True crime is the only genre on this site where the body count is not a joke. The village with the vicar is made up. The woman in the first chapter of a true crime book was somebody’s daughter and had a dentist appointment on Thursday. This changes how you read, or it should.
So here are the house rules. They’re not rules about whether to read it. You’re going to read it; I’m going to read it; the appetite for understanding why people do terrible things is as old as the campfire. They’re rules about how.
1. Check who did the work
Good true crime is journalism. It has a notes section. It has interviews with people who were there, documents that can be checked, and a writer who tells you when something is their guess. If a book has no sources, no notes, and a cover that looks like a thriller, it’s a thriller wearing a dead person’s name. Put it back.
The best writers in this genre spent years on one case and tell you what they couldn’t find out. The worst spent a weekend on Wikipedia and tell you everything, confidently.
2. Know the victim’s name before the killer’s
A simple test. Close the book after fifty pages and say the names of the dead out loud. If you can only name the man who killed them, the book has a problem and so does the way you’re reading it. The genre’s oldest failure is to make the killer the protagonist and the victims the set dressing. The good books refuse. They give the victim a life before the crime and a family after it.
3. Watch the word “fascinating”
Be careful when you catch yourself, or the author, finding a killer fascinating. Usually he isn’t. Usually he’s a dull, cruel man with a grievance and a car, and the fascination is a trick of the lighting. The cases that are actually complicated are usually complicated because of the investigation: what went wrong, who wasn’t believed, which evidence sat in a box for twenty years. That’s the fascinating part. The man is the least interesting thing in the room.
4. Mind the living
Most of the people in a true crime book are still alive. The detective who got it wrong. The neighbour who gave the quote. The sister. Read as though they might read it too, because they might. Treat the pages with their names in them as borrowed.
5. Stop when it stops being understanding
There’s a point in a reading binge where you’re no longer learning anything, just consuming grief at speed. You’ll know it. It feels like the fourth episode of something at 1 a.m. When you get there, close the book. Read a cozy mystery. The vicar will be fine.
6. Then check the locks anyway
You will. It’s not rational; your odds didn’t change because you read a chapter. But the genre leaves a residue, and the residue says: deadbolt, window latch, porch light. Do it, and don’t apologise for it, and then come back to the chair. The point of a locked door is what you do behind it.