New True Crime Book Club!

There is a new book club coming to the Lawrence Branch. The True Crime Book Club was originally scheduled for May 28 (you may have seen the flyers), but our new date is June 25 at 3PM. That's one extra month to pour over Michelle McNamara's exciting book. We hope you'll join us on June 25 at 3PM. Why true crime? Well, despite some people’s discomfort with the genre it is extremely popular, particularly in the podcast space and particularly among women. However, we’re diving into the book space and there is a long history of true crime books capturing curious readers. For example, Zhang Yingyu’s The Book of Swindles, a book of allegedly true cases of fraud, dates back to 1617. There is also the first true crime book in English, John Reynold’s The Triumphe of God's Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sinn of Murther, which dates back to 1635. However, the true crime genre as we know it today, a nonfiction “novel” of investigative journalism, started with Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación Massacre.

Most people think Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is the first true crime book, but Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación Masacre is generally considered the first true crime book as we currently define the genre. In 1956 Argentina, the Buenos Aires Province Police unlawfully captured and shot a group of civilians believed to be supporters of Juan Perón (Juan Perón had been overthrown by a military coup in 1955). Walsh details the victims of the massacre, reconstructs the events of the night, and shares testimonies from the Buenos Aires Province Police. Originally Walsh did this as a series of magazine articles, but those articles were later re-written into the book Operación Masacre. You can find Operation Massacre (the English translation) in our system as an eBook through hoopla.

While Walsh got there first, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood put true crime on the map, and to this day is the second best-selling true crime book of all time (Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi is the first). In Cold Blood is about the 1959 murders of Herb Clutter, his wife Bonnie Clutter, and their children Nancy and Kenyon Clutter. Like Operation Massacre, Capote’s In Cold Blood started off as a series of magazine articles. These articles were serialized in The New Yorker in 1965 and published as a book in 1966. Capote worked on the book for six years and ultimately wrote eight thousand pages of notes on the crime. While In Cold Blood was a major commercial success, there was definitely some criticism of it. Some charged Capote with making up conversations and quotes in order to make the story more interesting. Others claimed that instead of being written to inform, the book is written to titillate with gory details. Capote wrote off those critics as simply being jealous of his success, but those types of criticism continue to haunt true crime as a genre. In Cold Blood is available in our system as a physical book and as a book on CD, as well as electronically through eLibraryNJ.

Not all true crime books are about murder. Scams and heists are just as popular in the true crime space. Think of Anna Sorokin, the con artist who was the subject of the Netflix series Inventing Anna. Anna posed as a wealthy heiress and managed to swindle upper class New York from 2013 to 2017. She did eventually land in prison, but upon release she has already signed a deal for a reality show, launched a collection of NFTs, and hosted an event on the roof of her East Village apartment (she was still under house arrest) during New York Fashion Week 2023. Rachel DeLoache Williams, one of the people in the New York scene that Anna befriended and scammed, has already written a book on her titled My Friend Anna: the True Story of a Fake Heiress. Of course, we can’t forget former biotech entrepreneur and famous fraud, Elizabeth Holmes. Actress Amanda Seyfried won an Emmy award for her portrayal of Holmes on the Hulu miniseries, The Dropout. The book about the case is Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup and is written by John Carryrou, an investigative reporter for The New York Times. Like Capote and Walsh, Carryrou’s work started off as a series of articles. Carryrou’s book won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award in 2018. When Holmes was sentenced in 2021, Carryrou followed her case with his podcast Bad Blood: The Final Chapter.

By now you must be wondering why I’m taking you through this light list of true crime classics. I’m prepping you for our first official True Crime Book Club Read. Our first book will be I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara. The Golden Stake Killer case was about serial killer/serial rapist/burglar/peeping tom, Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. DeAngelo operated in southern California throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but was not arrested until 2018 and not convicted until 2020. Because DeAngleo operated in many different places in California, he acquired many different nicknames: the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area rapist, and the Original Night Stalker (to distinguish him from Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker). It was McNamara herself that coined the Golden State Killer moniker in an attempt to increase awareness about the killer and his crimes. Like our previous entries, McNamara’s journey with the Golden State Killer started out as articles, this time for Los Angeles magazine. Her obsession with the case and her unusually close relationship with law enforcement allowed her a level of insight that most authors do not get. Unfortunately, McNamara would pass on in 2016 at the age of forty-six, never getting the chance to see DeAngleo caught and prosecuted. The manuscript for I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which McNamara was almost finished with, was completed by true crime writers Paul Haynes, Billy Jensen, (friends of McNamara) and her husband Patton Oswalt. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is available in our collection as a physical book, in a large print edition, as a book on CD, and electronically through eLibraryNJ.

While we are still working on what time the True Crime Book Club will be meeting (probably June), I hope this blog post has you excited to join us! Also, if you don’t have time to make the meeting, don’t let that stop you from enjoying the true crime books in our collection. There are some fascinating stories that deserve to be heard!

- by Shanna, Lawrence Branch