American murder and its literary consequences: The rise of true crime

This dissertation is a study of the popular non-fiction genre known as "true-crime." True-crime has been one of the most popular and successful mass-market genres since the 1970s, but the genre has been neglected as a topic of serious literary study. This dissertation situates true-crime within its historical origins of late-1960s/early 1970s social upheavals, rising crime rates, inter-generational tensions, the rise of New Journalism, and a changing publishing industry. Close readings of key texts within the genre---Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels (1967) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field (1973), Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter (1974), Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979), and Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me (1980)---reveal that the genre is an expression of post-war American fears of rapid social and cultural change. True-crime confirms the reading public's fears about violence in America, bringing the reader into closer relationship with real killers, while simultaneously distancing the reader from the possibility of random violence and death. A cultural studies methodology is used to understand the ways in which the genre both reflected and helped to create those fears.; True-crime is also the site of a dramatic renegotiation and revaluation of the rhetoric of evil, and is one of the sites in American public discourse where that rhetoric is used without irony, and where notions and definitions of 'evil' are presented without ambiguity. The genre posited the psychopath/sociopath as a character type, thereby popularizing a new a way of framing the irrational and horrific. Different sub-categories within the genre demonstrate its growth and establishment, and true-crime now includes a large group of female-centered texts whose portrayals of deviant domesticity act as both corrective and talisman against inter-personal violence. When seen within its proper literary-historical context, true-crime emerges as a vibrant and meaningful strand of popular culture, little-understood and often devalued as 'pulp.' This dissertation seeks to define the cultural work of true-crime, and finds that work important and compelling.