Speaking about the art and craft of historical fiction in 2017, Hilary Mantel said she became a novelist because she had believed that it was too late for her to become a historian. When her first, monumental work about the French Revolution failed to find a publisher, she turned her attention instead to stories with a tighter focus, a more restricted circle of characters. But her reason for writing – and her way of thinking about history – remained unaltered. ‘The historian and the biographer follow a trail of evidence, usually a paper trail,’ Mantel explains. ‘The novelist does that too, and then performs another act: puts the past back into process, into action, frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their fates, with all their mistakes unmade.’
The same words might be said – might especially be said – of the novelist who chooses to base their work around the story of a crime that really happened. True crime is simply history as viewed through a particular lens, and as Mantel herself vividly argues, the historical record can only ever be partial. The reader looks to the novelist more as a companion than as a teacher, someone willing to accompany them on their journey into the past. Someone who will put the questions they themselves might ask.
There is some marvellous true crime writing out there: books that reconstruct trials, that pick apart police investigations, that interrogate the psychology of criminals and investigate their background. There are books that help us come to know the victims and to honour their memories. Some of these books are factual reconstructions, some are investigative journalism. Others are novels. In writing A Granite Silence I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use my skills as a novelist to take the reader back in time, to lead them to the street where the crime took place, to allow them to know the people who lived there as if they were their neighbours. I wanted to be free to glance off to one side, to let my imagination wander, to think about people whose lives are missing from the historical record.
True crime novelists, like historians, are passionate about the question of what really happened. I find constant inspiration in the work of those writers who have felt drawn to certain stories, who have followed them into the crannies behind the headlines. Writers who find their own way of telling the truth. Here are thirteen of them.
Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins (1934). Elizabeth Jenkins was a novelist, an historian and a biographer. She also wrote two important works of true crime fiction, which deserve to be better known. Harriet is an imaginative reconstruction of the so-called Penge Murder of 1877 in which four people conspired to cause the death of a vulnerable woman, Harriet Richardson, and her young child Tommy. Harriet, who had learning difficulties, had been left a large sum of money by an aunt – money Louis Staunton, a friend of the family, was keen to get his hands on. What happened to Harriet was horrific; it was also as complicated, unlikely and bizarre as the plot of any opera. Jenkins, who was born in 1905, remembered people still talking about the case fifty years after it happened. She tells Harriet’s desperate and enthralling story with precision, insight and empathy.
A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse (1934). When Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters were jointly accused of murdering Edith’s husband Percy in 1922, the case caught the public imagination to such an extent that it dominated the newspaper headlines for many weeks. A hundred years later and more, it is still exciting debate. In her fictional recreation of the ‘Ilford Murder’, Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s protagonist is Julia Starling, a young woman from a lower middle class background who marries deadly dull Herbert and finds herself falling for Leo, a young airman. With Leo often away on duty, Julia pours all of her dissatisfaction and longing into her letters. She begins to entertain fantasies of killing Herbert, and when the fantasy becomes a reality her letters turn into a weapon to be used against her. Fryn Tennyson Jesse – a great-niece of the poet – had a lifelong interest in true crime. Her 1924 book Murder and its Motives is still in print, and she wrote introductions to six of the Notable British Trials series, including the notorious trial of Timothy Evans and John Christie in 1957. She was a remarkable writer, whose journalism took her into war reporting and whose novelistic imagination surely made her identify with Edith Thompson, a woman whose ‘trial by media’ saw her executed on no other evidence than the fantasies of murder she had written down.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966). This is the one novel that inevitably crops up on every true crime reading list. There’s a reason for that, which is that it really is as good as everyone says, a book that anyone with an interest in true crime would have to read. Capote’s novel is often credited with being the first of its kind, which isn’t strictly true. What is true is that in Capote’s hands, this account of a Midwestern farming family and their murder at the hands of two disaffected young criminals attains the dimensions of classical tragedy. Capote has been accused of displaying too much sympathy for the murderers and insufficient attention to their victims, but I suspect that at least some of those who have said this have not read the book. What we get from Capote is restraint, empathy, a measured objectivity and just brilliant writing.
