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RARA-AVIS: True Crime?
Any interest in a "true crime" thread?
Last August, Alex Ross (New Yorker) traced true crime bestsellers way back
to the 18th century--believe one could date them earlier (Lazarillo, at
least).
Since Capote, later Mailer, recently with Ellroy's well received book about
his mother's murder, there seems to be an inevitable urge to turn from hard
boiled fiction to hard boiled reality--not that the two were that far apart
in the first place. In preparing for a library discussion program on In
Cold Blood, I ran across Capote's statements about authors as outsiders,
hence more sympatico with the outsiders of death row. (And Conroy's Prince
of Tides, autobiographical as it is, makes us wonder about the artist as
murderer.)
Is there an urge to (finally) just fill out the research, rather than turn
it into fiction? [My assumption: That the quality hard boiled writers,
like Hammett, have real cases to draw from.]
Who else has done this, especially after achieving success as a fiction writer?
Does the Chesterfield, Va. library system, other systems, receive many
complaints about "true crime"? Helter Skelter, for instance?
Which books would people nominate as "true crime" classics, and why?
Bill Hagen
billha@ionet.net
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