A brief defence of true crime

Bingeing the latest true crime podcast or Netflix series often feels like you’re monstering a Big-Mac meal in one gulp. But is public interest in killers and their deeds ­really so terrible?

A mural of Mushroom cook murderer Erin Patterson, Melbourne. Picture: Nadir Kinani

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have noticed that true crime is having a ­moment. As a genre, it’s in the midst of an ­Indian summer, basking in the light of a million podcasts, books and streaming dramas. As an industry, its stocks have soared into a new bull market, helped in large part by the world’s press and its extensive coverage of the Morwell mushroom trial.

It was, by any standard, an astonishingly grotesque and disturbing case, punctuated by moments of utter surrealism and madness. How a morose, chinless frump, who was herself already a known super sleuth, was capable of metamorphosing into a kind of Lucrezia Borgia of the antipodes, poisoning four people and killing three, by way of beef wellingtons laced with death cap mushrooms, is a terrifically tantalising question for anyone to contemplate. Only a snooty bore would say otherwise.

Last week, after watching an ABC presenter tut-tut about how the media’s “mushroom mania” could never rival the serious business of investigating “abuses of power and institutional failings”, I read a similarly affected account in The Guardian, penned by a Sydney crime novelist, who lamented the public’s morally dubious and apparently “insatiable hunger to play detective”, much of which sounded suspiciously like a classic case of “I’m a writer, get off my turf”.

The Illustrated Police News covers the Jack the Ripper murders.

Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen

Setting aside who is permitted to do and say what, it is possible, perhaps inevitable, that the mushroom murders will spawn dozens, if not hundreds, of smash-and-grab style podcasts, documentaries and streaming dramas. And so what?

My grandmother, a formidable bibliophile, maintained an ambitious reading list right up to her twilight years until one day she declared, quite pointedly, “if a novel does not start with the words ‘A shot rang out’, forget it”. Taste, in other words, can change and some people will always prefer a punchy story over a weighty tome.

Our culture’s obsession with true crime is now a well-documented phenomenon. The Victorians were hooked on the Ripper; the Edwardians likewise obsessed over Dr Crippen, whose improbable capture makes the police pursuit of OJ Simpson look like a game of Mario Kart by comparison. The methods of consumption may have shifted but the underlying impulses channelling these fascinations remain the same.

Besides is public interest in killers and their deeds ­really so terrible? “Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness,” wrote the great Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. And the nature of good and evil, as Carlyle submits, is a subject of universal concern, central to the exploration of the human condition, as are the circumstances that lead to inexplicable acts of violence.

OJ Simpson on trial for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, 1995.

At its very best, a true crime book or podcast excavates this sordid terrain, raising fresh questions, drawing new insight from previously forgotten or overlooked material and even restoring dignity to victims. (Just consider the work of this paper’s Hedley Thomas.)

The chief complaint one often hears of true crime is that it specialises in a brand of prurient entertainment that trivialises the tragic and exploits victims for a tidy profit. Its critics make easy sport of the industry’s promiscuous appetites and nauseating propensity for pointless psychobabble. And it’s hard to deny they don’t have something of a point.

Today, bingeing the latest true crime podcast or Netflix series often feels like you’re monstering a Big-Mac meal in one carnivorous gulp. Naturally, there’s that initial lull of comfort, even satisfaction, as you ingest that glorious gamut of stodge and flavour, but as the oily fats suppurate and slush southward, you begin to question the wisdom of your choices. But those who boast more refined tastes should beware: they’re beginning to look like the odd ones out.