On Light and Dark: True Crime in October
On the Sunday evening before the Thanksgiving holiday, my husband and I arrived in Alabama. The road was not lit. Through the headlights of our rented SUV, I glimpsed a sign that read "Murder Creek" over a bridge. My husband said he'd seen an old woman on a rocking chair on a front porch, sitting like a spectre. We had been listening to the audiobook of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote in preparation for our visit to the Monroe County Museum the next morning, but now we shut it off. My husband had never read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, despite loving the 2005 film Capote and both of us teaching the genre of the "nonfiction novel" in our academic writing classes. My husband had even come around to my enduring love of true crime after listening to the horror/true crime comedy show Last Podcast on the Left with me for the past year—yet he had somehow missed the work that launched (or merely tapped into, depending on who you ask) the popular fascination with true crime and stylistically created the genre as we know it today. Truman Capote was born in New Orleans, Louisiana but raised by his mother's relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. His next-door neighbour was Nelle Harper Lee, who would go onto write To Kill A Mocking Bird, win a Pulitzer, and accompany Capote on his research trips to Holcomb, Kansas for In Cold Blood. When Capote heard of the 1959 quadruple murder of a family for what seemed to be no reason, he'd already written Other Voices, Other Rooms (his first novel where, like Lee's first novel, there are fictional characters based on one another), the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, and some shorter pieces. Lee had finished the draft for Mockingbird and felt at loose ends. Their trip to investigate the murder of the Clutter family seemed like the best use of their time. They interviewed the townspeople and police, along with the apprehended murderers Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith. Right away, Capote was drawn to Perry's plight. Born of a Cherokee mother and a violent father, abandoned and abused as a child, yet still so full of dreams, Perry seemed to embody all aspects of Capote's childhood that he could fully articulate for himself. In Cold Blood's prose is compelling, moving, and innovative. Capote seamlessly weaves the story of the two criminals alongside the last days of the Clutters, adding human elements to both tales that are horror stories for very different reasons. When the Clutters violently exit the story, we see the aftermath in the townspeople and the surviving family alongside the prosecution and eventual hanging of the men who committed the murder. This structure is now standard for true crime writing, with perhaps better-than-average prose, but Capote is one of the first of his kind to depict crime in this manner. By narrating these events through an outsider's lens, he presents a story that is both light and darkness, both fiction and fact. This is the main reason why I return to this novel so often, and why I think it—along with true crime as a whole—is the best kind of reading for the month of October. It seems I'm not the only one, either. Netflix released the second season of Making a Murderer on October 19th. My Favorite Murder has been the go-to favorite podcast for some time, with three other true crime series in the top ten according to Stitcher's most recent list. Even older shows like Forensic Files are now receiving constant play through YouTube, Netflix, and syndication. While the ethics of this interest has been questioned—aren't we just revelling in someone else's pain? I think there's something more profound than sheer voyeurism happening here. It's not merely the gruesome details of death or terrifying things that strangers do to one another that scare us for the month of October. As a genre, true crime demonstrates that though someone has broken the law and committed a horrible act, people are outraged about it. More often than not the perpetrator is caught and prosecuted. Though justice may never blot out the initial violence, there is a sense of order restored when these narratives end. Our cultural obsession with true crime stems from this strong sense of justice, not merely a morbid fascination with gore or the broken-down lives of others. At the end, we want the bad guy to be put away, even if we complicate notions of who—or what—the bad guy really is. Truman Capote's hometown also embodies this need for justice. Driving into Alabama at night made everything seem spooky and uncanny, but in the morning, as my husband and I visited the Monroe County Museum, we were overwhelmed by light. Our tour guides were kind and charming. The displays for both Truman Capote and Harper Lee were larger and far more detailed than we expected. At the centre of this museum was the courthouse used as the model in the film version of To Kill A Mocking Bird. As my husband and I explored the rest of Monroeville, we realized that everything was structured around that courthouse. Everything was structured around justice itself. Both Harper Lee and Truman Capote grew up with a strong sense of justice anchoring their work. Even in the face of violence, this motivation only became stronger. I thought I understood all this before, but after seeing their hometown for myself, and on Thanksgiving Day no less, I understand why Perry—as much as the Clutters—fascinated Capote. He wanted more. I thought my husband and I had gone to this place to be scared, but I only ended up feeling thankful instead.
