One of my favorite genres is True Crime, and I loved to read this compilation on Daily Beast of the Best True Crime books.
I have read all of those, and in the case of In Cold Blood
An interesting case is the case of Fatal Vision
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I never liked “Fatal Vision” (I’m firmly in Malcolm’s camp, although I’ve never read her book. The case infuriates me too much. I had to step aside from it.) but I love love love McGuinness’s “Blind Faith,” about the Rob Marshall case from Toms River, NJ. It was great — such a case study of a sociopathic personality.
Hmmm – I haven’t read Blind Faith, I will have to check it out. I certainly felt more queasy about McGuinness’s actions after reading Malcolm’s piece, which I believe started as an article for The New Yorker, and got so much press that it was turned into a book. She makes a really good case. McGuinness replied in turn – it was a war on the op-ed pages, but Malcolm is so cool-headed, so logical, she pretty much demolished him.
She also wrote a fantastic book called The Silent Woman, about the challenges of writing a biography about Sylvia Plath, which ended up being about the obsessives of the world, and also the Hughes family, who held the copyrights to Plath’s work, and acted as gatekeepers in a way that was really detrimental to open conversation about Plath.
Malcolm’s good stuff.
But I will check out Blind Faith!
Blind Faith was made into a TV movie starring Joanna Kerns and Robert Urich. At the time, Joanna Kerns was still on Growing Pains, and she introduced her TV daughter, Tracey Gold, to Roby Marshall, the oldest son of Rob Marshall. (Roby was serving as a consultant on the film.) They married and are still married today.
I need to get out more.
I actually started to read Until Proven Innocent about the Duke lacrosse team and it made me so enraged I couldn’t continue the book. I do want to read that, though – sounds like it was a great example of dogged investigative reporting. But even thinking about those guys and how they were railroaded makes me see red.
I suppose that counts as “true crime”, although I am pretty sure it is shelved under things like “Current Affairs” at Barnes & Noble.
Nice work from you, Lisa! It’s like you have the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon database enclosed in your mind!
Oh, don’t even get me started on the Duke lacrosse case. There is not a Hell hot enough for Mike Nifong. I’m not a proponent of the death penalty, but damn. Just bankrupting him and disbarring him and his spending one day in jail is not enough. Not enough.
Yeah, I feel the same way – I think I got through the first chapter and I was already seething too much to continue. Maybe I don’t NEED to read the book, since it just convinces me of what I already know and feel. But still: they did some awesome reporting, and it’s a great service that this book exists – it’s an important book – so I thought I’d give it a shot. BAH! RAGE!!!!
Lisa – have you read much Ann Rule? Are you a fan?
I have every book she’s written. Well, except for the Tom Capano book. I’d already heard too much about that case to want to read any more about it.
Wambaugh’s The Onion Field is a favorite of mine; in part, I’m sure, because I first read it at the right age (13 or so) to still be jolted by the news that evil can stain, reaching out to you from the darkness even after all the bad guys have been rounded up and locked away. It honors the weight of what happened, that special burden all true crime stories must bear if we’re to forgive their inevitable trimming and telescoping of certain events, and imagining of others, to structure their narrative. As opposed to Echoes in the Darkness, which I only caught up with last year; there was an undercurrent to the meticulous narrative that kept me from trusting it, and a few minutes of research after finishing showed Wambaugh did indeed cross some lines in writing the book. (Though, as in the McGuinness case, I’m not sure Wambaugh was wrong in his conclusions.)
Bruce – it’s interesting your thoughts about crossing the lines. It’s a tough thing. Capote, to me, is the mark against which all such books should be measured – As you say, he makes no bones about the evil about what those two men did (“I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice man. I thought about it right up until I cut his throat.”) – and yet the two men emerged, as damaged delusional isolated beings – who, perhaps, would have just been petty criminals if they hadn’t met each other, and created another far more dangerous entity – as a pair. Perry Smith was obviously a bit in love with Dick, and afraid of him – and in Perry Dick found his most willing partner. He had probably maxed out all of his other contacts by that point.
To me, it is the sensitivity with which these terrible men are drawn – not explained, but portrayed – that elevates In Cold Blood over many others. It reads like a novel, and so Capote put his own stamp on it, obviously – if you read Ann Rule’s stuff, and I love it, it doesn’t read like THAT. She definitely (to me anyway) seems more like a JOURNALIST. More of a reporter.
Not that that’s good or bad, it just gives Capote’s book a more poetic feel than some others in the genre.
