Unraveling True Crime Novels (without all the red string)
Hey Friends,
The subject this time is true crime. In keeping with my current reading list and my research reading for my own projects, this time I'm recommending Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone In The Dark (2018) about Joseph DeAngelo aka the Golden State Killer aka the Original Night Stalker aka the East Area Rapist aka the Visalia Ransacker, a serial burglar, rapist and murderer who committed dozens of crimes up and down the state of California from 1976 to 1986, an epic spree that dovetails with some of the true-crime aspects of my novella Tania the Revolutionary about the Manson Family, responsible for nine murders in the Los Angeles area in 1969, and about the Symbionese Liberation Army which committed kidnapping, murder, bank robberies and bombings in LA, San Francisco and Sacramento from 1974 to 1976.
McNamara's book is noteworthy for essentially being three books rolled into one. The most horrific of the three is a true-crime novel ala Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, based on police reports and victim accounts, one that puts the reader at the scene for several of DeAngelo's most heinous crimes.
The second book is about how Michelle McNamara, a plain freelance writer, became so doggedly determined to help catch the GSK that she became a factor, according to certain members of law enforcement, contributing to DeAngelo's 2018 arrest.
The third book is a straightforward police procedural about the advent of DNA evidence and genealogy databases like Ancestry.com, a necessary evolution in crime-fighting, without which DeAngelo would never have been caught.
There is a surprising and emotional twist here also, having to do with McNamara's sudden, unforeseen death from a heart condition five years before the arrest. McNamara's unfinished story had to be book-doctored to completion by two fellow researchers and her husband, the comedian and actor, Patton Oswalt.
And speaking of the 1960s and true-crime books, here's one that might have gotten by you: Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel Picnic At Hanging Rock. I've always been a fan of this book and I've always had a suspicion that Alice Munro, that towering Canadian story writer, now 92, is too.
If you want proof, read Joan Lindsay's novel about several girls and a governess who disappear on a school trip in 1900 in the outback of Australia.
Then read Alice Munro's story "Open Secrets" from her 1994 collection of the same name about the disappearance of several girls and their teacher in the Canadian wilderness in a never-stated year. Placed side by side, it seems arguable that Munro's story was influenced by Lindsay's 1967 novel. The difference is that Lindsay leaves her mystery very much more open than Munro's.
Lindsay had some profound spiritualist leanings and wanted to float the possibility that reality is permeable and things are sometimes coming through it into our realm. And perhaps we are sometimes slipping through ourselves and never being seen again. Before WWI, before we entered the modernist period, spiritualism simply worked as a plot element in a way that it doesn't now. Ghosts worked better, too, as a device and still seemed to naturally belong in storytelling from before the leap we made into the modern era.
The difference between the periods is obvious in Munro's story, who was not a writer who messed around much with romance. Munro's treatment of the disappearances in her story is stolidly realistic: the cause is sex or lust or actually the destructive feelings that often come out when men and women have sex. Though the disappearances of the girls are never explained, in Lindsay's or Munro's versions, the subtext of Munro's story is the confusion of lust with the desire to inflict harm that leads to so much criminal behavior by men against women. So Munro's version suggests that the reason girls disappear is not at all mysterious, that it is an open secret, meaning not really a secret at all.
A documentary I suggest you see is Descendant, about the slave ship Clotilda, and how its owner, Timothy Meaher, snuck a human cargo of 110 souls into American waters off the coast of Alabama in 1859, dozens of years after the 1807 federal statute prohibiting the importation of slaves into America. Zora Neale Hurston wrote her book Barracoon -- not published until 2018 -- about Cudjo Lewis, a former slave who arrived in the hold of that ship, and who she met and interviewed.
For any new readers: My novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.