I’m reading Helen Garner’s diary at the moment, or rather her diaries, the three volumes recently released in the UK as a compendium, beginning soon after the publication of her first novel Monkey Grip in 1978 and carrying us through to the late 1990s. I’m currently in the middle of the eighties, just after the publication of perhaps her best-known work The Children’s Bach, which more or less coincides with the end of her second marriage. People talk about the clarity of her gaze, her merciless self-scrutiny and while all of that is true, what strikes me again and again is the calibre of her ambition, her genuine terror that she might not live up to her own high standards. She compares herself constantly with other writers and finds herself wanting, a necessary discipline that does not in the least diminish her ever-present joy in the practice of reading.
Even in the midst of life – and hers is an immensely social life, a tangled mass of friendships and rivalries and love affairs and motherhood – writing is central. She never seeks to downplay its importance and how I love her for that. I don’t believe in keeping writing stashed at the back of the cupboard, something that is done in spite of. Writing is because.
Garner has arranged her diaries as a series of vignettes. Only the years are given as a guide to where we are in her life. Individual entries are undated. They are like film stills, a pile of postcards, or photographs. You turn them over, one at a time. The year gradually accrues not through numbers but through narrative glimpses. Jump cuts. Sudden revelations. A life to lose yourself in. As I read I keep thinking about how Garner is now in her eighties and so I worry about her. I don’t want to lose her from this world, to lose this voice, this edgy, bracing, self-critical, fearlessly life-loving presence.
I know in advance that this volume will end with only one of Garner’s book-length works of narrative non-fiction out in the world: The First Stone, which was published in 1995. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014) will still be ahead of her. But even from where I am now in the 1980s, the qualities that make her a great writer of true crime – the acuity of observation, the rapacious curiosity, a quality of objectivity and a relentless capacity for asking questions, not only of others but especially of self – are nailed into place.
A surety of line, the apparently effortless ability to make ordinary language carry a meaning and a beauty that rises above itself. Garner, for all her fears to the contrary, is a great writer, period.
The first book of Garner’s I read was This House of Grief, which follows the trial of Robert Farquharson, accused in 2005 of killing his three sons by deliberately driving the car in which they were travelling into a reservoir. Less than a year earlier, Farquharson’s wife Cindy had left him, and Farquharson had become increasingly depressed and resentful as a result. The series of trials that led to Farquharson’s conviction took seven years to unfold, and Garner was present in the courtroom for every hearing. This House of Grief has, perhaps inevitably, been compared with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But it’s a very different book. Capote’s genius is in excising himself from the text entirely – except in the matter of the quality of his writing. Garner is there. She reveals not only the story but her process in telling it. She speaks and sometimes argues with others who are present, reporting their interactions in intimate detail. Like Capote, she finds herself becoming drawn into the circle of relatives and family friends who have been directly affected by the case. But where Capote rode out the emotional impact of such personal involvement in private, Garner’s difficulties and doubts are made plain in the text, becoming an inalienable part of the story she is telling. She asks the questions we ourselves might want to ask, often remaining openly uncertain about the answers she is given.
There is a perfection to Capote’s work that is somehow unassailable; Garner’s has an immediacy that arises from its openness to scrutiny, through its expressions of doubt, not only about casting judgement but, on occasion, about the whole enterprise.
As with her frank and self-searching account of a sexual harassment case in The First Stone, some critics found fault with Garner for not paying sufficient attention to the gender-specific aspects of the Farquharson case, most especially the nature and repetitive frequency of male violence. But one of the qualities I value most in Garner is that she has never been interested in filtering her observations or her writing through an ideological lens. She is interested in people and how they respond to the situations they find themselves in. Most of all she is interested in discovering the truth of what really happened.
This House of Grief had a powerful impact on me, not just in the shocking, harrowing story it was telling but in the way it was written. True crime literature has come in for censure – and I mean always, not just right now – for being exploitative, prurient, manipulative and even immoral. I would maintain that this is not a problem of content but of style. If you reach for cliches you will find your narrative lacking in nuance, in objectivity, in accurate reasoning. In any kind of storytelling but most of all when you are dealing in facts – especially painful facts, especially disputed facts – the chief responsibility of the writer is to strive for language that adequately conveys the nature of what is being described.
Exploitative true crime is not so much immoral as badly written. The work of a writer like Helen Garner is the antidote, the antithesis. In revealing to us the conflicted, contradictory and hard-to-discover facts and abiding contradictions of this terrible case she reveals to us ourselves, the extent of our prejudices, the divided nature of the society we live in.
