True Crime 101

how I became a true crime professor, a few colonial crimes, more recommendations

I mentioned last time that I’m going to change things up around here a little bit. For the next few months—through December, at least—I’m going to write about true crime. I haven’t talked about it much here at all, even though it’s probably the subject I know the most about, and is increasingly my academic specialty. (This quarter my entire teaching schedule is true crime courses.)

I wrote about this in my last book, but I never intended to be a true crime professor. Like many things in my life, it sort of chose me. Most professors get started in their subject area because it interested them, at least enough to make them want to get a PhD and write articles and/or a book about it. My case is a little different. My interest in true crime started when my mother was murdered.

That alone didn’t make me an expert. But if not for that, I probably wouldn’t have written a long paper in grad school about the portrayal of victims in crime documentaries, including In Cold Blood.¹ That began a long obsession with Capote’s book, which led to a pilgrimage to Holcomb I wound up writing an essay about, which in turn became my second book. Along the way I read or watched most of the major American works of true crime, and at one point I spent a year researching a different book project about gun violence throughout American history. I also read a fair amount of theory about documentary ethics, representation, depicting violence, and so on. Without really meaning to, I sort of gave myself a PhD in true crime.

A while ago—six years, maybe seven—I decided to teach a true crime class, as an experiment. Back then, I remember searching around for true crime syllabi online and not finding many. Now true crime courses are everywhere. I’m not saying I started anything; it was an idea whose time had come. True crime’s just too popular, and, considering the state of the humanities in higher ed, an English class that can fill a hundred seats is a hot commodity. Within a few years of my first true crime class, I was teaching a few different ones: a huge 100-level survey class, a book-a-week graduate course, one-day versions at conferences and residencies.

Teaching true crime may be my most marketable skill. It’s also one I have complicated feelings about. On day one of my classes, we discuss the fact that true crime is a euphemism: the crime in question is almost always murder. And however many true crime professors there are now, few of them have the same relationship I do to our subject matter. It’s a strange position to be in professionally, teaching a genre I resent. 

But while I don’t like true crime, I do find it deeply fascinating, and think it reveals a lot about our culture and society: our collective fears and anxieties; the evolving roles of media, police, and the justice system; our conceptions of truth and the conventions of storytelling; our outsized desire for violence and depictions of violence, and the lies we tell ourselves to obscure and deny that desire; and so on. I think it’s the most interesting genre, and the most American. We’re not the only country who likes true crime, but I do think it’s quintessentially ours, and my classes focus exclusively on American true crime, for that reason and because we only have ten weeks.

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The first week of every class is about the genre’s origins. Asking when true crime began is like asking when anything began: the answer is, it depends. I wrote a whole book about how the modern true crime genre begins with In Cold Blood. But you could just as easily say it was Jack the Ripper, or Lizzie Borden, or other examples from centuries before that. Most of the earliest American nonfiction narrates crimes, particularly murder.² You could argue that true crime goes back to the earliest human stories. I’ve sometimes half-jokingly called the Bible the original true crime: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the trial and crucifixion of Christ, etc.

On the first day, we look at a few early examples. The first thing we read is an excerpt from this old Oregonian article—the section subtitled “Coyote Makes Mt. Hood”—in which a tribal elder tells an origin story from the Molalla tribe, which has lived in this part of Oregon for thousands of years. The story itself is about a character named Coyote tricking another character, Grizzly, into killing himself, then cutting his body into pieces and scattering them; the heart winds up in Molalla territory, which explains why they’re adept hunters. In class, we talk about how it shares a few characteristics with modern true crime: it’s a story of a murder that focuses on the killer, it’s told from an outside perspective—third person, by a narrator who’s not present in the story itself—and it’s a story used to explain a society to itself.

Then we read a brief excerpt from Bartolomé de Las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies—I teach a different translation, and only a couple paragraphs, but that link should give you an idea—in which he describes the type and scale of the crimes committed by early Spanish colonists: the murder of tens of millions of people.³ That book is one of the earliest colonial writings, and it precedes the advent of what we call true crime by four centuries, but they have some things in common. The most obvious is that it’s about murder, in this case mass murder. (Which often leads to in-class conversations about why the modern genre tends to focus on individual murders, rather than mass killings or genocides.) Las Casas also positions himself as an observer, and is writing it as advocacy, a plea for the killing to stop. The writer’s relationship to the material, and that question of advocacy—for what and whom, as well as how genuine or effective it is—are both central questions for understanding the genre.

The last thing we read on the first day is a brief excerpt of William Bradford’s history of the Plymouth colony. (You can read all but one sentence of the excerpt I teach halfway down this page.) Bradford writes of the first murder trial in the British colonies, in 1630, a decade into Plymouth’s existence. John Billington, who sailed on the Mayflower, was convicted of murdering another colonist with a gun and hanged. Again, it isn’t true crime per se,⁴ but shares a lot of its characteristics. Bradford covers the crime, investigation, trial, and punishment; he focuses on the effect of the crime on the community itself; he delves into Billington’s possible motives, emphasizing that he was from “one of the profanest families amongst them.” (The notion of crime as hereditary would persist until well into the twentieth century.) And once again, Bradford positions himself in the text as an observer, although in reality he was a member of the community and writing with various agendas.

