The Evolution of True Crime: From In Cold Blood to I'll Be Gone in the Dark
The invention and reinvention of the true crime genre
Modern Classics: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966), I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)
True Crime
In the late 60s Truman Capote established the archetype of literary true crime with In Cold Blood. Although Capote is an extraordinary writer, the timing of his groundbreaking book involved forces beyond him. It is no coincidence that In Cold Blood was written and published at a turning point in history, as the age of modern movement and information became realized. Crime both real and imagined had long been part of modern storytelling, but it wasn’t until the raw details—many of them likely supplied by his research assistant Harper E. Lee (in an unlikely, the story of her participation in In Cold Blood became the basis for another bestselling “true crime” book a couple years ago)—became available that Capote’s book, part literary invention, part investigative work could have even come to fruition. The reason In Cold Blood remains a modern classic is that it was written in a time that was modern enough to make this reporting and type of storytelling possible. It was still the era of handwritten letters—which feature prominently as a source in the book—but it was also the first decade with unprecedented growth in highways and when telephones were commonplace. The crime that is the subject of In Cold Blood is one that traverses many state lines, even as the actual murders themselves take place in a small town, capturing, in a way, how this particular point in time was a turning point between two eras—old and new ways of living and old and new ways of understanding acts of violence.
What is In Cold Blood?
In Cold Blood recreates a brutal quadruple murder in Holcomb, Kansas committed by two men. Through interviews with the men and primary evidence provided by them, the detectives, and the people in the town, Capote is able to narrativize the full scope of the crime from its build-up, to the harrowingly rendered murders themselves, to the panic that spread in the town, and finally to the investigations as law enforcement tracked down the killers.
It's commonly accepted that In Cold Blood is a work of creative nonfiction, with heavy emphasis on the creative—The Guardian even ranked it as one of its 100 best novels. Capote himself referred to his own book in interviews as a “nonfiction novel.” But for as much embellishment, and the occasional fabrication in the book—see later: conveniently eloquent quotes—it is nonetheless the nonfiction piece, the facts underlying In Cold Blood which make it the revelatory book that it is. While the best novelists can make their readers believe, the black and white truth contained in a piece of true crime writing opens up the imagination in far more terrifying ways than fiction ever can.
This is not to take away Capote’s role in writing a landmark book, as a set of facts can be interesting in their own right but it still takes a storyteller to put them together in a compelling way in book-length form. The characters in the town, the psychological portraits of the murderers, and the ability to capture the atmosphere, the history, and the culture of these places, are all crucial to taking what is an astonishing and shocking crime and pushing it beyond a sensational headline and a few paragraphs in the newspaper.
Fact or Fiction
Even without diving into the case itself or doing research into the question of In Cold Blood’s creative license, it is fairly evident that any reader (or editor) with enough common sense would question any claims of journalism or truth. Would the murderers, for instance, give perfectly tidy, thematic quotes for the writer to use? (Many of the facts are based off interviews with the murderers, which as a methodology has its own flaws.) Here’s a piece of dialogue near the end of the book that struck me as particularly far-fetched, and pretty clearly is the writer making a tidy thematic point but putting his own words in the mouth of the killer for effect:
Why? Soldiers don’t lose much sleep. They murder, and get metals for doing it. The good people of Kansas want to murder me—and some hangman will be glad to get the work. It’s easy to kill—a lot easier than passing a bad check. Just remember: I only knew the Clutters maybe an hour. If I’d really known them, I guess I’d feel different. I don’t think I could live with myself. But the way it was, it was like picking targets in a shooting gallery.
A Modern Publishing Classic
The curious thing about In Cold Blood is that while it is the purest evocation of a modern classic, one that arguable invented an entire genre in book publishing and still gets mentioned at a high rate when a new true crime book comes along, it does not exactly have the lineage you might expect. In the fifty-plus years since In Cold Blood was published its literary antecedents that have endured—Helter Skelter, The Executioner’s Song, Under the Banner of Heaven—can be counted on one hand. And more to the point, the true crime genre—in books at least—is not a robust, top to bottom kind of concern in the book world. In the last edition of Modern Classics we considered The Secret History by Donna Tartt. There are entire lists of books being published each and every year that can trace their influence straight back to The Secret History—books that are hugely successful, books that are moderately successful, and all the way down the line. The same cannot be said for true crime books; there are a few that rise over time and many, many more that don’t.
It’s not entirely surprising that dozens of true crime books are published every year but that they don’t have a readership as reliable as other genres. That’s because the age information that ushered in In Cold Blood also created many other forms of true crime storytelling in quick order. 20/20 and Nightline would start a little more than a decade later in 1978 and 1980, respectively, and there would be no turning back. Now in the 21st century, podcasts and documentaries have all but replaced true crime nonfiction in book form. These mediums are more suited in many ways to telling factual stories. They are also cost effective and easier to consume. Think of how much easier—and in many ways more effective—it is to sit down witnesses and detectives in front of a camera and have them tell the story editing in b-roll footage than it is to conduct dozens of interviews, compile copious notes, organize all the evidence and then sit down and collate that into 300, meticulously-constructed pages. Documentaries and podcasts took what made In Cold Blood compelling and deliver it more quickly with more shocking impact.
