Murder into Art

By Lev Grossman

In 1959 Truman Capote spotted a short item in the New York Times. It described a quadruple murder in small-town Kansas: two men entered a farmhouse, shot the parents and two children and left with $40, a radio and a pair of binoculars. Capote lit out for Kansas, interviewed everyone he could get his well-manicured hands on and seven years later published a book about it. In Cold Blood combined journalism with the literary liberties of fiction to create what Capote called a "nonfiction novel," about two antiheroes and the thwarted dreams that made them killers. He believed he had discovered a new literary art form.

He had and he hadn't. Capote didn't invent true crime, though he did revive and revitalize it. Since 1966, In Cold Blood has served as the template for thousands of true-crime books. But the weird thing is that with a few exceptions--such as Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song--they aren't very good. In Cold Blood is not just the first modern work of true crime; it is also the only true-crime masterpiece, period.

What did Capote do that nobody else could? In The Monster of Florence (Grand Central; 322 pages), thriller author Douglas Preston (writing with the Italian journalist Mario Spezi) tells the story of a serial killer who terrorized Florence in the 1970s and 1980s. The Monster, as he (or she or they) is known, stalked couples making love in parked cars in the hills outside the city, which is something Florentines apparently do quite a lot. He would wait till they were finished, then shoot the man in the head, then the woman. Afterward, he would mutilate her.

Preston's account of the crimes is lucid and mesmerizing. In one case, the victims realized what was happening, but in a panic, they drove their car into a ditch. The killer coolly shot out their headlights before going to work. What's missing from The Monster of Florence is the Monster: the killer was never caught. This isn't Preston's fault, but it hamstrings the book. The acme of the true-crime writer's art, what raises it above lurid rubbernecking, is making the psychology of a killer comprehensible, even sympathetic. In doing that, the true-crime writer gives meaning to the ultimate meaningless act: murder.

Death in the Family

By contrast, it took only a few hours to catch the killer in Kathryn Harrison's While They Slept (Random House; 290 pages). Early on the morning of April 27, 1984, Billy Frank Gilley Jr., then 18, beat his parents and his sister Becky to death with a baseball bat in their home in Oregon. He said afterward that he did it to save himself and his other sister Jody from an abusive domestic situation. He imagined that they would run away together. Jody called 911.

This story fascinated Harrison for years before she tracked down Billy (still in prison) and Jody (now a successful businesswoman) and interviewed them. Billy's quasi-incestuous interest in his sister echoes an episode of incest in Harrison's life. "I find [their story] has a forbidden, sexual charge," she writes. "Because love, murder and running away together do imply sex. They do suggest an illicit erotic fixation." There's something very creepy about her interest in the Gilley murders that is difficult for the reader to make peace with--she is not just a clarifying, interpreting narrator; she also makes herself a specimen to be gawked at.

Harrison rummages heroically through the detritus of Gilley family life, which is certainly authentically depressing: poverty, alcoholism, physical and emotional abuse. But the deep, human reality of Billy's act eludes her--he is a dull, nasty subject, with none of the thwarted, Romantic brilliance with which Capote endows his subjects. Or maybe the problem is that she grasps Billy's truth too well, and that While They Slept suffers from an excess of honesty. That's something Capote certainly avoided in In Cold Blood. When it comes to true crime, too much truth can be fatal.