True Crime and Its Discontents

By Kat Davis

This essay first appeared in the Thriller Thursday Substack (https://substack.com/@thrillerthursday)

When I was fifteen, I pulled Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment from the shelf. I was surprised to find that this old, important-sounding tome was a page turner. For a few days, I was lost in the streets of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, following the misadventures of Rodion Raskolnikov, a poor student who talks himself into killing an old pawnbroker so that he can steal the woman’s savings and live the life he believes he deserves. The source of suspense in the novel lies not in finding out who committed the crime, but rather why this character did what he did and what happens to him afterwards. Crime and Punishment is not a murder mystery but rather the story of a murder and its effect upon the perpetrator’s soul.

Like many crime novels, Crime and Punishment was inspired by real events, in this case, by the life of a French serial killer. My debut novel In a Dark Mirror is also inspired by an actual crime that occurred in 2014 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, when two girls lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her multiple times, claiming that they did so under the influence of an internet bogeyman called Slender Man. The lurid details and the bizarre nature of the case received a lot of attention, and it has quickly taken on the status of urban legend, even as the perpetrators and victims remain very real (I do not name them here because I believe they have attained enough notoriety already). The story has received several nonfiction treatments, from books to an HBO documentary. When I started to work on a novel inspired by this real-life case, I knew that it was likely to be dubbed a “true crime novel.” Although it may seem like splitting hairs, I consider my book to be a work of fiction, and I think that difference matters.

True crime is a tricky genre, poised on the border between nonfiction and fiction. One classic example of true crime is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a nonfiction account of the murder of a family of four at their farmhouse in Kansas in 1959. Often considered the first “nonfiction novel,” it represents a kind of contradiction in terms, an attempt at using the immersive techniques of fiction to tell a “true” story. These days we experience a glut of true crime in the form of podcasts and documentaries, from the first season of Serial to HBO’s  The Jinx. The popularity of true crime has led to some predictable hand-wringing about whether the genre is itself somehow immoral. Should we enjoy ourselves while listening to stories involving the murder of real human beings? True crime makes a claim for itself as a form of nonfiction, albeit one that may allow for occasional embellishment. While I share a fascination with true crime as a genre and the ethical issues it raises, my concern here is not so much with true crime itself as with the misapplication of the term to fictional works that are not “true” at all.

The plot of my novel follows two timelines: one set in the past in which two socially outcast twelve-year-old girls convince themselves they are being visited by a supernatural being they refer to as Him, and another set ten years in the future in which one of the girls is released from institutional care and finds herself drawn into an online community for fans of her crime. The past timeline shares many plot features with the real-life case; the future timeline is completely fictional. Though the external actions of the plot follow the original case closely, the characters themselves are fictional—they have different names, different family situations and backgrounds, and live in a different part of the country. The novel also enters the characters’ minds in ways that a journalistic account could not, ascribing thoughts and motivations to them that should not be mistakenly attributed to their real-life counterparts. In my novel, the figure of Him becomes a kind of metaphorical stand-in for the aspects of adult life the girls are unready to face; the book thus includes some scenes dealing with youthful sexuality that are also completely fictional. Just for the record: all the “weird sex stuff” in my book is my own invention.

A nonfictional account that is only fifty percent accurate is not non-fiction at all, but a work of fiction that borrows fifty percent of its plot from real-life is still fiction—though readers are perfectly free to fault the author for lack of originality. We live in a time in which the lines between the real and the un-real, between scripted programming and reality TV, between actual news and “fake news”, between photographs taken by people and those generated by AI, are increasingly blurred. This is why, I think, the distinction between “true crime” and “crime fiction” matters; and it is for the same reason that distinctions between nonfiction and fiction have always mattered. To write a work of fiction is to claim a space of greater freedom than to recount a true event. A work of fiction can play with metaphor and shades of meaning in a way that straightforward reportage cannot; it can create scenes that never happened and invent new characters or situations that can deepen our understanding of a meaning we could not articulate in the original source material alone. While nonfiction appeals primarily to the intellect, fiction is above all an encounter with characters on the page and invites an emotional response. The reader of fiction goes on a journey with a character who, at the end of the work, is somehow changed. Most writers of fiction hope that, more than learning something, their readers feel something at the end of a book.

It’s a commonplace these days to say that reading fiction increases empathy.  I am wary of claims which imply that reading is something good for us that we should do regardless of enjoyment, like eating our vegetables; this seems to me to reflect a very narrow understanding of the purpose of art. Nevertheless, empathy was a very important question for me in writing In a Dark Mirror. How much empathy can or should we have for people who do awful things? What if the victims are children? What if the perpetrators are? Does everyone deserve a second chance? I felt a sense of transgression when I started working on this book, worrying that it was exploiting the individuals involved in the original crime. Yet the more I wrote, the more I understood that I was no longer writing about real people at all, but only the versions I had constructed of them in my mind. I approached these fictional characters with a desire to understand why they did what they did, rather than to judge them. The actions of real people in the real world must, at times, be judged—at least in a legal, if not moral, sense. Fiction is the realm of thought experiments, where we might feel freer to extend empathy and compassion precisely because the cost of doing so is less risky; stories can let dangerous criminals go free because their potential next victims are also fictional. This is the freedom of the fictional space, to allow for a more unbounded empathy than we might dare in real life. This, ultimately, is part of what is potentially transgressive and destabilizing about every work of fiction.

I know that people will continue to use the term “true crime novel” as a kind of shorthand for works inspired by real life, but I will continue to argue for the importance of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I hope for In a Dark Mirror to be read in the spirit of Crime and Punishment, rather than In Cold Blood, not as a factual recounting, but as a fictional story inspired by real events. While writing this book, I came to feel a kind of compassion for my characters even in their misdeeds. I am not sure how much such compassion can or should transfer to real life—but I know that exploring these kinds of questions lies at the heart of writing fiction.