The Classic True-Crime Books To Read Now
My Dark Places by James Ellroy
James Ellroy is widely acclaimed as one of America’s greatest crime writers. His outstanding achievements include the remarkable LA Quartet of novels, but he has also excelled at true crime. My Dark Places is his 90s memoir of his mother’s unsolved murder in the late 50s. Ellroy reflects on the event’s formative impact on him and how it led him to become a fiction writer, but also deploys the skills of an investigative journalist to explore the cold case himself.
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The Stranger Beside Me By Ann Rule
In a remarkable turn of events, crime writer Ann Rule ended up doing volunteer shifts alongside Ted Bundy on a suicide hotline. At a time when a 20-something Bundy was just starting to enact the sociopathy that would lead him to kidnap, rape and murder many times over, Rule got to know him. Her book shows how a handsome, set-for-success law-school grad can establish and maintain a horrific double life.
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Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi & Curt Gentry
Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecuting lawyer in the murder trials of Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ of followers. With a little help from pro writer Curt Gentry, he eventually delivered the definitive account of the Manson murders. Painstakingly researched, Helter Skelter is a gruelling account of how and why seven people were killed on a single night in late 60s LA by a group of people who had been led into these appalling acts by one man.
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Solitary by Albert Woodfox
This is true crime with a twist. Because on one level the crime in question was not strictly ‘true’. Albert Woodfox spent 43 years in solitary confinement – for a murder he didn’t commit. He was released in 2015 after a US district judge cleared him of killing a prison guard in 1972. Woodfox’s compelling memoir details the physical and psychological horror of spending 23 hours a day in a 9ft by 6ft cell, and shows why such prolonged isolated incarceration must be considered inhumane. But it is also a powerful testament to him and the human spirit that saw him through.
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Party Monster by James St James
James St James first published this memoir as Disco Bloodbath, but then it became a film with Macaulay Culkin and the book took the film’s name. The titular Party Monster is Michael Alig, whom St James knew well as a fellow Manhattan Club Kid of the late 80s and early 90s. Alig ascends to the very highest echelons of the New York club scene, but gets involved with drugs and eventually murders a dealer. St James was there throughout to tell this story as no one else could.
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I’ll Be Gone In The Dark by Michelle McNamara
Through the 70s and 80s, Joseph James DeAngelo murdered more than a dozen people, raped at least 50 and committed no fewer than 120 burglaries. He attracted a different nickname during each fresh crime spree and it wasn’t until early in this century that police realised this was all the work of one man. Crime writer Michelle McNamara was the one who settled on the name ‘Golden State killer’ in 2013. Her only book tells a chilling story of the havoc wrought upon West Coast America by DeAngelo.
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Unbelievable by T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong
An 18-year-old girl reports a rape by a masked intruder. Under interrogation, she breaks down and says she lied. Nothing is done. Two years on, a different case with remarkable similarities to the story she told raise suspicions that there is a serial rapist on the loose. The two journalists who tell this story – both Pulitzer prize winners – are as diligent as the pair of detectives who realise that justice has not initially been served.
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In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
This ground-breaking work of investigative journalism reconstructs the multiple murder of a Kansas family in 50s America. Truman Capote was comprehensive in his investigation and, in his willingness to recognise the humanity of the killers, also controversial. Now more than half a century has passed since In Cold Blood was first published, we have the perspective to place it as an early, genre-defining masterpiece of true crime.
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Mindhunter by John Douglas
This is the true-crime book on which Netflix’s outstanding Mindhunter series is based. While that show takes a break (David Fincher’s switched over to filming of Mank) you can sort fact from fiction with a dip into this powerful page-turner. John Douglas himself was an FBI special agent who set standards for criminal profiling as he investigated cases including those of Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and the Atlanta child murderer. As the director of Silence of the Lambs once said, “He knows more about serial killers than anybody in the world.”
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