A particularly violent and shocking mass murder of four Idaho college students has captured the attention of much of the nation. It is unlikely that you are learning this from me, but it is at least possible. Among my good friends are some who on principle try to avoid popular “true crime” journalism. The way this story has been handled in much of the press is sufficient to explain their attitude. The raucous babble of a Nancy Grace would put you off chocolate cake were that her subject. But I must confess my own strong interest in a “true crime” saga possibly destined to become the focus of some important literary work in the future. The accused killer, indicted and held without bond as he begins his slow crawl through our criminal justice system, is one Bryan Kohberger, a first-year graduate student in a Ph. D. program in criminal justice. As he awaits trial Mr. Kohberger enjoys the presumption of innocence. In this instance even more than in some other highly publicized cases this presumption is a legal fiction that will impede no informed person from supposing him guilty on the basis of the powerful evidence made public in the affidavit of probable cause. But even with the who of this who-dunnit known with near certainty, the larger Mystery of Iniquity remains perhaps more mysterious than ever. And as it required several tight-lipped weeks for investigators to develop their forensic evidence, there was plenty of time for the impatient Internet to explode with theories, many of them of the tinfoil hat variety. Unspeakable death has taken on a life of its own. Yet if the subject of murder authorizes much prurient sensationalism and conspiratorial lunacy, it has also been the stuff of some fine works of literature.
I am not alluding to the genre of the murder mystery, a popular form that continues to bring mental stimulation and pleasure to millions, and which not infrequently displays considerable artistic achievement. For the most part, however, the classic murder mystery places its focus on the mystery part. Murder is a background; the foreground is a mystery or puzzle to be explicated by a process of detection: Colonel Mustard, in the library, with a candlestick. One does not spend a lot of time agonizing over the victim in a Sherlock Holmes adventure. One is too busy marveling at Sherlock’s deductions.
Real murder is very different. For most people, surely, the very idea of homicide is so hideous and so aberrant as to challenge our concepts of human nature itself. Even people who deny the realm of the sacred talk about the sanctity of human life. Thus many powerful writers have found in actual, historical homicides the materials not merely of gripping narrative but also for profound social and ethical analysis. I have a list of five books, each of them having its origins in actual homicides, each in its time as shocking or notorious as the November slaughter in Moscow, Idaho.
At the beginning of the list, and still at the top in my estimation, is Crime and Punishment (1866). As the person accused in the Idaho slaughter is a doctoral student in criminology, said by some professional peers to be both highly intelligent and arrogant, there has been speculation that the crime was performative, intended to demonstrate the ability of a Nietzschean superman to achieve a “perfect” murder with impunity. Do you think these Keystone Cops are a match for my genius? Gratuitous murder to prove one’s release from the superstition of morality is a theme in Crime and Punishment, and in The Brothers Karamazov the principle animating the author’s anguish is obliquely implied by Ivan: if God does not exist, everything is permissible. There have undoubtedly been enough “successful” Nietzschean murders; but several of the failures have commanded the attention of writers of merit.
In 1924, in Chicago, two precocious and over-privileged University of Chicago students, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, eighteen and twenty years of age, who combined intellectual brilliance and frat boy insouciance, kidnapped and killed a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, Bobby Franks, just for the hell of it. Franks was Loeb’s second cousin and his near neighbor in their ritzy neighborhood. This “perfect” murder was so badly achieved that the supposedly unfindable body was discovered on the following day; and almost immediately a decisive clue put the detectives on the right trail, even before complex ancillary parts of the murderers’ elaborate plan to disguise a thrill killing as venal kidnapping could be put into effect. There swiftly followed the “trial of the century”, of which there are seldom fewer than three per decade in our land.
Cataracts of ink splashed over this amazing crime, just as a dense mist of pixels now befogs that of Moscow, Idaho. Meyer Levin, a Chicago journalist of the Thirties and a largely forgotten but serious novelist, virtually marinated himself in the details of the old case and more than thirty years after it published one of our earlier “non-fiction” novels, Compulsion (1956). The fascination of crimes for which motivelessness is the motive has commanded the imaginations of many writers. Levin brilliantly focuses on the Punishment no less than the Crime part. These boys really needed a good lawyer, and they got one. That they were two very rich homosexual Jews did little to endear them to public opinion of the age. Thanks in part to the oratory of the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow the trial marked a significant step away from our legal system’s raw embrace of the death penalty—not to mention that it gave Orson Welles a great movie role.
The motive for many murders is the fact that the victim’s existence is highly inconvenient for the murderer. Cherchez la femme—either as murderer (especially if there’s lots of juicy life insurance) or as murdered, (especially if there is another femme in the waiting room.) A very great novel of the latter category is Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), the historical sources of which he found in a sensational murder case from the Adirondack boondocks two decades earlier. Putting it crudely, a cad had drowned the naïve girl he had knocked up. Inconvenient. Dreiser did not fictionalize this case. He invented his own in its shadow, a masterpiece—perhaps two or three hundred pages too long, but a masterpiece—about the uncertainty of human motivations, about the social conditions of post-Industrialized America, about the nature of the American legal system and (as almost always with Dreiser) about the horrors of rampant capitalism. The word “tragedy” is now used by journalists to mean “something bad that happened”. The word has lost its ethical dimension. But in the life of Dreiser’s hapless anti-hero, Clyde Griffith, we see real tragedy—which is moral, Boethian, Shakespearian, and of course just a little bit Marxian.
Some literal-minded critics have noted that a “non-fiction” novel whose characters have fictitious names and do a lot of imaginary things might actually be fiction. So various writers have pushed the envelope by writing history that they call fiction—thus reversing the procedure of many historians. The emerging genre of “true crime” attempts, unsuccessfully, to avoid such ambiguities. Two such imaginative books by writers of great talent deserve more space here than I am able to give them: Truman Capote’s, In Cold Blood (1966) and Norman Mailer’s, The Executioner’s Song (1979). It is probably inevitable, but also perverse, that our literature of murder expends much energy on perpetrators and little on their victims.
Most of us want to think well of our fellow beings. The argument that allows writers to move beyond intense interest in a murderer to some sort of friendship with him begins with the Pelagian Heresy, the current expression of which is I Blame Society. Many women, in particular, seem to think they were put on earth to play the role of Goethe’s Gretchen for all the Fausts of Riker’s Island. That is why so many villains on Death Row receive marriage proposals from women they have never met.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) is the story of two low-life jailbirds (Good Criminal, Bad Criminal) whose infantile cupidity leads them, with singular brutality, to wipe out an inoffensive little farm family in Kansas. Capote followed the case with intensity, and his strangely developed friendship with Good Criminal continued to the last hour in the Death House. I use the term low-life without apology but not without recognizing that the killers were part of a large American criminal class of young men whose cultural and moral poverty left them with scarcely a chance. Certainly Gary Gilmore, who gained fame by insisting that he be executed by a Utah firing squad for two particularly brutal and gratuitous murders was of their number. He is the central figure in Norman Mailer’s non-fiction novel The Executioner’s Song. Mailer’s book vacillates between society-blaming and the remorseless unveiling of the peculiarly horrid graininess of the rootless criminality of the New West. Mailer faced some embarrassment later when he championed another killer, Jack Abbott, author of In the Belly of the Beast—the “beast” being our prison system. After being patronized by Mailer and absurdly overpraised as an emergent American writer of first-rate talent, Abbott rather spoiled things with a recidivist murder. Yet there remains something noble and at least allegorically redemptive in the literary attempt to turn our social lemons into literary lemonade.
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