Much less likely to be criminals, women account for a disproportionate share of readers and writers of crime stories
By K.S.C
FIFTY years ago Truman Capote told an interviewer about his grand hopes for a new literary genre. “In Cold Blood”, an account of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, published in 1966, was the product of Capote’s belief “that journalism—reportage—could be forced to yield a serious new art form”. He called this art form the “nonfiction novel”, but it is better known as true crime. While the genre has proved popular, consistently appearing on the New York Times bestseller lists, Capote’s literary hopes for it have yet to be realised. True crime has traditionally been dismissed as tabloid-fuelled trash. Charles Graeber, himself the author of “The Good Nurse”, a book about the most prolific serial killer in American history, wrote in 2013 that: “Many ‘true crime’ offerings are pulpy quickies…human tragedy served as porno McNuggets.” There have recently been signs, though, that true crime may be becoming more respectable—a change driven by women.
When WBEZ’s podcast “Serial” first aired in 2014, it was downloaded over 5m times, and won both a loyal following and a Peabody journalism award. The first season reexamined the death of Hae Min Lee, a Baltimore teenager murdered in 1999, and her former boyfriend Adnan Syed, who was convicted the following year and is serving a life sentence. The second season, the sixth episode of which was released this week, is interrogating the unfolding case of Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier imprisoned by the Taliban for five years and now facing a court-martial for desertion and, possibly, a life sentence. While the buzz around the second season has been less intense, particularly since it has gone fortnightly, it still has plenty of listeners: the third episode was downloaded 2.8m times in the first week. “Serial” was co-created by Sarah Koenig, who also presents the show, and Julie Snyder, who acts as executive producer. In fact, of the 12 staff on the project, nine are women; in American print journalism, meanwhile, men get around 63% of the bylines, while online they have 58%.
Similar high-profile, true crime successes created by women can be found on television and in print. The late Ann Rule, a true crime writer, is famous for “The Stranger Beside Me”, the bestselling account of the life and crimes of Ted Bundy, whom Rule worked with briefly in the early 1970s. However, she began writing true-crime stories a decade before—using male pseudonyms at her editors’ insistence—and went on to write around two books each year. “Every Breath you Take”, published in 2001, sold over a million copies.
A study conducted in 2010 suggests that women are more frequent readers of true crime than men. The authors of the study ascribe this to women’s fear of violent attack, although the evidence is far from conclusive. Frankie Fyfield, a British crime-fiction writer who draws on her own work for the police and later for the Crown Prosecution Service, describes her writing as cathartic, a way of making sense of messy psychological and ethical dilemmas she encountered in her work. Before her death in 2015, Rule told the Seattle Times something similar. “I wanted to know why some kids grew up to be criminals and why other people didn’t. That is still the main thrust behind my books: I want to know why these things happen.”
“Making a Murderer”, the 10-part Netflix show released in December 2015, was filmed by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos over the course of a decade. The show pores over the case of Steven Avery, a Winconsin man convicted in 2005 for the murder of Teresa Halbach. Mr Avery was, at the time, suing the police department for $36m for their part in his wrongful arrest and 18-year imprisonment for another crime. Despite the blatant conflict of interest, police officers who weeks before had been deposed in the lawsuit were involved with the investigation of the murder. From the very beginning Mr Avery was the only suspect under suspicion and there have been allegations that evidence was tampered with.
A petition asking President Obama to pardon Mr Avery has gained nearly 500,000 signatures and the publicity generated by “Serial” has led to a post-conviction hearing to review Mr Syed’s case (it began on Wednesday, and is ongoing). But the question of individual innocence and guilt is almost beside the point. America incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country. Although it accounts for just 5% of the world's population, it houses 25% of the world's prisoners. Currently over 2.3m people—the vast majority of them men—are behind bars there. Clearly the American criminal justice system deserves more scrutiny. Perhaps the attention of women, who are so much less likely to be the perpetrators of violent crimes, will help lead to reform of the system of arrest, conviction, imprisonment and labour.
Correction: This article originally misidentified the partner-station which co-produced "Serial": it is Chicago's WBEZ, not New York's WNYC. Sorry.
