Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
By Walter Kirn
The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
By Anand Giridharadas
HBO’s latest hit, True Detective, shows just how far the detective story has come. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders at the Rue Morgue launched the genre’s formulaic success, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle solidified the buddy-cop schtick that’s alive and well in True Detective.
But would we have detective fiction if crime weren’t ever, well, true?
The true crime genre can be even more thrilling than what springs from the imagination. Here, the author is the detective, piecing the story together for us eager readers. The following are a couple stand-out titles to put on this summer’s reading list.
In Walter Kirn’s Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, the novelist and contributing editor to Time magazine details his 15-year relationship with a man who calls himself “Clark Rockefeller” and unravels his discovery of Rockefeller’s real identity — a child kidnapper and murderer. Fans of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood will love this one.
Shortly after 9/11, a white supremacist plots revenge on three different convenience stores in Texas, killing an Indian man, a Pakistani and seriously wounding Bangladeshi Muslim Raisuddin Bhuiyan. Author Anand Giridharadas explores this mystery in The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, detailing the survivor’s quest to save his near-executioner from death row.
