Show and Tell

I've got a heinous commute that I make a little more palatable by listening to audio books. I've managed to get through the biggies (Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Iliad) and indulged myself with crappy fantasy series (Song of Ice and Fire, Wheel of Time). But right now, I'm going through a streak of true crime, and I'm finding something bothersome.

If the events in question actually happened, it doesn't matter how horrible the writing is, someone will publish it. It seems unbelievable, but it's true. I understand that the story doesn't have to make sense - we all know that the truth is often stranger than fiction (that's why we have a trite saying for that) - but the fact that you don't have to do any character development, maintain any narrative flow or attempt to put events in some kind of understandable order seems unfair.

In the book I'm currently ploughing through (I don't even want to mention the name of the book, it's that bad), we get horrible, horrible language usage (the most glaring: use of the words "fetus" and "newborn" interchangeably in a story where the legal issue is whether the found bodies were those of stillborn babies or babies killed after birth - the difference is material!), cutting back and forth through time in a way that makes it impossible for the reader to understand what's happening, and the author's obvious bias against his subject.

I've read a good many true-crime novels written by people who weren't journalists or authors before they wrote the book in question, but were moved to tell the story of a crime that had touched them or their families. Most took great pains to lay out the story in a way that made some sequence of events clear to the reader. All of them were clear about their position on the guilt or innocence of their main antagonist.

Just before reading this current offering, I read Mikal Gilmore's "Shot Through the Heart," an account of his family and his brother Gary Gilmore's life. I was bothered that we didn't get much of Gary's personality throughout the book, but by the end I could understand that it was the very lack of understanding that haunted Mikal, Gary's youngest brother. His narrative started with his grandparents, progressed to his parents' relationship, then covered his own family life right up to the execution of his brother. There were family secrets to which he refers, but because he never knew them, we don't know them either. It's a haunting, beautiful book that makes Gary Gilmore's life and death seem both tragic and inevitable.

It's a stark contrast with a story that seems no less tragic, but I can't be sure because it's author plainly doesn't believe anything its subject has to say about the issue. The subject is a woman who had given birth to four children whose decomposing bodies were found in a storage locker in Arizona. They were full-term babies, but they had been dead so long that it was impossible to tell whether they had been born alive or not.

The woman claimed that she'd been raped repeatedly, and that her mother had killed her children because she'd been single when she'd given birth. Apart from those facts that are hammered into our heads by the author's repeating them ad nauseum, it's hard to tell what really happened, or even what the author thinks happened. The author talks about her "alleged" rapes and says that she "claims" this or that happened. It reads as though he wrote a very different story and was pressured into adding or deleting things until it made no sense.

He does say that the woman's own confessions were confused and contradictory, but isn't the author's job to help us make sense of it? To somehow put the confessions in context so that they help establish the person's guilt or innocence? Instead, confessions that cut back and forth between the births of four children over several years are themselves cut with a narrative of the events over those years until it's all a confusing soup and it's easy to stop caring, despite the authors harpy cry of "Dead babies! Dead babies!" It's heartbreaking that a story with some pretty deep issues at its heart has been so shabbily treated.

On the other hand, this is unlikely to stop me from reading more true crime. The surest sign of addiction, isn't it?