What Does Our True Crime Obsession Say About America?

Writers Jack Womack and Michael P. Daley are old pals and sometime collaborators. Daley edited Womack’s cultural history of the flying saucer craze Flying Saucers Are Real! (Anthology Editions, 2016). Womack edited Daley’s crime biography Bobby BlueJacket: The Tribe, The Joint, The Tulsa Underworld (First To Knock, 2018). Crime and societal breakdown are themes in both Womack and Daley’s works. Womack’s novels envision dark near futures, exploring worlds like the dystopian New York City of Random Acts of Senseless Violence. Daley often records troubled pasts in detailed cultural histories like Bobby BlueJacket. When it comes to their own reading, Womack and Daley also both maintain expansive non-fiction crime libraries. A few days ago they rehashed some of the more memorable and obscure entries in the “true crime” genre and discussed what true crime reading means in America.

Michael P. Daley: For me, non-fiction crime books are probably the best way to try to understand what it means to live in America. You can explore the county’s proverbial “superego”—which are the laws. And at the same time the country’s “id”—which are the desires that’d cause you to break those laws.

Jack Womack: Not to mention the ego. Which in this case I’d think of as William Macy’s car salesman in Fargo—where he’s trying to get it right but he’s like “Oh no! I can’t! I can’t!”

MPD: I mean if you say “true crime” to someone on the street, all they’re thinking of is like serial killer books. But some of our favorite books are the societal books. I’m thinking of books where there is an awareness of a complex world, as opposed to just titillating the reader with degradation.

JW: The social context is always so important. One of the books in my library is The List by Chet Dettlinger and Jeff Prugh (1983), which is about the Atlanta Child Murders of like 40 years ago. But it’s a huge book because it not only covers the crimes, but it also covers the entire background of the community and Atlanta and the history and the entire thing. And some books do an excellent job of that, you know, even if they’re not the most exciting to read sometimes. In Cold Blood (1966)—that’s amazingly written. That’s beautifully written. But then the aesthetics almost begin to outweigh the subject matter. And that can often not be a good thing. But you cannot beat Herbert Asbury’s books on New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. Nobody does books like that anymore.

MPD: But there’s a flip side. We talk about a social consciousness, but would as many people read about the history of Atlanta, for example, if it wasn’t accompanied by reporting on grisly abominations? Perhaps “the crime” is necessarily the delivery system for larger ideas, because otherwise few would care.

JW: Grisly abominations are key to getting attention in many areas of life, it seems to me. Then again, sometimes you just want the basic information. John Dean’s The Indiana Torture Slaying (1966) for example. That’s just the awful details about a ghastly torture and murder of a teenage girl via a happy heartland family in the middle of Indiana.

MPD: I’m also interested in books that explore the mundane or everyday aspects of criminal culture. That humanize I guess—where there is nuance and a reflection of life as it is. I’m thinking of Gay Talese’s Honor Thy Father (1971) or Ron Padgett’s Oklahoma Tough (2003). Both of those books are about underworld life, but they’re intermixed with family squabbles and tenderness.

JW: There’s also the personalized crime memoir. Like, do you remember the books written by the women who didn’t get picked up by Ted Bundy? Or, Fugitives (1934), “the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, as told by the mother of Bonnie and the sister of Clyde.” It’s obviously been ghostwritten, but it is their narrative. It’s one of the insta-books that came out in the wake of their getting shot down. And then there’s the wonderful book Love Murders of Harry F. Powers: Beware Such Bluebeards by Evan Allan Bartlett (1931). That’s actually the basis for Night of the Hunter. But the author was Powers’ former attorney. He defended him, lost, and then wrote a book about him.

MPD: The family aspect of Fugitives reminded me of the well-known Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). That’s the one where the former LAPD guy reopens the Black Dahlia case, only to discover that the killer was his own dad, who just happened to be the abortion doctor to the stars in 1940s Hollywood. That’s another one where, to your point, it’s about a crime but also about a world. You go in-depth into both Hollywood and social issues like how covert abortions were at the time. But there’s also the first-person crime memoir like Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (1926).

JW: Oh, You Can’t Win. That’s the top one. Sister of the Road (1937) runs a close second. But You Can’t Win—it’s so accepting of the nature of reality.

MPD: How would you describe his reality?

JW: Jack takes life for what it is, because he knows what’s fightable and what isn’t. And he knows the help of the Johnsons is always necessary. It’s a much more realistic take on life than many had at the time and many do today. It’s important to read as a historical document, certainly, but in circumstances it can be useful as an internal guidebook.

MPD: Memoirs like his have a beautiful existential aspect, where you can really see through the eyes of a single person positioned against the world. And similar to the memoir, there’s the first-person criminology document, like the University of Chicago ones from the 1930s. There, a sociologist kind of helps the subject produce a memoir of sorts. Edwin Sutherland did one called The Professional Thief (1937).

JW: Or like Whiz Mob (1955) or The Big Con (1940) by David Maurer. Wonderful books exploring the techniques of cons and cheats and the exploitation of greenhorns one way or the other.

MPD: In that case, I’m also thinking of Omar the Beggar’s Panhandler’s Handbook (1977).

JW: Not unlike Repairmen May Gyp You (1949).