Evolution
What is most striking about reading In Cold Blood today is that it is an incredibly slow read. At nearly 400 pages long, it stretches out each phase of the crime, packing in every piece of research, quoting primary source documents like the murderers’ letters and journals (sometimes unedited and put in the text at full-length). Although it remains a classic for many of the skillful choices and elegant writing, In Cold Blood in many ways feels like it was left in the dust by what came after in the true crime genre. Capote set the template, but with better information, more detail, and without the burden of doing something completely new, true crime has seen vast improvements in the sophistication of how to dissect a crime. As criminology, forensic science, and surveillance technology have grown exponentially, the tools for a true crime writer to answer the essential questions of the genre—how and why—would become greater as well. The average fluency of the true crime audience now surpasses what detectives of old knew. Amateur sleuthing is no longer a fringe hobby, and no true crime viewer, reader, or writer will find In Cold Blood quite as sophisticated or shocking as it once was.
Modern True Crime: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
By drawing a line from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) to Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (2018) we can trace many of the changes not only in the true crime genre, but publishing and ultimately society at large. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark follows the case of The Golden State Killer, also known as the East Area Rapist and the Night Stalker. I’ll Be Gone is written from the perspective of a writer just like In Cold Blood is. That’s to say I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a one-for-one literary true crime successor of Capote’s masterpiece. The parallels are eerie in other ways: like Harper Lee’s contributions to In Cold Blood were invaluable, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was put together by its editor and others after Michelle McNamara’s early death—meaning two of the most important literary true crime books ever written were put together with heavy input from people other than their authors.
The principal difference between these books published five decades apart is the point of view. Capote makes efforts to keep authorial distance, referring to himself in the third person whenever he’s forced to mention himself at all (e.g., “x witness told the author”), attempting to keep that traditional omnipotent authority of The Author in tact. Michelle McNamara narrates and frames much of I’ll Be Gone in first person. Before we even delve into the true crime aspects and maturation of the genre, this shift defines a sea change in writing and society in general: telling a story in first person, even one that’s supposed to be fact based, has become entirely acceptable. McNamara is not a law enforcement professional but an amateur detective, a perspective she makes no efforts—and frankly doesn’t have to in the 21st century—to hide.
In both fiction and nonfiction over the past five decades writing has leaned vastly toward the personal and first-person perspective. Authority in writing no longer comes from expertise or maintaining an illusion that the author is impartial and infallible; instead it comes from an ability to project emotional authenticity and intelligent analysis. If you can write well and be compelling, you have authority in today’s literary landscape. From the year In Cold Blood was written to the year I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was written, the use of “I” in books has almost tripled. Capote, with his penchant for artistic license, would have loved to write In Cold Blood in this era. And yet the irony is that McNamara has done the work, getting her facts right and even contributing to the case, so much so that one of the detectives, Paul Holes, considered Michelle a “partner” and almost a peer in the investigation (pg. 314).
Style
Stylistically I’ll Be Gone follows a second trend that’s happened in tandem with the use of first person: the changing definition of what makes writing literary on a sentence level. Whereas In Cold Blood is lyrical and expansive, I’ll Be Gone is short and declarative in a way that has become the norm, even among the most decorated and respected writers. Compare the florid way Capote introduces the detective as a character, giving him an entire raison d’etre by way of quotes, to the spare, lean way McNamara introduces a key detective in the Golden State Killer case.
First, here’s Capote’s description of the lead local detective in the Clutter murders, which is indicative of every character introduced in the book:
The Bureau’s Garden City Representative, and the agent responsible for a sizable portion of western Kansas, is a lean and handsome fourth-generation Kansan of forty-seven named Alvin Adams Dewey. It was inevitable that Earl Robinson, the sheriff of Finney County, should ask Al Dewey to take charge of the Clutter case. Inevitable, and appropriate. For Dewey, himself a former sheriff of Finney County (from 1947 to 1955) and, prior to that, a Special Agent of the F.B.I. (between 1940 and 1945 he had served in New Orleans, in San Antonio, in Denver, in Miami, and in San Francisco), was professionally qualified to cope with even as intricate an affair as the apparently motiveless, all but clueless Clutter murders. Moreover, his attitude toward the crime made it, as he later said, “a personal proposition.” He went on to say that he and his wife “were real fond of Herb and Bonnie,” and ‘saw them every Sunday at church, visited a lot back and forth,” adding, “but even if I hadn’t known the family, and liked them so well, I wouldn’t feel any different. Because I’ve seen some bad things, I sure as hell have. But nothing so vicious as this. However long it takes; it may be the rest of my life, I’m going to know what happened in that house: the why and the who.” (pg. 92)
And now McNamara introducing one of the detectives, who would become a writer and true crime podcaster in his own right (but that McNamara, tellingly, doesn’t even introduce the first time he is mentioned in the book:)
A silver Taurus pulls up right on time, and a fit, neatly dressed man with short blond hair and a hint of summer tan gets out and calls my name. I’ve never met Holes in person. During our last phone conversation, he cheerfully complained that his family’s golden retriever puppy was keeping him up at night, but he looks as if he’s never had a worry in the world. He’s in his midforties and has a calm, easygoing face and a jock’s gait. He smiles warmly and gives me a firm handshake. (pg. 198)
This is just one of many instances in which I’ll Be Gone is denser and more tightly packed than In Cold Blood. At the time of In Cold Blood’s publication the depiction of the actual murder inside the house of the victims was shocking and found distasteful by some. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark quickly laps anything Capote ever shows of the crimes themselves in terms of graphic and upsetting nature multiple times in the first 60 pages.
