Jack Olsen on the Marketing of Murder

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There is a market for murder, and there always has been. But in the book publishing business, murder has been killed as an honest genre. Ten years ago, if you wrote a book about anthropology or your sailing trip around the horn, it had to be a good book to catch people's interest. But if it was about murder, it would sell no matter what the quality. It didn't even have to be true.That is no longer the case.

Most people consider that the true-crime genre started with In Cold Blood. Of course there were plenty of good books before that, like The Boston Strangler, or Butcher's Dozen, but there wasn't a steady diet of books as there was later. Truman Capote's book showed us that if you get a good story, and you're not afraid to hype it up with some literary flourishes from your own imagination (and if you're a literary genius), you can make a lot of money. Après Capote, the deluge -- inferior writers who flooded the market with imitative and derivative junk that sold well no matter how sloppily written and researched.

Then about six or eight years ago, there was a shift in the market when the public lust for its daily dose of blood and guts began to be satisfied by TV and the movies. Now the true-crime fanatics have any of about 25 TV shows to choose from. Murder is everywhere. It's in every theater, on every TV channel, all day and all night. The public still can't get enough of it, but they no longer get it solely from books and magazines. Thanks to the infotainment industry, they can get right in the police car with the cops and go to the scene, watch the crime go down, and be there to catch the expressions on their faces when they cuff the bad guys and haul them in.

The marketing of murder has devoured itself. Quality has been driven out by a malignant derivative of Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. So does bad writing. The very best and best-selling true-crime authors have turned to other genres and left the genre to shlockmeisters.