On the day I started writing this, I read an interview in the Guardian with the writer Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold rightly gained attention for her 2019 book The Five, in which she re-examines the lives and circumstances of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper. In shifting the attention away from the women’s killer, she created a compelling new model for true crime literature as well as providing insight into a society that – sometimes subtly, often not at all subtly – insisted that murdered women were to some extent responsible for their own violent deaths. A hundred years later, the same set of attitudes became a determining factor in the botched police investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. If anything proves the need for the shift in thinking Rubenhold is advocating it is surely this. And yet – proving her own point – she ended up becoming the target of online abuse by ‘Ripperologists’, that peculiar subset of true crime enthusiasts who concern themselves with the unsolved (and now unsolvable) mystery of Jack the Ripper.
Certain extreme fringes of the fraternity were incensed, it seems, by all kinds of things: that Rubenhold was not sufficiently immersed in the ‘science’ of Ripperology for her opinion to have any currency; that she ‘hated sex workers’ because she insisted on undertaking a more nuanced (and factually accurate) examination of the victims’ backgrounds; that she dared to suggest that it didn’t matter all that much, actually, who the Ripper was.
They’re a funny bunch, Ripperologists. I’m not going to castigate them for their weird enthusiasm – or only those who go in for online harassment – because to an extent at least I get it. In every writer of true crime there is at least a little of the obsessive, a little of the Ripperologist. What I don’t get is: why Jack? Seriously, guys, we are never going to know. Move on. Rubenhold herself has moved on. Her new book, Story of a Murder, focuses on a crime that took place decades later but that commanded equal column inches at the time. Dr Crippen was often reported in the press as a ‘mild-mannered murderer’; through focusing once again on his victim(s), Rubenhold is intent on showing us that he was no such thing. That indeed there is no such thing.
Rubenhold has some fascinating things to say in her interview about true crime generally. ‘I’m not interested in straight true crime,’ she insists. ‘I’m interested in the darkness in human nature as seen through historical events. And I’m fascinated by how granular you can get in terms of historical understanding; I’m looking at material that a murder throws up – all the witness statements, all the trial papers, all the unspoken human experience.’
I find all this deeply relatable. In writing A Granite Silence, the stuff I kept coming back to was the quotidian detail and circumstance of ordinary lives. The first witnesses called in the trial of Jeannie Donald were working people – a lamplighter, a gas worker, a baker – who happened to be up and about on the street in question before anyone else. I kept coming back to these people – the slaters, the rag-and-bone men and especially the lamplighters. Their trade does not even exist now yet in 1934 it was still part of the normal street scene. Such details – like the items of furniture in a room I describe in the first pages of the novel – are luminous to me because they give us an insight into history as it is lived. To quote Rubenhold again, ‘that’s where the story is – it’s about people’s experience.’
I would add though that I think we need to be honest about our attraction to these kinds of stories. There’s a section of the commentariat that insists the current ‘obsession’ with true crime is a new thing, a toxic byproduct of capitalism, or celebrity culture, or (most popularly and inevitably) the internet. But that simply isn’t true. Going back to Jack the Ripper (if we must) the police file of bogus witness statements, prurient and salacious rumour-mongering, false sightings and – yes – dozens of people claiming to be the Ripper is as thick as any amount of similar correspondence they might receive today. Ditto the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, two full decades before widespread internet use. And the public fascination with high-profile murder cases goes back well before either.
There are many theories as to why that might be. I tend towards the belief that there is something mythic about these stories, something we recognise as being common to all of us. We draw together instinctively behind the headlines in sorrow for the victim, fear of the killer and fascination with the mystery. We feel horror at the violence and a sense of helplessness at the suffering of those left behind. We feel something else, too, something harder to describe. Not excitement so much as déjà vu. These crimes lay bare our fears, our vulnerabilities. We want to read about them because they are part of the definition of who we are.
I know all this, because I feel it, too. It is why I am drawn to write about such things.
In her truly excellent book Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe suggests that there are in fact four distinct categories of true crime junkie: those who identify with the victim, those who seek for justice, those who cast themselves in the role of detective and those – a very small group – who see themselves in the killer. Monroe gives potent examples from each category. I find her arguments convincing and compelling and for the record, as both reader and writer I would put myself firmly in the detective camp. I would also say about myself as a writer that I recognise and respond to the powerful energy of the mystery template in fiction and especially in non-fiction, that relentlessly nagging question: what really happened?