In a way, the information age has created a paradoxical effect on the prose of I’ll Be Gone; it’s as if McNamara has such a volume of information (her files are a literal truck load at the end of the book) that she can discard so much and be left with the most distilled and intense pieces of information. In contrast, Capote has to use everything he’s got, even if that’s an overly long quote from the detective. It makes I’ll Be Gone a much more propulsive, immediate, and intimate read, which more than holds its own against video and audio true crime storytelling. The description of the crimes, the psychology, the criminology, the science, the investigative techniques, and the relationship between storyteller and story are all happening at once in a short space in I’ll Be Gone, showing just how far we’ve come as consumers of stories about crime.
Caveat
That said, it is important to give Capote his due and note that everything he pioneered has not been supplanted. One of the conventions, the serene setting opener, hasn’t changed in fifty years and is a feature of almost any book or true crime article. It’s a feature of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark as well.
Here’s the opening page of In Cold Blood:
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
And here's McNamara’s chapter opener a few pages before she introduces Holes (although here you can see a fact-based, declarative, less metaphoric style taking the fore here as well):
The history of Concord, California, involves Satan and a series of misunderstandings. Legend has it that in 1805 Spanish soldiers in pursuit of a band of reluctantly missionized Native Americans cornered their quarry near a willow thicket in what is present-day Concord. The natives took cover in the dense trees, but when the soldiers charged in to seize them, the natives were gone. The spooked Spaniards dubbed the area Monte del Diablo—thicket of the devil—the archaic definition of the word “monte” translating loosely into “woods.” Over the years, it morphed into the more conventional ‘mountain’ or ‘mount,’ and English-speaking newcomers transferred the name to the nearby 3,848-foot peak that dominates the East Bay landscape, and it became Mount Diablo. Devil Mountain. In 2009 a local man named Arthur Mijares filed federal paperwork to try to change the name to Mount Reagan. He found the Devil name offensive.
Post-Modern True Crime
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the new modern classic of the true crime genre. It synthesizes many decades of progress and will replace In Cold Blood as the gold standard, one that publishers and writers will try to emulate. Structurally and stylistically, I’ll Be Gone jumped leaps and bounds with the advantages of millions of more primary source documents and research tools at McNamara’s disposal—although on the question of style, short and declarative sentences verse poetic and florid sentences, remains a matter of preference.
Perhaps its most telling quality is that I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a meta-history of true crime and criminology itself. Since I’ll Be Gone covers a cold case it is also the story of how solving crimes has changed from the late 70s with uncoordinated police departments and a vague understanding of criminal motivation and pattern to the 2010s when DNA was commonplace and technology has revolutionized detective work. Through one case it shows exactly how far we have come from Capote’s days on the cusp of the modern era, to now a post-modern era of crime investigation and reporting. If history is any guide, I don’t expect we will see a rash of literary true crime books copying I’ll Be Gone in the Dark in the coming years. While it has solidified the new mold of what a true crime book can be, the competitive media forms—podcasts and documentaries—are still faster and commercially more viable. If In Cold Blood marked the second wave of crime writing after fiction and sensationalism, then I’ll Be Gone in the Dark marks the third of information and personal perspective, and it may very well take another fifty years before we figure out where we’re going next.
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 76, Pages 378
Whale Anatomy
This has been a long newsletter, so if you’ve made it this far and have been able to keep up in Moby-Dick as well, you deserve as much whale oil as your bucket can carry. Long before Michelle McNamara was reinventing the true crime book as an amateur investigator, Melville was giving his anatomical armchair masterclass on whale anatomy. I can confidently say that I understood very little of this week’s reading as Ishmael describes taking apart their captured whale (it’s as gross as it sounds), and my educated guess is that his scientific understanding leaves a little to be desired. As always after several chapters of oddball textbook, he does use all of this anatomy talk to great effect in one fairly wild scene, which “will be sure to seem incredible to some landsman”.