True Crime / Life Books

[dubbel zout]

On 3/17/2020 at 4:00 PM, peacheslatour said:

I liked Dominick Dunne's The Two Mrs. Grenvilles.

I love everything Dunne has written. (RIP!) His life was ride, with big highs and terrible lows, and he brought all of that, along with enormous empathy, into everything he wrote. And the access he had for his true-crime stuff was incredible. Everyone would talk to him.

Most of his fiction is based on one real-life story or another.

[Epeolatrix]

Just finished "Murder Capital of the World: The Santa Cruz community looks back at the Frazier, Mullin, and Kemper murder sprees of the early 1970s" by Emerson Murray. The structure of the book is that he went through past recorded information (interviews, news articles, police reports, etc) and did new interviews to come up with an oral-history style account of the murders.

I thought it was really interesting, but I must advise that it can get a bit graphic in parts. Yeah, I know it's a book about murder, but there were details I had not heard before about Kemper's crimes and I was a bit squicked, even though I am not normally squeamish.

[Epeolatrix]

This is only sort of true crime, but it's related enough that I think people here might be interested: "Shooting Zodiac" by Robert Graysmith, released Aug 2021.

It's a document of the making of David Fincher's Zodiac movie, and Fincher's efforts to make it as accurate and truthful as possible. I've only just started, but it's been pretty good so far. I think a key as-yet unspoken element is that Fincher's obsession with getting everything right was very attractive to Graysmith, whose own obsession with the Zodiac case led to his two most famous books (the ones that were optioned for the movie).

We get insight into Fincher's research process and the depths he pursues to get as much detail as he can, as well as the minutiae of film production (getting the right studio and funding, getting actors, etc). There are interesting conversations with some of the original detectives, a couple of Arthur Leigh Allen's family members, and eventually surviving victims.

[Edited to add: This book is lead-up to the making of Zodiac, focusing on Fincher's extensive research phase. There is not nearly enough actual making-of data, but the pre-production stuff is still fascinating.]

 

Edited January 9, 2022 by Epeolatrix
Added info

[Epeolatrix]

A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind by Ann Burgess

Okay, I admit, I've been waiting for this book for decades. Prof. Burgess was one of the original members of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, along with Robert Ressler and John Douglas. While they and other men of the BSU have written multiple books, this is the first retrospective by Burgess about her time and work with the FBI. Initially I had an unfortunate tendency to conflate her with Dr Wendy Carr of the Netflix series Mindhunter, but that faded quickly. I enjoyed hearing about her experiences and her insights, and it was good to get her point of view on the things Douglas and Ressler had also written about.