This talk is based on Jean Murleys Edgar Award-nominated book The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture. The book is an examination of the true-crime genre in various textual and visual forms—magazines, books, films, television programs, and the Internet—within popular culture. The lecture will present an overview of the book along with highlighted findings in the form of true crime magazine covers and content, material about high-profile criminal events such as the Helter Skelter murders, and a look at some contemporary true-crime treatments in blogs and television programs.
In the way that real murder is narrated, shaped, and transformed into entertainment for consumers of popular culture, true crime has become a genre that promises truth yet delivers formulaic fantasy. As an attempt to make meaning of violence in American society, true crime is preoccupied with both the factual and mysterious or unknowable aspects of murder, as both forensic science and the enduring mystery of murder are highlighted in contemporary true-crime. The genre also posits the centrality of the individual killer and victim, particularly in its relentless focus on the figure of the psychopath as the center of narrative attention and emotional concern. In its different pop culture iterations, true crime posits a law-and-order ideology of containment while offering multiple and often-contradictory messages about gender, race, and class. As a formula-driven genre, true crime is conservative and predictable, but it also holds unexpected surprises that challenge assumptions, such as the fact of its largely female readership and audience. True crime is also the site of a dramatic renegotiation and revaluation of the rhetoric of evil, and is one of the sites in American public discourse where that rhetoric is used without irony, and where notions and definitions of evil are presented without ambiguity. When seen within its proper historical context, true-crime emerges as a vibrant and meaningful strand of popular culture, little-understood and often devalued as lurid and meaningless pulp reading and viewing.
Most fundamentally, The Rise of True Crime takes seriously a popular art form in its analysis and appraisal of underrepresented or trivialized aspects of the true-crime genre, such as mass-market paperbacks, cable-tv forensics and cold-case series, documentary films about serial killers, and true-crime web logs for fans of the genre. Criticism of true-crime, when it appears at all, usually focuses on the more highbrow examples, such as In Cold Blood or The Executioners Song. This book challenges the thinking, still current among some scholars and literary critics, that tabloid popular genres are fleeting and irrelevant. The Rise of True Crime—and this lecture—offers an overview of American murder narration as it examines the cultural work of true-crime, work that is important, compelling, and often misunderstood or ignored entirely.
Jean Murley received a B.A. in English from Hunter College in 1997, and a Ph.D. in English, with a certificate in American Studies, from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2004. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Queensborough Community College (CUNY), where she teaches courses in writing, American literature, mystery and detective fiction, and American popular culture. Her current research interests include crime literature, representations of violence in American popular culture, and hip-hop music and culture. She has published an article about Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe in Understanding Evil: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Rodopi Press, 2003) and an encyclopedia entry on contemporary true-crime literature in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading (2008). The Rise of True Crime is her first book; it has been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America for the best critical/biographical book of 2008.
