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My interest in true crime has gradually evolved from one-off investigative articles to podcasts and webseries to, apparently now, books. I just finished Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, which is, uh, what it says on the tin. I’ve been meaning to read it for ages, since it was so highly recommended by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark of the My Favorite Murder podcast, and it was absolutely worth the hype.
To me, the appeal is absolutely McNamara’s writing/narrative voice— it is, obviously, a non-fiction book, but it doesn’t read like one. She weaves in her research on the Golden State Killer with memoir-like chapters detailing how she did the research, the impact that spending so much time and energy on this case has had on her, and the unsolved murder of a childhood neighbor that led to her interest in true crime in the first place. When focused on the GSK case, she has a way of pulling along a seemingly incongruous narrative tread, just to the point where you’re like, "okay, this is cool, but how is it relevant?", only to end with some clarifying or emotionally striking twist. I can’t help but picture the stereotypical TV detective’s corkboard covered in maps and photographs and criss-crossing red thread, each string ending in a precisely-placed thumbtack.
The value of McNamara’s narrative style is unfortunately emphasized by the lack of it in the last chapter, which covers some of the potential areas of investigation that she had planned, but ultimately never had a chance to follow up on. (McNamara died in 2016, before she was able to finish her book, so it was completed and published by her husband and some friends of hers who were also crime writers.)
To me, the appeal is absolutely McNamara’s writing/narrative voice— it is, obviously, a non-fiction book, but it doesn’t read like one. She weaves in her research on the Golden State Killer with memoir-like chapters detailing how she did the research, the impact that spending so much time and energy on this case has had on her, and the unsolved murder of a childhood neighbor that led to her interest in true crime in the first place. When focused on the GSK case, she has a way of pulling along a seemingly incongruous narrative tread, just to the point where you’re like, "okay, this is cool, but how is it relevant?", only to end with some clarifying or emotionally striking twist. I can’t help but picture the stereotypical TV detective’s corkboard covered in maps and photographs and criss-crossing red thread, each string ending in a precisely-placed thumbtack.
The value of McNamara’s narrative style is unfortunately emphasized by the lack of it in the last chapter, which covers some of the potential areas of investigation that she had planned, but ultimately never had a chance to follow up on. (McNamara died in 2016, before she was able to finish her book, so it was completed and published by her husband and some friends of hers who were also crime writers.)
