The novelists skewering the ickiness of true crime

Eternally popular but often deemed problematic, the true crime genre serves up a constant stream of content about dark, unpleasant crimes. Katie Rosseinsky explores a wave of new novels unpicking the way these stories are told – and why our appetite for them is so ravenous

L-R: ‘Penance’, ‘I Have Some Questions For You’ and ‘Death of a Bookseller’ (Getty)

Did you listen to the podcast?” asks the narrator of Eliza Clark’s new novel, Penance. If you usually start your morning commute by pressing play on another discussion of a particularly grim murder, this direct address might make your stomach lurch. The second book from Clark, who recently appeared on the prestigious Granta young novelists shortlist, is a faux non-fiction narrative, its “author” a journalist called Alec Carelli. “Did the host make jokes? Do you have a dark sense of humour? Did that make it OK?” Carelli probes. “Or were they sensitive about it? Did they coo in the right places?”

From the first page, Penance is a punchy skewering of the ways we might strain to justify an interest in real-life stories about killers, cold cases, abductions and other less than salubrious subjects. We feel icky, even complicit – and that’s before we’ve been apprised of the gory details of this (fictional) case. Throughout, Clark makes it hard not to confront the murky ethics of consuming a true crime tale like this one. Hers is the latest in a wave of novels asking uncomfortable questions about the genre, cleverly wrapping them up in a gripping, can’t-look-but-can’t-look-away plot.

Penance is set in a faded resort town in the North East of England, and charts the events leading up to the death of Joni Wilson, a 16-year-old who was burned alive by three classmates on the eve of the 2016 EU referendum. That timing means the story is buried under reams of Brexit coverage, making it ripe for reappraisal later by true crime aficionados and reporters like Carelli. What sort of cases acquire cult status, Clark makes us wonder. Can ethical true crime ever be more than a contradiction in terms? And what are the IRL consequences of growing up on a digital diet of violent true stories and serial killer fandoms?