[crime] Sleazy, bloody and surprisingly smart: In defense of true crime … an appreciation of true crime books …
The very thing that makes true crime compelling — this really happened — also makes it distasteful: the use of human agony for the purposes of entertainment. Of course, what is the novel if not a voyeuristic enterprise, an attempt to glimpse inside the minds and hearts of other people? But with fiction, no actual people are exploited in the making.
I love crime fiction, too, but lately I’ve come to appreciate true crime more, specifically for its lack of certain features that crime fiction nearly always supplies: solutions, explanations, answers. Even if the culprit isn’t always caught and brought to justice in a detective novel, we expect to find out whodunit, and that expectation had better be satisfied.
An Appreciation Of True Crime Books
This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2014 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Books, Crime.
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