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Alice Bolin is the author ofDead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession.
I dont deny these stories have proliferated in the past five years.
Since the secret is out Oh you love murder?
entire TV networks, podcast genres, and countless limited-run docuseries have arisen to satisfy this rumbling hunger.
In 2016, after two critically acclaimed series about the O.J.
It was odd, hearingO.J.
or examine our collective obsession with it.
The difference between highbrow and lowbrow in the new true crime is often purely aesthetic.
They sift through evidence and reconstruct timelines as they make a run at create a coherent narrative from fragments.
This is what makes this style of true crimeaddictive, which is the adjective its makers most crave.
(This fact is subtly skewered in Gay Taleses creepy 2017 Netflix documentary,Voyeur.)
Then I realized that I am sort of one of them.
There are specimens of highbrow true crime that I love,CriminalandO.J.
They are sentimental and yet utterly graphic, clinical in their depiction of brutal crimes.
Its always talked around in discussions of why people like true crime: It is … funny?
Crime stories also might be less risky when they are more stilted, more clinical.
But there is a reason most reporters do all their research, then write their story.
She is able to do it, which means very little, since the crime occurred 15 years earlier.
Simply by merit of their popularity, highbrow crime stories are often riskier than their lowbrow counterparts.
Advocacy and intervention are complicated actions for journalists to undertake, though they are not novel.
That is maybe what irks me the most about true crime with highbrow pretensions.
Ive come to believe that addictiveness and advocacy are rarely compatible.
But in truth, this is is probably a feature, not a bug.
These are large-scale crimes whose resolutions, though not mysterious, are also not forthcoming.
(It is significant that all of these books are by women.
Theres alsoEar Hustle, the brilliant podcast produced by the inmates of San Quentin State Prison.
