I’ve got a lasting bee in my bonnet about the true crime genre. The more true crime content I consume, the more convinced I become that only the steadiest of hands can handle it. It is so easy to tip into the lurid or the exploitative; it may be impossible to avoid the latter. For that reason, I’ve avoided the many Murdaugh murder-themed properties, although it seems there’s a documentary on every streaming service about the South Carolinian tragedy. I did accidentally catch the sentencing hearing, by which I mean I had CNN on and didn’t choose to actively avoid it when they switched over to the judge’s speech. It felt too intimate, to look into a man’s eyes as he’s sentenced to life in prison, like I had stumbled upon a stranger losing their virginity or an execution. Before this, there was life as it was; now there’s just prison and all its attendant horrors. I make no judgement on his guilt or innocence or what deserts are just, but I felt in my gut that it was a moment I shouldn’t have been there for.
There are many coincidences in life, although the timed release of a published work is not usually one of them, but I have found myself consuming two new pieces of excellent true crime content this week and in my commitment to being judgey about most true crime, I want to also highlight pieces I think get it right.
The Coldest Case in Laramie (Serial Productions/NYT): The original Serial podcast kicked off the true crime podcasting craze, inspiring much less meticulous and more thirsty progeny, but the OG has remained mostly respectful and cautious in its productions (even just that sentence could surely be debated with vigor in the comments, but I think it is generally accurate). Its latest is The Coldest Case in Laramie, a sparse, eight episode elegy to true crime itself. It would seem fitting if it were the last true crime podcast ever made, as it is largely about the impossible nature of the genre, the way memory erodes more than we think and many stories can twist themselves easily to accommodate this or that villain. The podcast is narrated by NYT reporter Kim Barker, who was in high school when a woman a few years older than she was murdered in her town of approximately 70K people. Shelli Wiley was young, white, and beautiful. There was racial discrimination and a whiff of sex, potential police corruption, unfairly-obtained confessions. All the elements of a juicy story are there: the crime is disturbing and flashy, there are living witnesses who “remember” so much, and the lead suspect is still out there just waiting to be interviewed. But Barker resists the narratives her genre is pushing her to fulfill, instead turning in a stripped down statement on our inability to solve puzzles like this one, and how little it would really matter even if we could.
Listen if you like elegiac, laconic, well-researched documentary journalism.
I Have Some Questions for You (Viking Press/PRH): The TikTok-ification of publishing has introduced to the public the buzzy shorthand used within publishing houses for their many sub-sub-sub genres. There’s not just mystery, but “dark academia” mystery. There’s not just historical fiction, but “female-centric retellings of ancient myths” historical fiction. All of these have cute nicknames; the romance genre has reduced it to a series of acronyms you have to be deep within some specific message boards to fully decipher. So I guess if called upon to be reductive, I would call Rebecca Makkai’s new novel I Have Some Questions for You a “dark academia twist on true crime” or something to that effect. Set in an elite New England boarding school that reminded me of a college gothic Middlebury (everyone skis) the novel follows Bodie, a woman who went to the school in the 90s and has returned in 2018 to teach a class on podcasting and film. While a student, her roommate was murdered. The supposed murderer was swiftly caught and has been in prison for 20+ years, but Bodie feels old ghosts stirring as she visits campus, and starts to wonder if the murderer could have been someone else. The novel is a mix of first and second person, which doesn’t usually work, but Makkai is a deft writer able to handle both this genre and an unconventional narrative structure. Interested in many of the same things Laramie highlighted, Questions is also about the extreme instability of memory, especially around traumatic events. As Bodie resists the pull of a world saturated in true crime hobbyists, obsessives, and fantasists, she begins to wonder if even the truth would mean anything after all this time.
Read if you want a book that is both a “book club book” and is actually good.