MPD: That’s a whole other sub-genre—the self-defense crime books. Are You Safe From Burglars? (1971) is special—written by a burglar named Robert Earl Barnes. It’s superficially a book to help you protect your home, but it’s really just a manual to go out and safe-crack.

JW: Exactly! It’s just like: “Let me give you this book explaining which exact streets you can avoid that have all of the houses of prostitution on them…”

MPD: But then there’s the law enforcement perspective, too.

JW: Jack Webb’s The Badge (1958). I was never able to read that book without hearing Jack Webb’s voice reading it, because I just grew up with him. Bernard Spilsbury’s forensic books are very good too. That’s actually more like “post-mortem crime.” Did I give you Chicago Murders (1945)?

MPD: Yes indeed. Part of the “Regional Murder Series.”

JW: That was a great series. The problem there was that some cities were much better for murders than others.

MPD: Chicago Murders calls to mind The Gang by Frederic Thrasher (1927) or Explosion of Chicago’s Black Street Gangs: 1900 to Present by Useni Eugene Perkins (1987)—again it’s like crime books are an entry point into the social history that informs the present moment. Also related to the subject of Chicago, I was reading a book about Big Bill Thompson—Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image (1988). He was in some ways kind of like a proto-Trump style mayor of Chicago.

JW: Oh yes. I know Big Bill.

MPD: And I was surprised to find that, even prior to Capone’s era, Chicago was described by papers in other cities, particularly by those on the East Coast, as being this vice-den, corrupt, hyper-violent locality. I didn’t realize the reputation went back to the city’s origins more or less. Though a favorite, Herbert Asbury’s Chicago: Gem of the Prairie (1940), does discuss some early malfeasances. But yeah, Chicago’s always kind of been New York’s straw man.

JW: Exactly! None of the cities in the Northeast really have any room to talk. Boston. New York. Philadelphia. I mean please. Atlantic City. We have rich traditions ourselves up here.

MPD: Speaking of Atlantic City, there’s the business/crime classic: Temples of Chance by David Johnston (1992).

JW: There’s probably more books about American crime than there are about Lincoln. When you talk about international crime, you’re taking in everything from Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder (1827) all the way through Jack the Ripper, which I guess is the first major event that led to the crime text after all, in terms of the public.

MPD: Why are people so interested in serial killer texts?

JW: In the case of Jack the Ripper, I think it’s purely Sherlock Holmes overlap. But with your average Ed Gein say, I don’t know.

MPD: Serial killing is so extreme and, because of that, maybe it’s hard to be actually emotionally invested as a reader. And that lack of emotional investment, therefore, makes the reading tolerable, while it is incredibly dark at the same time. Like serial killer books absolve the reader of social responsibility in ways that other crime books don’t. “Crime” as a concept is the most socially-minded concept there is. It revolves questions of power, community, justice, race, class, monopolies on violence, and so on. But some serial killer narratives, being essentially rarer cases of pathology, often circumvent all these questions. And because questions are circumvented, they don’t beg an answer of the reader. So, maybe serial killer books are “light” reading.

JW: They certainly were light reading for about fifteen years there. They were a fad in the 1980s and 1990s. It was during that time that Neil Gaiman did the early issue of The Sandman (1989–1996), which takes place at a serial killers convention in the Midwest. By the 90s, you had those zines like Answer Me! (1991–1994) and those other horrible things. At the same time, you had fun things like Murder Can Be Fun. I remember when every Barnes & Noble or Borders had an enormous true crime section and most of the titles were essentially Lifetime Serial Killer Movies in print. And all too often even when you had a crime that was genuinely out of the ordinary, the author writing about it wasn’t. Judging from Netflix, I gather a number of these crimes go straight to documentary now. And, like the books, a few are good and most aren’t. But yes, serial killer books are a part of… normality, at least in our world.

MPD: The 1980s and 1990s were pre-social media. And social media creates the sensation of having skin in the game, politically and socially, even though it’s partially an illusion. Back then maybe there was more freedom to recede into weird or dark zones of the mind. That was a period of ironic distance. The world was further away.

JW: There was about 15 years there where it seemed like people were trying to not let anything happen if they could possibly keep from it. And that’s when the “serial killer thing” started. It was very odd. If I were a Crowleyian, I’d think there was some Thelemic Ronald Reagan stuff going on. But there’s just so many more awful things going on now. The crimes you now notice in the media are the horrible school and workplace shootings—essentially they’ve become the predominant media crime of our age. It’s just depressing. It’s just a dead end in so many ways.

MPD: Analyzing the cultural consumption habits of mass shooters would be telling, like their favorite TV, websites, music. From what I’ve read, it always seems to be the greatest hits of American garbage culture—really just the worst culture we produce as a country.

JW: The blend that’s been developing over the past twenty years is just… not good. When I see Milton Cooper talking about flying saucers—and in the middle of it he sticks in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—things are just changing there. Sometimes I’m just speechless. So much information is coming in. If you don’t have a sense of history or of science, so much information that comes in will just bounce right off you. It’s a really dangerous situation.

MPD: Do you think the nature of future true crime books will change because of this?

JW: I’ve thought about this for a while. Ultimately, I can’t help but think the good old “Who/What/How/Why Was So-and-So Killed?” will continue to command the field.