There is a current that runs through true crime writing, binding disparate authors from countries across the world. A question that so obsesses these writers that they will stop at nothing to unearth, to their satisfaction, the answer: what sort of a person could commit these violent crimes, and why?
Different things about these atrocities will attract the attentions of different authors. Some are upfront about the specific elements that grip them to each case, for example Emmanuel Carerre’s fascination with the emptiness of Jean-Claude Romand’s life and the perhaps tenuous link to his own quiet days in The Adversary. However, some obfuscate their involvement to a degree that a term has been coined, the invisible journalist, which suggests a book which spontaneously came into being without any intervention from the curious person.
Books like In Cold Blood by Truman Capote seek to detach subject and writer to an extent that, while perhaps not dishonest in the truest sense of the word, could definitely be called disingenuous. Nowhere within the text of the book is the reader introduced to Capote and his motivations. What is the source of his obsession with Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, for what but obsession drives someone to pen 343 pages about a crime? He declines to say, as well as omitting any information about his research process or interviewing techniques – perhaps because, as it was later revealed, he received a significant amount of uncredited help from Harper Lee.
When originally published as a four-part serial in The New Yorker, In Cold Blood featured an ‘Editors Note’ stating that “All quotations in this article are taken either from official records or from conversations, transcribed verbatim, between the author and the principals.” However, when one stops to think about this, it becomes obvious that it is at best, an exaggeration. Capote repeatedly includes thoughts or conversations that took place involving people who were subsequently murdered before he could extract these details. This exchange between Nancy and Kenyon Clutter is one such example:
“Good grief, Kenyon. I hear you!”
As usual, the devil was in Kenyon. His shouts kept coming up the stairs.
‘Nancy! Telephone!’
Barefoot, pajama-clad, Nancy scampered down the stairs.”
The first chapter, ‘The Last to See Them Alive’, contains multiple examples of this.
Peering behind the curtain past the book’s story and into its methods of construction raises further questions about the nature of the non-fiction novel as an entity. When the invisible journalist is detached utterly from the text, there is no sense of what has been pieced together through painstaking research, what has been embellished for the sake of the story, and what has been wholly invented.
If the topic at hand was the brutal murder of a family, the minutia is vital for accurately conveying the story in its entirety. Capote himself confirmed that at least one scene (the last one, between the detective Alvin Dewey and Nancy Clutter’s best friend Sue, was entirely fabricated. This casts a shadow of doubt across the whole book, creating suspicion where before there was trust. More recent examples, such as David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Anse Seierstad’s One Of Us, provide detailed accounts of their research processes and methodologies, ensuring a huge degree of trust in their reportage.
However, despite these inaccuracies and fabrications, In Cold Blood’s biggest failing is that it is not a book about a murder and the family who were the victims. It is a deep dive into the men who killed them, a subtle but important difference.
True crime writing, by its very nature, aims to tread the knife edge between exploratory and exploitative. A person who was the victim of a murder has been deprived of the opportunity to tell their own story, and it is the responsibility of the journalist to take up that mantle and provide an account that explores the victims in detail. Neither In Cold Blood nor The Adversary neglect this entirely but the scales are tipped in the favour of the villains of these tales.
The victims are not the centre of the story; they are a catalyst exploited into a portrait of the people who killed them. As Carrere says, “It was to him that I felt I owed consideration because, wishing to tell this story, I saw it as his story.” Romand, however, is the one who keeps his voice – the victims are silenced, and who will tell their story?
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Student journalist & freelance writer. Check out Quick Play, where I review video games that are 10 hours or less.