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979). It’s not difficult to trace the lineage from Capote’s In Cold Blood to Mailer’s magnum opus, which in its turn was the direct inspiration for Gordon Burn’s book about Peter Sutcliffe, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. Mailer’s novel tells the story of Gary Gilmore, a convicted armed robber who went on to commit two murders and who was the first person to be executed in the US following a moratorium on the death penalty that had lasted almost a decade. Like Capote, Mailer went directly to the source, interviewing friends, family and associates of Gilmore as well as police and legal counsel. His coverage of the trial and the debate around the death penalty – Gilmore refused to appeal his sentence – could have been a book in itself. I was only ten when Gilmore was executed but I have vivid memories of the headline news – indeed this was almost certainly my first and horrified realization of the fact that executions could still happen outside of the history books.
Mary Swann by Carol Shields (1987). An innovative, densely textured novel that makes use of both poetry and playscript, Mary Swann is the story of a ‘lost’ Canadian poet who grew up poor in rural Canada and whose death at the age of forty remains a mystery. The novel examines the effect of the poet’s life and death on various individuals in her orbit, including her would-be biographer and a shy provincial librarian. Shields wrote Mary Swann as a homage to the Vancouver poet Pat Lowther, who was brutally murdered by her husband Roy in 1975. Pat Lowther was prodigiously talented – her first poem was published in a local newspaper when she was ten. Roy was a failed poet, and bitterly jealous of his wife’s growing success. According to his daughter from a previous marriage, he was also violent and extremely troubled. With its literary theme, innovative form and embedded sense of mystery, Mary Swann was one of the novels that first awakened my interest in writing based around true events.
Libra by Don DeLillo (1988). There is a forensic quality to all of DeLillo’s writing, a pared-back brilliance that makes it a natural fit for true crime subjects, and here in Libra we get his take on one of the biggest. The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 has probably spawned more words on paper than any other murder (with the possible exception of Jesus of Nazareth) but DeLillo’s deep dive into the mind and chequered history of Lee Harvey Oswald is remarkable for very deliberately blending historical fact with imagined scenarios. DeLillo shows how the assassination could have happened – whilst maintaining his own stated belief that the truth behind Kennedy’s murder is most likely lost to history. Unsurprisingly, Libra generated plenty of controversy in the US. A review in the Washington Post accused DeLillo of being a bad citizen. ‘If novelists are bad citizens,’ DeLillo countered, ‘we’re doing our job.’ He gets my vote every time.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996). The Grace of the title is Grace Marks, a servant in the house of Canadian farmer and landowner Thomas Kinnear. In July 1843, Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, with whom he was having an affair, were shot and bludgeoned to death by James McDermott, another servant of the house and Grace’s lover. McDermott and Marks fled to the US, where they were soon apprehended. Both were convicted, though Marks was spared the death penalty. Before he was hanged, McDermott made a statement blaming Grace for the crimes, insisting that she was the ‘evil genius’ behind the plan, and that she had feigned madness in order to escape the gallows. Atwood’s novel takes place after the murders. Grace has been committed to an asylum and is something of a cause celebre. A doctor, Simon Jordan, is determined to win Grace’s confidence and to discover the truth: was Grace involved in the murders, or not? In the novel, as in life, the question remains unresolved.
Red Riding quartet by David Peace (1999 – 2002). Peace’s first four published novels take place against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, with the investigating police force revealed as corrupt, inefficient, and riven by internal feuds. Some characters keep returning from book to book; others are killed off, their deaths a warning to anyone trying to discover who was responsible. Peace’s language is bold, stark, uncompromising, as is his portrait of the social and political landscape that formed the backdrop to his own adolescence. It’s difficult to overstate the impact these books had on me when I first read them, most of all for their subverting of crime genre stereotypes. Peace does not offer any of the comforts of traditional crime fiction. What he offers is brilliant writing and an honesty about the nature of violence and the impact of poverty that few writers have matched.
Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn (2008). Though Gordon Burn’s career was cut tragically short – he died of cancer in 2009 at the age of sixty-one – the books he left behind have been powerfully influential. To write his 1984 book on the Yorkshire Ripper, Burn spent most of two years living in Sutcliffe’s home town, getting to know his friends and family in order to gain an authentic insight into his background. Burn’s later book about Fred and Rosemary West, Happy Like Murderers, saw him immersing himself in trial transcripts, police interviews and many other other first-hand accounts. Researching this horrific material had a severe impact on Burn’s mental health, and he said he would never write another true crime book. His final novel, Born Yesterday is the closest he came to revisiting the territory, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a single year – 2007 – and the news events that defined it, most notably the abduction and disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Burn said that he hoped the novel might give future readers a sense of how the raw material of news gets refashioned as history. It is a remarkable achievement. I have read this book several times now and am still hypnotized by it.
The Kills by Richard House (2013). In the vastness and complexity of its structure – four standalone novels that combine to create a single overarching narrative – The Kills bears comparison with David Peace’s Red Riding quartet. There are plenty of murders in The Kills, but the true crime being examined is the political chicanery, economic exploitation and environmental vandalism perpetrated by US-government-backed big business in the aftermath of the Iraq war. The ‘War on Terror’ kickstarted by 9/11 is revealed as a free-for-all in which the only working currencies are money and violence. As well as being a masterpiece of formal invention, The Kills is a thrilling, disquieting, thought-provoking piece of fiction that reveals bitter truths about our own time.
Dead Girls by Selva Almada translated by Annie McDermott (2020). Roberto Bolano’s 2004 novel 2666 was one of the first to openly address the crime of femicide in Latin America. Since Bolano we have seen pioneering work in true crime writing by Laura Restrepo, Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Cristina Rivera Garza among others. In Dead Girls, Selva Almada concentrates her attention on three young Argentinian women who were murdered for their gender in the 1980s, exploring their backgrounds and circumstances as well as the political backdrop against which their killings took place. Almada is one of a brilliant new generation of South American writers whose approach, blending journalistic with fictional techniques, has brought new energy and viewpoints into contemporary true crime writing.
The Treatment by Michael Nath (2020). Here is a novel that shows what is possible when fact and fiction come together in the mind of a writer whose imagination is as fertile as his talent with words. Nath bases The Treatment around the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and the decades-long struggle to unmask institutionalized racism within the Metropolitan Police. A journalist, Carl Hyatt, has been fired from the broadsheet he worked for after his investigation into a corrupt property developer risks getting them sued. He’s been forced to take a job with the Chronicle, a free-ads paper. But in spite of promising his wife that he’ll stay away from the story, Carl’s obsession with uncovering the truth is about to lead him and those he cares about into mortal danger. The Treatment is a postmodern take on the Elizabethan revenge drama, delivered in a bravura mix of poetry, street slang and Multicultural London English. Nath exercises superb command of his material in a novel that demands a second reading to fully appreciate its inventiveness.
Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates (2023). Oates has frequently takes inspiration for her work from true crimes, and the background to Babysitter is a series of unsolved child murders that took place in Detroit in the mid-1970s. The novel follows Hannah, the wife of a rich but rather dull businessman. She begins an affair with a total stranger, who refuses to reveal anything about his background or even his real name. He is powerful, controlling and violently unpredictable – but for Hannah that is part of the attraction. Oates’s narrative is multi-stranded, with Hannah only gradually becoming alive to what is going on in her own neighbourhood. Babysitter is brilliantly imagined and richly characterised, with a genuine sense of menace. Keeping the external events at one remove – glimpsed from the corner of the eye – gives the reader a queasy and increasing awareness of the danger Hannah is in.