there are more podcasts and docudramas than even the most hard-boiled enthusiast can handle.
This was certainly evident last year, if not before, when Ryan Murphy’s Jeffrey Dahmer series, starring Evan Peters, became the centre of controversy. The show was relentless in its graphic reenactments of Dahmer’s crimes and raw depictions of families and victims, many of whom had not consented to having their stories told. If it was not apparent to us before that true crime’s insistence on retelling cases long solved then the Dahmer show certainly opened our eyes and turned our stomachs.
The debate around the show led many to ask whether our societal pre-occupation has surpassed into a sickness of exploitation and gratuity (if they weren’t already). And in 2023 we’ve been given three novels – Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, Alice Slater’s Death of a Bookseller and Eliza Clarke’s Penance – that reflect this turning tide and question our true crime fixation.
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Each novel takes on a different aspect of true crime culture in order to interrogate our relationship with the genre. Alice Slater’s Death of a Bookseller focuses on Laura, the daughter of a murder victim, and true crime obsessive, Roach. Both are fated to work in the same bookshop in Walthamstow, north east London. Roach is obsessed with Laura, and believes that beneath what she views as her pastel veneer, she can sense a shared darkness. But the murder cases that Roach treats as a hobby are part of Laura’s tragic past, as it's soon revealed that her mother was a victim of a local killer. Through these polar opposite characters Slater looks at both sides of the true crime discourse.
Part of Slater's commentary hones in on faux feminist true crime podcasts, beginning the novel with a live show that Roach attends. In a recent interview on The Final Girls podcast, Slater detailed her attendance of a similar event for My Favourite Murder, in order to write this chapter. To the podcast’s host, Anna Bogutskya, she confessed that the experience was akin to a modern day hanging. This is echoed in the book as fictional podcasters The Murder Girls rile up their fans, cheering at the perpetrator’s prison sentence. As their audience applauds, Roach describes it “as if the entire auditorium would collapse under the weight of our love, our passion, our thirst for justice”.
Despite often claiming to be feminist, podcasts like this hinge on carceral justice, jeering whenever a culprit is put away for life, or given a death sentence. We must keep in mind that the justice offered by the judicial system does not protect many of us, and your race, class and gender largely affect whether you will be protected or vilified. Therefore praise of a system that protects rapists and murderers in its own ranks, is in violent opposition to feminist ideals (and in fact the phrase “carceral feminism” feels oxymoronic – how can feminist values coexist with bigotry, racialized and gendered violence? Truly they cannot).
For those of us familiar with true crime podcasts, like Slater’s fictional The Murder Girls, we have grown to expect this resounding, and flawed, call for “justice”. Slater outlines the crowd mentality apparent at these shows, and indirectly questions our comfort levels with true crime’s devolvement into entertainment. Death of a Bookseller highlights whether one person's trauma should be the inspiration for another's merch stand.
Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You (Feb 2023) is told from the perspective of a podcast creator, and examines investigative true crime podcasts. This book overall gives a more favourable look at true crime, as its central characters truly believe it to be an alternative route for justice. Bodie – a podcaster invited to teach students about the medium at the boarding school she once attended – values the investigative style of true crime podcasts. She is more concerned with uncovering evidence than cracking jokes, and as the narrative unwinds, one students’ podcast certainly has a pertinent role to play in the justice system.
Bodie is used to being questioned about her involvement in what is now largely perceived as a problematic genre. She insists her aim isn’t to sensationalise gore but to look at crimes that allow the reporter to discuss “structural racism, domestic violence, policing issues”. This is a viewpoint Bodie holds throughout as her students’ project becomes an attempt to overturn the conviction of a man tried for the murder of Bodie’s boarding school roommate.
“Instead of forming the structure around a corpse, they are, finally, questioning the narrative itself.”
The philosophy contained in Makkai’s novel suggests judicial reform, setting certain types of podcasts apart from the others (the one in the novel leverages an appeal of a conviction). Bodie is determined to use her journalistic skills to uncover the truth, and in the real true crime world, it’s certainly the case that there are many who commit to the journalistic integrity that Bodie upholds with reverence. However as Penance suggests, some use the cover of proper reportage to distort the truth.
For a long time the crime genre, both fact and fiction, has concerned itself with structuring narratives around dead girls. The audience is presented with a body and then our narrators paint a picture of a crime and a victim. Eliza Clark’s Penance is structured as a faux true-crime book, and so takes this form, but it's clear from the outset that this is merely deception. Our narrator Alec, is a disgraced journalist who sets out to cover the murder of 16 year-old Joan by her peers. However Alec’s real concern is to reignite his journalism career.
We see this, too, in real life true crime discourse. Some documentaries, like Netflix’s much-contested Making A Murderer, care more for ambiguity and insinuating the innocence or guilt of an individual than they do for the people affected by the violent event. Penance serves as a necessary reminder to readers not to trust what is posed as fact: it’s important to note that a book’s mere publication doesn’t imply its legitimacy, as Penance’s clever meta-structure attests.
Each of these three novels probe at our societal true crime obsession, asking why we crave this content and wondering how the narrative is distorted by those who cover it. Slater, Clarke and Makkai are concerned with creating novels that no longer rely on the mystery of the dead girl. Instead of forming the structure around a corpse, they are, finally, questioning the narrative itself.
Words: Billie Walker
