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Culture & Life
Kate Summerscale’s 6 favorite true crime books about real murder cases
The best-selling author recommends works by Helen Garner, Gwen Adshead, and more
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Kate Summerscale is the author of “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,” “The Book of Phobias and Manias,” and “The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place.”
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‘Life After Life’ by Tony Parker (1990)
‘This House of Grief’ by Helen Garner (2014)
‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ by Janet Malcolm (1989)
‘The Adversary’ by Emmanuel Carrère (2000)
‘The Devil You Know’ by Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne (2021)
‘A Thread of Violence’ by Mark O’Connell (2023)
By The Week US
published 12 November 2024
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Kate Summerscale is the best-selling author of “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” and several other acclaimed works of British true crime. Her latest work is “The Book of Phobias and Manias,” to be followed in early 2025 by “The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place.”
‘Life After Life’ by Tony Parker (1990)
Parker recorded interviews with 12 British men and women who had been convicted of murder, then transcribed and edited their words to create a series of extraordinary first-person narratives. Along with Truman Capote’s (very different) In Cold Blood, this book opened my eyes to the possibilities of writing about crime. Buy it here.
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‘This House of Grief’ by Helen Garner (2014)
A wonderful account of the trial of an Australian man charged with the 2005 murder of his three young sons. Garner documents every twist in the proceedings — and her own feelings about the case. Buy it here.
‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ by Janet Malcolm (1989)
A brilliant, bracing examination of the relationship between Jeffrey MacDonald, a U.S. Army captain who was eventually convicted of having killed his wife and children in 1970, and his biographer Joe McGinniss, who claimed to believe in MacDonald’s innocence but denounced him in print. Buy it here.
‘The Adversary’ by Emmanuel Carrère (2000)
The shocking story of Jean-Claude Romand, an apparently respectable French doctor who murdered his wife, his children, and his parents in 1993. Romand’s whole life, it emerged, had been a weird and elaborate hoax. Buy it here.
‘The Devil You Know’ by Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne (2021)
A forensic psychiatrist reflects on some of the criminal offenders she has treated at Broadmoor, the storied psychiatric hospital west of London. Adshead offers fascinating suggestions about the meaning of their violence. Buy it here.
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‘A Thread of Violence’ by Mark O’Connell (2023)
This is another book that interrogates the act of writing about crime. O’Connell tracked down and interviewed Irish socialite Malcolm Macarthur, who killed two strangers in Dublin in 1982. To write about Macarthur, he realized, was both to exalt and to exploit him. “Whether I liked it or not,” he says, “I was implicated.” Buy it here.
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