Was that crossing a line? Perhaps. He fictionalizes it – even the way he chooses to open and close the book (brilliant – the waving grain of the fields) – shows a strong editorial bent. He is not just telling us the facts – he is ARRANGING them.
The more I learn about McGuinness and how he handled MacDonald, the more suspect his book seems. I still find it highly unlikely that a random bunch of crazy hippies would break into his house – while he was there – and kill everyone – while he, a man who was trained to be a killer – passed out in the hallway and woke up with a bump on his head and his entire family dead. But the crime scene was totally tampered wiht, that’s a given – it was a total MESS – so evidence that seemed like a done deal was actually a mistake from the bumbling CID investigators. That leaves a huge loophole for reasonable doubt.
Every couple of years there is a profile of MacDonald in People magazine – when yet another appeal comes up or whatever – and he still maintains his innocence.
I have to say one interesting aspect of McGuinness’s book, and this is purely subjective: I have such a visceral dislike of Jeffrey MacDonald (not because of what he was accused of doing, but his personality in general – that lightweight macho party-boy type) – that I am very willing to believe in his guilt, merely because I find him so repulsive. Now that is not how our justice system is supposed to work – and I am speaking just as a layperson here, not an expert – but I do wonder if McGuinness had the same visceral response to the guy, and so that clouded his judgment. Who knows.
Ann Rule’s memories of working with Ted Bundy at the rape hotline center (of all things) are amazing because he was a “stranger beside her”, and her memories and observations are quite acute – like any good homicide detective – but to imagine that that guy, that guy right next to her – could do all these crazy things … She became so obsessed with it that it basically launched her career. Pretty wild.
I haven’t read The Onion Field. Probably should!
Sheila–The line crossing I laid at Wambaugh’s feet strikes me as more damaging than Capote’s artful arrangement (to use your term). I agree that In Cold Blood remains the standard-bearer in the genre I believe it’s credited with spawning, and that the book’s poetic breadth is valuable enough to overcome the problematic aspects of Capote’s empathy. And at least that empathy is intended to be something universal, a chronicle of a tragedy that stretched back years and blasted every life it touched, including the perpetrators.
Whereas in Wambaugh it was a matter of seeing how the author extended his sympathy according to the role they played in his (and the prosecution’s) theory of the crime. If you’re unfamiliar, it was a byzantine crisscross of a conspiracy, with the architect simultaneously setting up a deranged triggerman to kill his lover, all the while dragging his own associates along on a series of alibi-providing wild goose chases, feeding them paranoid lines about the assassin’s volatility and threats of violence. It requires those associates, various hangers-on of a popular school teacher, to be rather enormous dupes, strung along by the most blatant lies and reversals, and Wambaugh portrays them as such: sweetly trusting lost souls who should have known better, but got swept along by their friend’s fabrications.
Which is not beyond the realm of plausibility; any of us can accept even outrageous tales from someone we respect and trust. But then neither is the idea that the man convicted of actually doing the shooting–a highly disturbed individual no doubt, and possibly already a murderer independently of this crime–was set up by the teacher and his associates. By portraying the two principals as pure evil and the associates as gullible naifs, Wambaugh doesn’t reject the notion so much as seal his case so tight no outside air can seep in; it’s this claustrophobic, penned-in narrative, where everyone reveals precisely the character traits necessary for them to play their determined roles and no other, that had me wondering about the story’s reliability.
And it turns out that the convicted gunman was released (due to prosecutorial misconduct, which didn’t rule out his actual commission of the crime but does raise that tricky reasonable doubt), and Wambaugh paid the chief investigator in the case contingent upon the arrest he predicted being made. Which stirs the pot rather more murkily than Capote refusing to demonize the men when contemplating the evil that men do.
An aside: Philip Seymour Hoffman or Toby Jones? I plunk for the latter myself, and his film, though I pleasantly find Keener and Bullock practically a draw.
Yes, Toby Jones all the way. I wasn’t an admirer of Capote – I thought Chris Cooper was the best thing in it – he was FANTASTIC – I’m a fan of Hoffman, and enjoyed his performance, but I prefer the other.
The whole “writing of” In Cold Blood is a huge interest of mine – what Capote went through – the Gerald Clarke biography is seriously a highwater mark in terms of biography – Capote was quite a character. It’s amazing, how he basically lived with these Bible Belt people for years, got their confidence, and it certainly helped the book be what it was. He got “inside”. And he was such a fairy (a “fairy on the prairie” as he called that time in his life) – but I loved how he got these people to trust him. It certainly helps that book shine.