Personally, I don’t find anything wrong in this. How a reader – or a writer – relates and responds to true crime stories is a personal matter, the business of their own conscience. For me, that business depends on providing suitably persuasive answers to the question of why I am interested in a particular story, what I can bring to my account of it that might justify and make sense of that interest in literary terms. There have been moments – quite a few of them – in the last twelve months when I have doubted my ability and my desire to work in this field again. But then I have asked myself: what if I am good at it? What if I cannot, now, imagine doing anything else?
In her interview for the Guardian, Hallie Rubenhold reveals that her mother died while she was working on Story of a Murder. ‘It really made me reflect on being a historian, and documenting lives,’ she says. ‘Because there’s a start date and an end date. Life has a finite beginning and a finite end. This is your time. And that’s it.’
Her words for me are powerfully resonant, a true reflection of my own motivations in deciding to focus my attention on this kind of story.
FIVE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF TRUE CRIME WRITTEN BY WOMEN
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
‘[The journalist] is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.’ So opens Janet Malcolm’s interrogation of the ethics of journalism, and true crime journalism in particular. The journalist, Joe McGinniss, befriended and gained the confidence of the murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald, in order to write his bestselling 1983 book Fatal Vision. MacDonald quickly came to see McGinniss as his ‘man on the outside’ and possibly a route to being exonerated. Needless to say he was very, very wrong. Malcolm’s book is itself a kind of true crime narrative, brilliantly written and with a deeply personal understanding of what is at stake.
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson (2007)
Nelson’s aunt Jane was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969, while she was still a student. No one was convicted of the crime. The tragedy had always been there in Nelson’s background, but it wasn’t until 2005 that she addressed it in writing. Jane: A Murder is a hybrid work that includes poetry, prose and reportage to tell Jane’s story and to recover her identity from that of ‘murder victim’. The Red Parts is the continuation of that story some thirty-six years later, when a new suspect is identified and finally brought to trial. Nelson is a writer of powerful originality and both these books offer radical new perspectives on true crime as the subject of literature.
The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee (2015)
Carol Ann Lee is a historian and biographer who has written on a number of true crime subjects, including Myra Hindley and Ruth Ellis. The Murders at White House Farm is her exhaustive investigation of the 1985 Jeremy Bamber case, in which the then twenty-four-year-old Bamber was ultimately charged with the murders by shooting of five close relatives including his six-year-old twin nephews. Bamber continues to protest his innocence, now as then blaming his sister Sheila Caffell for the killings. This is one of those cases that now appears to be unsolvable. The only person still alive who knows the truth is Bamber himself – the ultimate unreliable narrator. Lee’s account, like all her work, is quiet, methodical, beautifully written and open to all arguments. Her careful reconstruction of the character, background, personal problems and appalling media portrayal of Sheila Caffell makes this book doubly worthwhile.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)
As well as being the most problematic, serial killers are for me the least interesting subjects of true crime literature – these men are violent, small-minded, narcissistic misogynists, end of. For this reason I read very few serial-killer-related narratives, especially US ones. Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the exception, a book that proves that any subject can be a worthy subject if the writer is sincerely motivated and equal to the task. McNamara made it her life’s work to discover the identity of the Golden State Killer, a notorious rapist and murderer who committed his horrific crimes throughout California during the seventies and eighties. McNamara died in 2016 with her book still unfinished and the killer still uncaught. The manuscript was brought to completion by McNamara’s husband, together with an investigative journalist and a true crime writer. The resulting book became an instant bestseller and recharged the continuing cold case with some much needed publicity. The murderer – a retired cop – was finally brought to justice just two months after the book’s publication.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza (2023)
Rivera Garza’s sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico in 1990. She was just twenty years old. Though the killer’s identity was widely known, he was never arrested. Some thirty years later, Rivera Garza attempts to gain access to the files that were kept on the case. Unwilling to expose themselves to scrutiny or criticism, the police prove to be an active impediment in her search for justice. Rivera Garza’s formally inventive and searching memoir examines the official response to the crime of femicide in Mexico amidst the systemic problems of entrenched machismo and a failure to understand or even recognise the increasing phenomenon of intimate partner violence. It is also a joyful, defiant celebration of Liliana herself, a young woman who, one feels instinctively, would be the first to admire the book that bears her name.