True Crime

I've been out of town for a few days, visiting with relatives. And though I have a copy of Kafka's The Castle in my suitcase (because about a dozen people, in inquiring about my new novel, have asked how direct the influence is, and I have had to say a dozen times, in total humiliation, that I have never read it), I've mostly spent my time reading true crime books.

Rhian loves true crime, and typically that's what she's reading when I'm reading police procedurals. But this time I'm all over it. Man, the writing is often quite bad. But these things are fascinating. The thing that really gets me about them is the utterly bizarre, unpredictable details. No matter how desperately the author wishes to adhere to the conventions of the genre, all these ridiculous elements of real life keep intruding.

I just read a few by Joe McGinniss--they're really not bad, by the low standards of the form. In one, we watch the aftermath of a husband's murder-for-hire of his wife, from the point of view of their three teenage sons. The kids' grandmother's friend moves in to become their unofficial guardian; she's a loony Bible-thumper who invites the accused gunman's wife to live with them, out of charity. Imagine--the wife of the guy who probably just killed your mom is there in the kitchen when you get up every morning.

Or, in another McGinniss book, a wealthy wife murders her wealthy husband during an affair with a home theater installer. While she rots in prison, the home theater installer marries a blond woman with "a silver sports car," as a Chinese news magazine reports. The article ends with this man mowing his lawn: "The sweating Michael took off his shirt and walked around with his fat belly bouncing around."

Bad crime fiction is all cliché--the bad writer doesn't have the skill to stray from the norm. But bad true crime, in all its coarseness, can't help but let life spill out all over the place, like Michael's fat bouncing belly. I'll take a good novel over a good true crime any day (with the possible exception of the stupendously awesome Black Dahlia Avenger), but when only the bad is available, give me the truth.

Helter Skelter

Talk about guilty pleasures. Whenever I'm feeling low on energy and enthusiasm, I find myself gravitating toward true crime books. I blame my mother, who was and is fascinated by serial killers and whose copy of Helter Skelter sat on our bookshelves my whole childhood, just out of my reach -- I was sure it had to be good, with a title like that, but I wasn't allowed to read it. But this past week, after a long succession of snow days and kid illnesses, I finally got it out of the library.

Wow, is it ever good -- even better than Ann Rule's Ted Bundy book, The Stranger Beside Me, which is really saying something. What makes the author, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, a top-notch lawyer and investigator also makes him an excellent writer: an eye for the significant detail and a deep curiosity about people and their motivations. Bugliosi didn't just try to figure out what happened, but why -- how those particular crimes emerged from those particular characters at that particular time.

Maybe that's why I like true crime: when it's at its best, it's like good fiction. To perhaps misquote Flannery O'Connor, it's all about what people will do, in spite of everything.

There's a new book out called The Triumph of the Thriller, which argues that some of the best writing today is to be found in thriller and crime fiction. Maybe so. But I wouldn't know, because while I like a good solid mystery, I usually can't get beyond the first few pages of those big, blockbuster-type thrillers: they're too packed with action and dialogue. Things happen because the form requires that lots of things happen; events don't spring organically from characters -- they're imposed upon the characters. Obviously, it's a matter of taste, but it seems to me that movies are a much better medium for exploding cars and speedy banter and actiony storytelling. Fiction is best at going inward.

And that, I would argue, is what the best true crime does, too. It might be impossible to ever get inside the head of Charlie Manson (thank goodness, I suppose), but Bugliosi's efforts make for truly interesting reading.