The novelists skewering the ickiness of true crime

Did you listen to the podcast?” asks the narrator of Eliza Clark’s new novel, Penance. “You’ll have all over the front pages and then a year or two later, it’ll be out in novels: you can see the process of the writers themselves getting hooked on these stories, realising how fascinating they are.” The most influential – and intriguing – 20th century take on true crime, though, was surely Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, his “non-fiction novel” about the 1959 murders of a Kansas family. And I just began to feel the more I was consuming, the less that I was really gaining from it.” Copycat true crime podcasts, she adds, don’t often “talk about the wider aspects” of a case, “from potential social change that could be preventive, to prison abolition, to the political elements that build the landscape of the justice system” – and a lot of the shows she listened to ended up “very black and white, being pro-incarceration, or even winking towards being pro-death penalty”. The podcaster protagonist has become increasingly popular in crime fiction over the past year or so, with “the writers and broadcasters of true crime stepping into the story”, Harris says – and it’s a shift that “probably goes hand in hand” with “mixed feelings about the police”. In her novel, she didn’t want to just set up “easy positions” in a complex debate: her character Laura might denounce true crime as “exploitative”, but she also writes her own true crime-inspired poetry.