The Tragedy of True Crime by John J. Lennon

 

This is ... not exactly narrative non-fiction, but there's a strong whiff of memoir to it--probably stronger than Lennon intended, but he's all over the book as a character, even though his crime is arguably less-examined than the other three. The book seems from the cover copy, and sometimes feels reading it as though it wants to be, a critique of true crime as a genre; but while it pokes some holes, it's really not exactly a takedown, at least most of the foibles Lennon aims at are ones I'm at least aware of. Three of the four killers here are not the sort who'd normally be profiled in some true crime book or show--there's the gay man who killed and dismembered his (arguably abusive) sugar daddy; the mentally ill Black man who took part in the murders of two priests; and the White drug dealer who killed someone who (he thought) was looking for an angle to take over his (possibly metaphysical) turf. Of course, the fourth one is a guy whose case broke big in the 1980s and has been occasionally reexamined over the past decade--part of the book's thesis is that there are only so many straight white people killing each other, and true crime is needing to reach out to find new stories, there's only so much reexamination the old stories will bear. Because the author is in prison--and all the other guys at least were when he spoke to them--there's also a fair amount about what prison life is like. Honestly, it probably says more about mass incarceration, the effects of the gutting of public mental health, the blowback effects of stripping education and other self-improvement programs out of prisons, and other aspects of the American (or at least New York's) criminal justice system, than it does really about true crime. It's a solid and interesting read, if not really a happy one.