The second day of class, which I’m prepping for as I write this, we’re reading two texts that are more recent, and more classically considered true crime, although still early examples. (Neither seems to be available online.) One is Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Trial of Ruby McCollum,” a account of a woman’s trial for killing her white abuser in Jim Crow-era Florida, which differs from a lot of early true crime in a few senses, notably that it’s written in first person and is focused on the Black community: Hurston wrote the piece for the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper, two years before Brown v. Board.

We’re also reading an article from the 1963 issue of True Detective magazine, “Murder Announced a Marriage,” a woefully written account of two teenaged lovers being brutally slain in their car on a country road. It’s an example of classic “pulp” true crime, from the magazine that essentially created the modern genre, written with access to (and often the cooperation of) the police, down to the use of actual crime-scene photos. It came out while Capote was writing In Cold Blood, and shows students what sort of tradition he was working in, as well as the seedy illegitimacy the genre was known for until he came along and made it literary.

In the upper-division version of the class, we also read the introduction of the best book on true crime I’ve read, Jean Murley’s The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture, which does not seem nearly as well known as it should be.⁵ Murley’s intro situates the genre’s origins a little later than I would, but does a great job of analyzing its development from the pulp magazines through the early twenty-first century.

After that, we’re on to In Cold Blood, which we should be finishing this time next month. I’m not sure what I could write here about that book that I haven’t already written elsewhere, but I guess we’ll see.

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If you thought this new true crime focus meant I was going to stop subjecting you to recommendations at the end of each post, you, dear reader, were mistaken.

• Speaking of true crime, Leah Sottile—whose work I’ve recommended here before—has a new investigative podcast, Hush. It’s excellent. 

• I’m currently reading my old friend JM Tyree’s new horror novella, The Haunted Screen, and loving it. It’s so smart and funny. Whenever I read a funny literary book it makes me wonder why most of them are so tediously self-serious.

• Sarah Smarsh’s new book, Bone of the Bone, came out earlier this month. I’ve said this here before, but she’s one of my very favorite writers on the topic of class in America, and I previously read and liked many of the essays included, so I’ve been looking forward to the collection for a long time.

• I finished Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, which I wound up not liking as much as I thought I would halfway through. It’s fascinating, innovative, way ahead of its time, and unlike any other novel I’ve read, but it’s also uneven, overlong, and sort of unsatisfying in the end. (The Infinite Jest comparison is inevitable for many reasons—era, length, breadth, number of characters, generalized irony and wackiness, Tucson connections, blue paperback covers—but to me they did not seem all that similar, except in the way their endings were both disappointing.) But I’d still rather read Silko’s books than almost anyone else’s.

• Speaking of DFW, and of essays, I first fell in love with both the form and his writing many years ago, through his essays, which are far better than his fiction. And I’m a fan of Pablo Torre’s podcast, which I’ve recommended here before. So I was excited to hear Torre interview Michael Joyce, the subject of one of DFW’s more (in)famous essays, “The String Theory.” I find the hero worship of Wallace troubling, in this episode and in general, and its discussion of Wallace’s mental illness leaves something to be desired. But it’s really fascinating to hear Joyce describe the experience of being profiled and the essay’s effect on his life.

• I saw William Basinski play the entirety of his new record live earlier this month in Portland and have been listening to it ever since.

• I recently discovered Doggyland, Snoop Dogg’s animated series for kids. I wish I could teach this episode in some of my writing workshops (or send it to the authors of a lot of writing advice I see on Substack).

• I also recently rediscovered this old playlist I made for Largehearted Boy when my first book came out. Four of the songs had been taken off of Spotify since, but it holds up OK, and it does take me back to the not-very-pleasant time when I was writing that book.

• The two best things I watched this month were both South American documentaries: Pictures of Ghosts, an excellent and very essayistic Brazilian film from last year that’s on the Criterion Channel, and the classic 2010 Chilean doc Nostalgia for the Light.

• I’ve written a lot about ChatGPT here, and generally think it’s overhyped, at least in its current incarnation and for my purposes. Google’s recently released NotebookLM, on the other hand, seems like something that could be far more useful for nonfiction writers.

1. The other texts I wrote about were Haruki Murakami’s Underground, a very strange book about the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway in 1995, and Ira Sachs’ Untitled, an obscure experimental documentary film about 9/11.

2. One of my weirder research discoveries while working on that aforementioned book project was an epic poem a Spanish conquistador wrote about massacring an entire Pueblo in 1599, which may have been the first poetry written on what is now American soil.

3. The figures are disputed, as are the methods—disease killed a large portion, although I doubt that made much difference to the dead.

4. Although it is the first entry in the best true crime anthology I know of.

5. You might say that book is criminally overlooked.