There’s a voice. You know it if you’ve listened to any true crime podcast in the last decade: two friends, a microphone, a kitchen table, and a murder discussed the way you’d discuss a bad date. “So, okay, so he’s got this history, right?” Chatty. Intimate. Slightly thrilled.
I don’t want to be snobbish about it. The voice got millions of people, mostly women, to take an interest in how justice works and fails, and that’s not nothing. But the voice was built for audio, for the walk to work, for company. And it has started turning up in books, where it doesn’t belong, and the books are worse for it.
What the voice does
It sits beside you. It says “we” a lot. It speculates out loud and then says “but I don’t know, maybe not.” It finds things “wild” and “insane” and “so creepy.” It performs its own reaction so you’ll have one too. On a podcast that’s intimacy. On a page, where you’ve bought the book precisely because someone did the work, it reads as the work not having been done.
The best true crime books have always had a cooler voice. Not cold; the writer cares, you can tell. But the writer is a reporter, and the register is “here is what I found, and here is what I couldn’t,” and the horror is left to the facts. A good true crime book never tells you something is creepy. It describes the kitchen, and the clock, and what time the neighbour heard the car, and you’re the one who goes cold.
Where it shows
Three places, if you’re reading the new releases.
The first person. More and more true crime books open with the author: how they found the case, what it did to them, how they couldn’t sleep. There’s a version of this that works, the memoir-investigation where the writer’s obsession is the story. But most of the time it’s the podcast host’s “so, okay” in print, and it moves the victim one chapter further from the front.
The speculation. Podcasts speculate because they have to fill an hour. Books don’t. A book that says “it’s possible he was there earlier, but we’ll never know” is a book that didn’t call enough people.
The adjectives. “Chilling.” “Twisted.” “Unthinkable.” A book that reaches for these has run out of facts to put in their place.
What I’d ask for
A notes section, first. The notes tell you what the voice can’t: whether anyone did the work. Then the victims’ names in the first chapter, not the killer’s. Then a writer who trusts the reader to feel something without being told what.
And then, honestly, the podcast, for the walk. There’s room for both. There’s just a difference between company and evidence, and the books should be the evidence.
I’ll be in the chair with one that has footnotes. Deadbolt turned.