The Mystery of the Sodden, Droopy Prose

It all began on June 4, when New York Times crime-fiction critic Marilyn Stasio reviewed a St. Martin’s Press true-crime book called Safe Harbor: A Murder in Nantucket, by Brian McDonald. The book deals with the death of millionaire New York businesswoman Beth Lochtefeld and love gone wrong on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Stasio, who is not known for her desire to make friends in the author community, didn’t like Safe Harbor. But, in the review, she seemed to take the whole thing a bit further, tarring a whole genre with a brush aimed at this single volume:

A Murder in Nantucket is Brian McDonald’s account of an actual killing that took place there in 2004, but it reads like a mystery, so it might go into my laundry basket--except that the language of true-crime is so inelegant it seems to dishonor the dead. Unlike the civilized fictional villainy on the Vineyard, the real-life murder of Elizabeth Lochtefeld, who was stabbed to death, was cold and cruel. Both the victim and the man accused of killing her came from good families and had money, but as Asey Mayo says in another, fictional, context, “re-fined people do murders sometimes.” Yet McDonald doesn’t say it anywhere near as well; his book is sodden with the droopy prose and weepy sentiments that afflict most true-crime accounts of murder.

Um. Ouch. But you can’t go around saying stuff like that--especially in the Times--without expecting some type of backlash or, at least, talk back. Unsurprisingly, this has come in the form of the raised voices of the blogosphere, beginning--to my knowledge--with a brace of true-crime authors who were inspired by Stasio’s review, Gregg Olsen and M. William Phelps, who, in the first posting of their brand-new blog, Crime Rant: Deliberating Crime Coast to Coast, took the reviewer to task:

Moreover, it is unprofessional, if not lazy, for a reviewer to sweep an entire genre underneath a fictional rug to make a larger point.

In her Clews: The Historic True Crime Blog, Laura James makes some well-considered points, then levels her pen at crime fictionists:

Hmm. ... Maybe it’s just me, but I get the strong impression that a lot of mystery authors have never read much true crime. And I’m afraid to say that it really, really shows.

James follows this up with lists of some of the heavy hitters from true-crime history--Ann Rule, John Berendt, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer among them. As James points out, “They don’t give out Pulitzer Prizes for ‘droopy prose.’”As near as we can tell, the fallout continues to fall.