"If bookshops were cities, the true-crime section would be the red-light district."So begins an article in today's Guardian about the evolution and growth of of true-crime writing since Truman Capote's watershed work In Cold Blood. If you're interested in true-crime or how a genre can change/develop in the blink of a new book, give it a read.
I enjoyed reading about the English counterparts to the US's In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, and The Stranger Beside Me - books like 10 Rillington Place and Cries Unheard and the play Beyond Belief.
Are you a proud true-crime fan, or do you pull your hat over your eyes when you venture to the bookstores "red-light district"?
10 comments:
I've read In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter plus [from this side of the water] Killing for Company [I think it was] - the story of Donald Neilson who killed young men and then cut up their bodies and reduced them in acid. Also read the Yorshire Ripper story. And of course I've read a couple of Jack the Ripper books though not Patricia Cornwall's.
I was a fan of true crime but prefer to escape into fiction nowadays - in all sorts of ways.
Still, if I see a book that appeals I'll buy it.
I prefer (adore) the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich. Laugh out loud funny. Much better than, brr, real life!
Sorry "I can't handle the truth!". True life murders and nasty crimes make me very uncomfortable.
But saying that I do like to read Agatha Christie!? In fact i've read maybe 50% of her books so far, but I guess that is light weight in comparison to what you are talking about. OH well just proves i'm a soft southerner (english that is)!!!
Yeah - I can only take so much of it myself. Though of course truth is stranger than . . .
I think In Cold Blood is absolutely brilliant but I was always way more interested in the Clutters - the lives interrupted, the things that one moment were so important, then suddenly weren't - than the killers. I haven't read much other true crime. I usually head for fiction and that's that.
Liz, very cool animated Welsh flag!
I agree, Jen. Since Harper Lee was with Capote as he researched the murders in Kansas, wouldn't it have been interesting if she'd taken up the Clutter end of the story (lives interrupted)? Truman was so wrapped up in the lives of the killers that I am left wanting to hear more about the family they murdered.
Have you ever thought how much of a surprise and shock sudden death must be - assuming you have just enough time to take it on board before you fade away ....
And I can't help believing in that sudden-death-instant, the only thing that would spew forth from my mouth would be a very surprised "Shit!" Hope God understands. ;-)
Agatha Christie? When no one is around, and I need some bucking up, on goes Murder She Said, Ahoy, Most Foul or At a Gallop with Margaret Rutherford. Makes my day. Otherwise, not really interested in "true" crime, so much of it seems to me, not interesting at all, but sadly banal.
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